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London,
Arbutus
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Cuisine: Other
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£25 - £34
63 - 64 Frith Street, W1D 3JW
Nearest Tube: Piccadilly Circus
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Close XDescription: Once home to the legendary Bistro Bruno, this comfily smart U-shaped Soho site is now owned by one of the chefs who worked there at the time, Anthony Demetre, most recently chef-director of Michelin-starred Putney Bridge. His days of fussy food have been replaced with gorgeously gutsy, full-flavoured French cuisine that hits the mark with every single dish (just as well, because you'll want them all). Meat is Demetre's strength: there's every reason to get excited about the starter of slow-cooked shoulder of lamb boulangère with soft, nutty sweetbreads and spiced dates. The more adventurous will be satisfied with the likes of pieds et paquets, a Provencal dish of sheep's tripe and trotters. Desserts are the best you'll have tasted in a long time. Every wine on the 50-plus list is available by the 250ml carafe. Brilliant.
Open: Mon - Sat 12pm - 2:30 & 5pm - 10:30pm
Sun 12:30pm - 3.30 & 5:30pm - 9:30pm
Dress code: None
Payment options: All major cards except Diners
A brilliant bistro bargain
By David Sexton, Evening Standard 12.03.08
Waiting game: Service at Arbutus is both attentive and friendly
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Forty quid for a proper lunch for two is about as low as it goes for anything worth eating. You can easily overshoot this mark at Wagamama, say, or Pizza Express, two of the obvious venues for decent refuelling.
Yet, at the moment, you can enjoy a set menu of three courses at £15.50, plus a glass each of good wine, at one of the best restaurants in town, Arbutus - and still get out of the door for precisely that. It's an astonishing deal, given how good a meal this Michelin-starred place delivers within these constraints. For though the ingredients are economical, the cooking remains top-notch.
There are only two choices for each course, quite proper to the bistro ethic (anyway, variety is overrated). To start, there might be an unusual cut of sliced meat. This week there was warm sliced lamb breast with pecorino cheese - thin, tasty curls of meat, beautifully dressed with a parsley sauce and an endive salad, radishes and watercress.
Winter vegetable soup with Baux de Provence olive oil contained potatoes, carrots, kale, lentils, leeks, some cubes of creamy white cheese as well as the aromatic oil - and was wonderfully good and restorative. Each vegetable had retained its own different texture, having been carefully assembled and not stewed into a uniform sludge, as happens in lazier kitchens.
For mains, there's fish or meat. Cornish pollack and smoked eel risotto sounds a strange combination but works a treat. The creamy, yielding grains of the risotto were intensely flavoured with small pieces of the one expensive ingredient, the eel.
Everything's pollack these days and it's never been a species to make the heart leap - you tend to eat it wishing it was cod, although perhaps grateful it's not coley - but this big, perfectly judged chunk made it seem for once a highly worthwhile fish.
Caillettes - shyly glossed as "old-fashioned meatballs" - came simply with carrots and potato purée. But both the vegetables were terrific, the carrots having absorbed the buttery cooking water to become intensely flavoured.
Caillettes are a speciality of southeast France, traditionally made when pigs are slaughtered. These contained rough-chopped heart, liver, lung and spleen, as well as shoulder, combined with a green vegetable (here, cabbage), wrapped in crepine (veiny, white caul fat), and browned in the oven.
Perhaps the nearest equivalent in English is faggot. They were just extraordinarily savoury: wonderfully musky and meaty without being too overtly offal-based.
To finish, there's cheese or a pudding. A fine slice of Morbier came with nicely arranged bread and dressed leaves of Little Gem.
The Floating Island here is perfect: fluffy egg whites in a surprisingly geometrical shape, topped with pink praline, sitting in a superbly light, vanilla custard.
It's impossible to imagine this old French classic better done. It makes an ideal end to a meal that feels well-balanced and properly thought through in every way: both tasting good and in thoroughly good taste.
The front room, it must be said, is pretty noisy - better to be seated at the back. But service is friendly and attentive and there's no sense of being a second-class customer if you don't splash out. Tap water is offered first, and quantities of great bread.
The excellent wine list offers 250ml carafes of every bottle, beginning with a Côtes de Gascogne white or a juicy Vin de Pays du Gard Syrah-Grenache at £4.25.
Confine yourself to one of these, resist wandering off into the carte - and you've got as good a restaurant bargain as I know.
Details are correct at the time of publication - please check with venue before booking.
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David Sexton is right. It's at this sort of price point (£15.50 + glass house wine) that Arbutus really works, the value becomes more questionable as you move away from the set menu into hit and miss of more expensive a la carte.
- Scott, london
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