Tipped

Perfect. Just perfect.

August 28, 2008

Chez Bruce deserves its Michelin Star. The restaurant manages to combine wonderful food with attentive, yet unobtrusive service in an unstuffy atmosphere. Vegetarians will find themselves very limited and vegans will probably fare better elsewhere, but if you like your meat and fish, you'll be very happy here!

From start to finish, it would be impossible to fault our dinner at Chez Bruce. We were politely greeted with a friendly smile and shown to our table, where we were given excellent advice from the knowledgeable sommelier and brought wonderful food in an unhurried, yet timely manner.

I started with thinly sliced prosciutto with a salad of tomato, olives, feta, crisp polenta and basil
The dish was packed with flavour and the herbed polenta, served as croutons, was particularly complimentary to the other flavours present in the dish.

My dining partner ordered a main course of roast coquelet with foie gras, potato gnocchi, salsify and meat juices. The coquelet was absolutely magnificent - a real melt-in-the-mouth treat and we would recommend it very highly.

For my main, I ordered baked crottin de chavignol with caponata, rocket dressing and hazelnuts. It was lovely and the hazelnuts, which I'd never had with chèvre (it's always a default to walnuts, isn't it?) were a really lovely change and complimented the nuttiness of the crottin perfectly.

The only downside to the main was that I ended up so full of cheese that I couldn't bring myself to order a cheese plate, which given the massive selection of very interesting looking options, was a rather sad state of affairs!

My dining partner ordered raspberry sablé for dessert (packed full of fresh raspberries and delicious) whilst I abstained!
We then had coffee with freshly made truffles, which were delicious.

Perfect food, perfect wine, perfect service and a lovely night out. Also surprisingly good value, given that you could easily spend the same money in a non Michelin Star establishment, without any indication of the food's quality.

It gets 5 stars and a big smiley face from me! :)

Tags: Michelin Stars, cuisine: modern european, cheese, wandsworth common, friendly service, somellier, fine wines

Top London restaurant

August 03, 2007

This is probably my favourite restaurant in London - and is considerably better than a lot of the greats in France too. Unpretentious, unstuffy, with a wine list to die for - oh, and an amazing cheeseboard too. Great place to go with friends, as there's a small room you can hire upstairs too.

Tags: French