Restaurants
Mien Tay is a small restaurant with a cosy feel – indeed the long front table was taken up with a couple of generations of one family when we visited. We were offered recommendations from the menu which featured old favourites such as spring rolls, pork ribs and salt and spicy squid, alongside more traditional dishes like chargrilled quail and frogs legs.
We kicked off by sharing a duck salad with fresh ginger and fish sauce which was beautiful, light and fresh tasting with plenty of duck and cooling noodles.
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WC2H 9DD
London
Covent Garden
19-21 Monmouth Street
London’s oldest French Restaurant sits inconspicuously on Monmouth Street - it’s only once you walk inside Mon Plaisir, that you realise what a gem this place is. The restaurant has cracked two things: good food and repeat custom. The latter is so well established that people return with requests for their favourite table on the tips of their tongues. Our table was slap bang opposite the cook’s lift (which is still used to transport piping hot dishes from the kitchen to the table), and we watched, slightly mesmerised as the waitresses came and went with customers’ orders.
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W1D 4SQ
London
50 Frith Street
Anyone who has weaved their way through the streets of Soho, will know there is no shortage of eateries. At whatever speed you like your food – fast, slow, crowded – it’s all there. Now you can add Mooli’s into the mix. A Mooli is a roti (Indian bread), wrapped around a delicious and freshly prepared selection of ingredients. There are five different combinations on the menu; chicken (with crisp apple salad, mint and coriander chutney), asparagus (with cumin potatoes, yoghurt and tamarind chutney), paneer (with grated carrot and tomato chutney), beef (with coconut salsa and raita) and pork (slow cooked and served with pomegranate salsa).
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This Italian restaurant offers up its fare on London’s Mayfair stretch. Its basement location greets you with a brightly lit bar, which follows round to the main restaurant area. As we were seated at a white linen-clad table, boasting a Mayfair postcode we thought it only right to start our evening with the peachy sparkle of a couple of bellinis before eyeing up the menu.
The dishes on offer at Mosaico are for the most part, typically Italian – as we supped our peachy cocktails, we decided to opt for carpaccio of beef to start, along with a plate full of razor clams.
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Just two minutes walk from Covent Garden, this modern Indian restaurant has a brilliant grip on health and flavour combined. The food at Moti Mahal is refreshingly light – no oily sauces or heavy dishes weigh down the menu here. Head chef Anirudh Arora pays close attention to the spicing and flavour of his dishes, and the restaurant’s new tasting menu has gone one step further, with a selection of biodynamic wines matched to each course.
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EC2M 7PD
London
22⁄23 Liverpool Street,
NOW is a new dim sum diner from the people who brought us Ping Pong dim sum. This new eatery has opened up on Liverpool Street, just opposite McDonalds, and really it works in a very similar way to McDonalds. You queue up, you order an all-in-one meal, and they give you your meal in disposable cardboard packaging… but there the similarities end. While McDonalds is cheap and grimy and leaves you wishing you hadn’t bothered, NOW is cheap and cheerful and leaves you feeling like you popped to Hong Kong for five minutes during your lunch break.
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Porto 4200 232, Portugal
Rua de Costa Cabral 2343
Can there be many things more daunting than choosing a restaurant, blind, in a large city? Well okay, not strictly blind thanks to the genius of the internet and not an especially large city, but can you really trust the travel advisor reviews websites? I always imagine management forcing everyone from the Maitre d’ to the pot washer, to invent three new identities, purely to push their restaurant up through the ranks.
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W1
London
58 Crawford Street
Occo has one particularly great thing going for it: variety. When you walk into this modern Moroccan restaurant in Marylebone, your eye falls on the main bar and dining area. Darkened wood and sleek design gives the first glimpse of Occo a polished London air, but walk a little further inside and you'll find a conservatory room for intimate dining and Occo's boudoir - a den of deep red, low-slung seating where you can opt for cocktails, Moroccan snacks and a smoke on a shisha if you feel like it.
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We turned up at One-O-One in two quite different states of mind. Although we were both quite freezing from the fierce chill that October seemed to blowing about everywhere, I was largely quite relaxed having had a pleasant day at work, whilst my better half had experienced one of those hellish days at the office, filled with stress, frustration and a good helping of tension. Now, this precarious state of being can sometimes be exacerbated by snooty staff at posh restaurants, so imagine the relief when we realised One-O-One wasn’t going to be one of those places.
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