The Gate

370 St John Street, EC1V 4NN
Nearest tube: Angel
0207 278 5483

map; website

I have only been to a (non-Indian) vegetarian restaurant once before (David Bann in Edinburgh) and the food was a stodgy affair, with lots carbs and fried things.  Thankfully, the food at the Gate wasn’t as stodgy as I expected and it was beautifully presented.  There are two restaurants – the original branch in Hammersmith (which is currently being refurbished) and the other in Islington; the Gate brand has been around for over 20 years and has won various awards and spawned a brace of cookbooks.  The menu is pretty reasonably priced with starters at £5 to £7, mains £12 to £18, they also offer a £15 pre-theatre deal.  The Islington branch is a few minutes’ walk from Angel tube and is decked out in an unassuming way with nothing much on the walls and a large bar propping up stick thin anemic looking staff - an advert for the vitality of veggies these guys ain’t.

I started with a fairly decent aubergine and cauliflower pakora (£5.75) – the cauliflower still had a nice crunch and was not dominated by the coriander and chilli spicing.  My main course was fried aubergine (the Scotsman in me couldn’t resist a double-header of fried dishes) served with okra, sweet potato, guacamole and mixed beans, all set off with a kick of cayenne pepper.  The presentation was impressive although a tad twee – the aubergine had been hollowed then breadcrumbed and was set on the plate on its side with the okra popping out.   I really enjoyed the dish and didn’t feel overly full immediately afterwards, but about an hour later I felt like I had a cannonball in my tummy.

Dessert was a very disappointing pear tarte tatin which was served cold and it seemed like the pastry chef had prepared it first thing in the morning and it had been sitting in the fridge since then.  The pears were rather tasteless – possibly as a result of being cooked much earlier in the day.  And a final note on the staff – they were friendly and efficient, but they looked very tired and about as pale as Ed Miliband at a public speaking course.

Verdict: in general well executed vegetarian food, but the staff need a good roast to perk them up.

Also see: lustrous musings, Metro and Table Crowd.

Ilili

53a Streatham Hill, SW2 4TS
02079984742

map; website

Streatham is one of London’s hidden gems – it bustles with diversity from Bangladeshi, Indian and Polish grocery stores to Portuguese cafes, Middle Eastern bakeries and African organic shops.  Alas, its range of restaurants are less interesting – there are quite a few bog standard Italians, some wannabe gastropubs and a smattering of curry houses, but nothing outstanding.  Therefore it is not somewhere I would normally go for dinner, but a chance meeting of some Streathamites at a wedding led to a lift into town and a recommendation for dinner at Ilili.

Ilili is a Lebanese restaurant nestled in the centre of Streatham Hill, close to Streatham Hill station.  The menu is mostly mezze with all the standards like hommous, tablouleh, yoghurty things, kebabs etc.  There are some more unusual entries though – Lebanese pickle, a chicken liver dish and a Middle Eastern broadbean salad.  It’s a small place with a handful of tables and an open kitchen – the fact that it is BYOB obviously attracts a lot of the clientele and everyone around us seemed to be tanking the booze.  The mix of clientele displays the diversity of Streatham, from a bunch of be-shirted middle class yobs with red faces, to handsome young Spanish students and impeccably dressed black families, to Germaine Greer lookalikes in African patterned trousers, all spheres of humanity were there.

The food was simple but excellent, and very reasonably priced.  As we were in a rush we didn’t have any main courses, but they offer a whole seabass for £13.95 which seems like absolutely fantastic value.  We started with decent hommous (£3.95) which had a nice texture with a hint of lemon sharpness and a decent stab of tahini.  Next, we had sambosa (essentially a samosa shaped like a spring roll) (£4.25) which was stuffed with melt in the mouth lamb and a smattering of pine nuts.  Baked aubergine with chickpeas and tomatoes (£4.10) was very uncomplicated; the aubergines were good quality and had been properly salted before cooking so they were really soft and sweet.  This was all shovelled down with thin flatbread which was the only disappointment of the meal – it was lacking flavour (not enough salt in the dough maybe) and when it cooled down it quickly turned to cardboard.  Finally, we had spicy fried sausages (£4.50) which were rugged and flavoursome, fantastic with a squeeze of lemon over them.

Verdict: great for a hearty and wallet-friendly meal.

Beijing Dumpling

23 Lisle Street, WC2H 7BA
Nearest tube: Leicester Square
020 72876888

Beijing Dumpling is a Chinese restaurant on Silk Street in Chinatown – it specialises in siu long bao which are dumplings with soup inside them, so that when you bite into the dumpling hot rich soup bursts out.  All the dumplings are either boiled or steamed – there are no fried monstrosities here.  The restaurant is fronted by a large window in which little Chinese ladies make the dumplings by hand for the amusement of passers-by.  The interior is decked out like a sauna (a reference to steamed dumplings?!) with wood strips on all sides and wooden furnishings – it is pretty homely though, and a lot more congenial that the typical garishly furnished Chinatown restaurant.

Beyond the dumplings, the menu is pretty bog standard Chinese, with noodles, hot and sour soup, chow mein and lots of fried things.  Before our dumplings we tackled a decent crispy fried duck – the meat was fresh and rich without any hints of cartilage or bone; the plum sauce was generic and probably came from a Chinese cash and carry, but the pancakes were beautifully light and taut.

Then to the dumplings: we opted for spicy pork without soup (so they didn’t come sitting in soup but still had soup inside).  I really enjoyed these – the dumplings were firm and sticky, containing bursts of slightly vinegary pork stock and soft pork mince with just a hint of spice.  A couple of the dumplings did not have soup in them and it must have leaked out because the dumpling had been haphazardly made – but otherwise a very pleasing dish.

Our final dish was a bit of a disaster – fried spicy aubergines which were coated with so much MSG that they gave me instant sweats, a mouth as dry as Will Self’s wit and a desire to glug four gallons of water.  A dish to avoid at all costs (or at least ask for the non-MSG version).  The service was pretty efficient and nicely topped off by a pontytailed maitre’d who, whilst being very friendly, was dressed like a triad and looked like he could easily snap you in two with a crafty karate chop.  I wish anyone that chooses to complain to him all the luck in the world….

Verdict: stick to the dumplings and don’t annoy the maitre’d.
Also see: Ginge lists everything, The Skinny Bib and thefoodpot.

Bill’s

28 St Martin’s Courtyard, off Long Acre, WC2E 9AB
Nearest tube: Covent Garden
0207 240 8183

map; website

Bill’s is a UK-wide restaurant and grocery chain that serves unchallenging British and Mediterranean food.  The Covent Garden restaurant is handily placed a stone’s throw away from the Seven Dials and it is a bit of rough diamond amongst the putrid chain restaurants that populate the surrounding area.  Due to its location it gets very busy at weekends so you will probably need to queue for a table, but I’d say that you should not need to wait more than 20 minutes.  They do a good line in salads and sharing plates like mezze and antipasto.  I wasn’t feeling healthy enough to order a salad, but the reviews I’ve read speak very highly of them and given that Bill’s shop next door sells fresh fruit and veg I imagine the ingredients would be tip-top.  The breakfasts also seem hearty – see londontastin.

I went for Saturday lunch and the atmosphere was bustling, mostly with shopping bag laden girls with the odd bored male clustered amongst them.  We started with homemade tortillas with guacamole, salsa and sour cream.  The tortillas were very fresh and light, and the dips were excellent.  To follow, I had haddock and chips with mushy peas – one of my dining companions had ordered a fish stew which we were told would take 20 minutes and I think my fish had been cooked early and left on the pass for quite a while because the batter was very soggy (this was not helped by the fish being “artfully” presented on a dollop of mushy peas meaning the moisture of the peas soaked into the batter creating a big moosh).  I shouldn’t be too hard on the chefs because I reckon that they cleared about 250 covers that lunchtime. Less excusable was my post lunch espresso which was truly awful – it tasted like engine oil mixed with angusturra – given all the strides made in quality of coffee in London recently why is restaurant coffee generally still rubbish?

Verdict: I wouldn’t go out of my way to eat at Bill’s but it is still one of the better options in Covent Garden.

Also see: foodforthink and aghte.

Dinner by Heston Blumenthal

Mandarin Oriental Hyde Park  66 Knightsbridge, SW1X 7LA
Nearest tube: Knightsbridge
020 7201 3833

map; website

Dinner by Heston has been open for just over a year now and it has taken the London restaurant scene by storm.  It is Heston’s third restaurant after his famous triple-Michelined Fat Duck and the quirky gastropub the Hind’s Head.  The food at Dinner by Heston is less complex and more affordable than that offered at the Fat Duck, but it has already gained a Michelin star and is listed as the 9th best restaurant in the world by San Pellegrino.  The restaurant is a stone’s throw away from Kensington tube station in the plush five-star Mandarin Oriental hotel.  Head chef Ashley Palmer-Watts has a great pedigree having worked with Heston for 14 years and was head chef of the Fat Duck from 2003-2008.  The dining room is opulent but understated with lots of grey and neutral furnishings, the only nod to Blumenthal’s wit are the porcelain jelly moulds that decorate the walls.

Two points of warning before I write about the food.  The wine list is extremely top-heavy and you need to look hard for any bottle under £50 – it is disappointing that a more “accessible” restaurant offers very few moderately priced wines.  Also, the service is rather slack (whilst I appreciate the benefits of informal service, for £70 a head I expect service of a certain standard) – the staff were clumsy at clearing plates and placing cutlery, we were served by 6 or 7 different waiters and had to wait to be served on a number of occasions whilst staff were standing chatting around the till, this is simply not good enough for a Michelin starred restaurant.  Thankfully I found nothing to complain about from the food.  Apparently all the dishes are historically British and old Hest (or a flunky more likely) dug them out of dusty old cookbooks and reinvented them.  The savoury porridge with frog’s legs (£14.50) smoked beetroot and fennel was fantastic, the delicate frog’s legs came sitting in a risotto-esque porridge base which as lifted by the fresh, clean fennel.  Powdered duck breast (£32) was cooked sous-vide ie vacuum packed then cooked in a water bath at low temperature for a long time, the meat was marvellously tender.  The “powdered” nomenclature is a bit of a red herring – it is an old-fashioned word to denote curing meat in brine.  For dessert we had the tipsy cake (£12) which is based around spit-roast pineapple (they have a special machine to roast pineapples over an open flame which takes a bit of time so you need to order this dish at the start of the meal), this is served on a board with a few slices of the beautiful caramelised pineapple and a moist brioche-based pineapple cake with hints of caramel.

Verdict: Fantastic food but the service is not up to scratch.

Also see: London Piggy, Hungry Hoss and fpn.

French and Grace

Unit 19, First Avenue, Brixton Village Market, SW9 8PR
Nearest tube: Brixton

website; map

Ellie Grace and Rosie French are food bloggers turned restauranteurs – they own a tiny restaurant (3 tables inside, 2 outside) in Brixton Village which serves up hearty Middle Eastern inspired food from a miniscule menu.  They started off running a “Salad club” from their flats (taking inspiration from the various home-cooking supper clubs that popped up in the trendy parts of East London a few years ago), this evolved into a home-spun bistro that received rave reviews whilst the blog cataloguing their adventures won the Observer’s best food blog award in 2010.  This success inspired them to pack in their day jobs and to go mobile: cooking in people’s houses for special occasions, at music festivals and eventually running a food van.  All of these culinary adventures reached their logical conclusion in the Autumn of 2011 when they opened their diminutive restaurant amongst the colourful Caribbean and Latin shops in Brixton Village.  The restaurant has won lots of awards and even hosted the esteemed Jay Rayner as a guest chef.

The menu focuses on wraps with side steps into meze and snacks; we went straight for the signature wrap – lamb sausage with red cabbage, carrot and butter bean hummus (£5.60).  The sausage was dense and meaty with a slightly spicy hue, but unfortunately there wasn’t a lot of it.  I wasn’t too disappointed though, because the red cabbage and carrot salad was superb – the cabbage was slightly sweet and melt in the mouth.  We also ordered a special of hearty Italian stew (£8.50) with pancetta, cabbage, white beans and parmesan – this was really simple but very tasty, the kind of meal I imagine a Tuscan field labourer happily tucking into.  Again (strangely) the cabbage was the star of the show – it has been perfectly cooked so it still had a slight crunch and it had lapped up the rich meat fats and sweet garlic used in the base of the stew.  To finish a luxurious sticky toffee pudding including morsels of ginger and bathed in a wonderful toffee sauce.

Verdict: join the fight for a table as soon as you can.

Also see: Zoe Williams, South London Blog and Wholey Moley.

PipsDish

133B Upper Street, Islington, N1 1QP
Nearest tube: Angel
07503 293438

website; map

PipsDish is a funky independent restaurant housed in a former Citroën garage on Upper Street.  It is owned and run by a polymath, Philip Dundas who is an Oxford graduate, senior project manager at the Royal Opera House, education czar and food writer.  Philip and his partner Mary Doherty serve simple and homely British food from a pared down menu.

They have a bring your own policy with no corkage (with a couple of fridges to keep your drinks cold) and the fixed dinner menu is priced at a reasonable £30.  There is an open kitchen backed by a wall of cookery books and fronted by tables bursting with fresh produce.  All the heavy machinery has been removed from the garage and only the hydraulic car jacks remain; a bright red Citroën bread van has been disemboweled and now doubles as a dining area for 5 or 6 (try to get a table here if you can, but you’ll need to ask for it specifically).  Unfortunately, before you are able to eat Philip subjects all diners to a rather supercilious speech about the soullessness of modern restaurants, his manner and tone betray his background as a management consultant: this attempt at anti-pretentiousness came across as rather self-important and snobby, thankfully this was the only black mark of the night (but those of a vaguely cynical persuasion be warned!)

After a rather bland canapé, we started with a fresh, clean vegetable soup  which was simple but very well executed.  The main course was a wonderful fish stew  – the star of the show being large, sweet mussels, supported by meaty tuna chunks and morsels of fatty salmon.  They do fish nights on a Thursday which will be well worth going along to.  Dessert was seasonal and extremely tasty – a mishmash of tart rhubarb, cream and light meringue.

Verdict: great value hearty food in a really fun venue.

Also see: London Unattached,  BarChick and London on the inside.