london restaurants

i went to this incredible place the other week

http://www.timeout.com/london/restaurants/mes-amis

and it might be one of my favourite restaurants in london...the kitchen space is right in the dining space, every square inch of the walls is covered with decorations, the food is completely perfect

There is an extraordinary Malaysian in the little cut between Red Lion Street and Red Lion Square next to an also-good Argentine steak sandwich place. Also try the Polish bar/restaurant and the Thai take-away place in Little Turnstile, or decent coffee at Fleet River Bakery.

I worked on HH until June. My favourite places - the aforementioned Malaysian cafe and an old-skool jacket potatoes/soup/chilli/pasta place - are gone. I often ended up at the salad bar in Sainsbury's which is very good value and the queue moves faster than you'd think, but I'm guessing that's not the kind of suggestion you're after! Fleet River Bakery on Lincoln's Inn Fields has a long and slow-moving queue but their product is pretty good. There's a Kimchee (everything half price in January) and lots of independent Koreans towards Clerkenwell Road. Lamb's Conduit Street is also handy.

must try some of these - i'm very close to the station, aviation house.

the queues are pretty crazy - lol at me suburb man in the big city but my utopian ideal of working centrally and a 15-minute tube from my flat is tempered mildly by the huge volumes of people, i was only used to that in the mornings before this.

was at the richmond on queensbridge road friday night - really impressed by it.

Similarly, was in Naughty Piglets on Water Lane, Brixton, the other day, and it was excellent, twee name aside.

anyone been to oldroyd? Thinking of going in a couple of weeks..

I went to Berber & Q, just behind Haggerston station, last night and it was fantastic. Usual tossy East London no-bookings policy but they have at least made an effort to make the place a pleasant environment to wait in, we sat at the cocktail bar and the drinks were excellent.

Food was really top quality, one of those places where you get a huge pile of grilled meat on a tray and share it out amongst yourselves, but the range and subtlety of the flavours set it above most of these places. Like, everything was delicious, especially the clove smoked pulled lamb.

it's not a restuarant, but the groundnut chicken stew at spinach and agushi in exmouth market i had for lunch today was exceptional.

i was at smoking goat on thurs -been there before, maybe it's gone up too, but i consider it really expensive unless you maybe have four people to share the unlimited rice/salad - but the food there is excellent, and besides somsaa, hard to match.

It's really expensive and the portions are pretty small for the price. Cramped as hell too.

Theo's in Camberwell: rather good pizza and exceptional pork bombettas.

Yeah Theo's is pretty good, that little stretch of road is ridiculous for eating and drinking options now

was in the delaunay counter at lunch today - had previously only been to the main restaurant. such a nice little place, quiet, brilliant service and you can have lunch for in and around a fiver.

hunan is absolutely incredible. love the menuless approach and pretty much each of the 18 courses hit the spot. unbelievable how delicious they made garlic tempura beans. amazing tilapia, gonna dream about the shrimp roll forever. waitress didn't deign to give us more than scant information about any given dish - she'll half mutter the basics ("celery, lamb") and be gone before you have the chance for questions, which i liked a lot

guess this is as much pub as restaurant - but i just zipped into the lowlander on drury lane to get out of the strange and short apocalyptic storm that just hit london (traffic barriers blowing down the street etc) - nice little spot. massive selection of beers, lots of belgian but many others too, and a stereotypical belgian menu, mussels etc.

I've been there and had a fun evening. Despite walking near it virtually every day, I'd had no idea it was there until my friend suggested it.

i've never been inside that noodle place on the corner of the balls pond road and the A10 but it says "NOODLE BAR" in massive fonts which is always enticing as I like noodles, and looks as thought it's dodgy enough to be worth a visit.

Dalston finally no longer has anything going for it

good places for a quite bite around curzon soho??

Vico! South East corner Cambridge Circus.

Koya Bar, Frith Street (I accept that that is probably my answer to about half the queries on this thread.)

it's a good answer though

Anyone have a favorited curry spot in the immediate vicinity of Borough High Street?

Someone recently recommended Simply Indian on Tabard St to me, but they also said they'd changed from an a la carte to a set menu and put the prices up, which made it less appealing. And I have not tried it myself.

If that's the one just opposite the Royal Oak then it's pretty good. It's BYOB though, if I remember rightly, although it's a couple of years since I last went.

ended up at koya a coupke of days ago - burned marmalade and soy chicken legs with leek, and monkfish agedashi with mushroom udon. it was superb.

We wound up eating at the Royal Oak last night, as my companions were less fixated on curry than I'd imagined. Win!

The cod cheek agadashi and mushroom udon I had at Koya at the weekend was very fine.

near curzon soho - one of the four 4 seasons in chinatown

Where's good in Brixton, where you can reserve, and someone with an expense account is paying? Any suggestions?

i've heard good things about http://www.naughtypiglets.co.uk/

not gone yet though - last time i was in brixton i was tremendously excited bc i finally got to eat at fish, wings & tings, and the cod fritters were as incredible as i'd been told

Salon in the market may be ok, the one time I went I thought it was good but not as good as some of the ecstatic reviews.

Nanban (Masterchef dude Tim Anderson's slightly experimental Japanese place) is really very good and could likely get expense account worthy if you get busy with some of the small plates and the sake menu.

Not sure either of these is the kind of luxe you might be looking for on the corporate card. Have also heard good things about Naughty Piglets but not been, fwiw.

Had a quick dinner at Barshu tonight - really good of course, so ~~tingly~~ too. Need to go back with a bunch of people so I can try lots of different dishes.

naughty piglets was p good when i went - good seasonal menu tho I'm struggling to recall what i had exactly.

vico was an excellent recommendation, suzy. good atmosphere and excellent food and unusually generous service - "thought you might like some bread with your pickled anchovies" etc. gelupo bar tucked in st the entrance.

Santo Remedio at Old Street straight up just made me realise what the fuss about Mexican food is. Puts everything else I've had in London to shame

that's just opened, right?

had a good meal in bone daddies shackfuyu on old compton st tonight. quite different and interesting - would be great for a large group, i just nipped in solo before a class.

went to smokehouse in islington saturday - it was kinda poor, which is a surprise as i thought it was excellent the first two times i went, prob once last year and once the year before. i wouldn't go back i don't think, i suspect a different chef or something.

yeah it opened in december. has three reviews on tripadvisor, all 5 stars. was empty when we showed up and stayed so. it's really out of the way - we only discovered it because we were taking a shortcut to a different restaurant - and it needs a boost, so everyone please go there at once, it is legit amazing. also they're apparently opening a proper mezcal bar upstairs in a week or so. might be a decent FAP location

This is excellent information since I work at Old Street.

If they've fucked up the Smokehouse then this is a straight-up disaster for London. I ate there in November and it was great then.

Also according to Tripadvisor some random trattoria in Sydenham is the sixth best restaurant in the whole of London, which is pretty exciting since I can walk there. I guess these kinds of things happen a lot but the last time I noticed it was with Meze Mangal in New Cross and that is excellent so hey.

Went to Otto's in Gray's Inn Road last weekend, which I guess is how posh French restaurants in London used to be. The people next to us had the canard a la presse which is an extraordinary piece of culinary theatre but fuck paying £140 for the pleasure.

i found trip advisor pretty useful when travelling in small cities or towns in europe - like when the reviews are sparse the town almost filters the morons away, so you get like two or three good reviews which appear to have been written by someone of average intelligence. that's often enough to point you towards a great place. it's also good for entertainment value - so many spanish towns and people are like "worst burger i ever had" reviewing the kind of 1 euro seaside tapas place that i would personally be happy to to die in.

never used it in london though. i always feel like someone needs to set up a version of it that isn't full of morons, like surely there's a way for design and promotion to somehow exclude the trip advisor people, but nobody has ever done this.

i heard about that duck presse at otto's - sounds hilarious. on smokehouse, maybe it was just a bad night - it was perfectly fine but i had been very impressed previously so it was an anti-climax. one or two of the dishes that i'd seen before had changed radically.

I think it's genuinely useful for filtering out can't-be-arsed tourist traps in large unfamiliar cities but I'd never rely on it as a sole recommendation engine, especially in London. In general it tends to balance out reasonably well if there's a critical mass of normal people amid the obvious street teamers/random dicks. When an unheralded place suddenly starts throwing up load of rapturous reviews it's worth paying attention to though. London restaurants, especially new openings, are so heavily PRed nowadays and food blogs etc don't tend to cover really good neighbourhood restaurants that could otherwise fly under the radar a bit.

Seems to me that most of the places high on the London tripadvisor list are fairly random (even ones I've heard of and love, like Zeret Kitchen in Camberwell).

tripadvisor can be useful in london when you want to eat in a specific area that doesn't have buzzed-about restaurants, though it wouldn't be my first research port of call

went to mamuska on elephant & castle roundabout the other day; hits the sweet spot between "cheap n cheerful pre-gig casual diner-style restaurant" and "actually very good, very hearty polish food to stave off these godforsaken temperatures that are still with us"

I loved Mamuska the couple of times I've been (when it was still inside the pink shopping centre). All the lovely carbohydrate!

Medium-range Brit/Euro cuisine in the city centre/Holborn/Farringdon for a birthday dinner, with good vegetarian options, anyone? Cheers in advance!

this was probably a far too generic request right? I booked a table at Salt Yard on Goodge St, anyone been there?

I have. I liked it; not as much as I expected to like it after reading ecstatic reviews on blogs but there was absolutely nothing wrong with the place. Perfectly sound choice.

nice one, thanks!

yeah it's nice for sure.

yeah it's good