Joe Allen, Burleigh St, Covent Garden

Joe Allen has been in London since 1977. I first went there in about 1979 and it has been, on and off, one of my favourite restaurants in town ever since then. When I heard that the building it was in, had been bought and that it would be moving, I was disappointed and worried. They found new premises very close to the old venue, and they reopened in 2018. COVID restrictions hit London soon after and last week was the first time that I had managed to go since the move.

The new Joe Allen is almost the same as the old Joe Allen and that is a very good thing. The atmosphere is still intimate, they turn the lack of natural light into a positive. White tablecloths and theatre posters offset the darker decoration. The music is showtunes and old songs but at a low level so as not to interrupt conversation. The service is really good, attentive without being intrusive, I have to say that is one thing that has improved since the 1980s.

The menu has changed a little, while I was sad to see that the black bean soup is no longer on, there are equally interesting things on there to replace it. The type of food that it does remains the same – unpretentious, comfort food done with style. The menu is short but varied, classic dishes done well. The restaurant caters to people attending the nearby theatres and gets busy both before the shows and after the curtains fall, so if you want to eat late, you should book to ensure you get a table. The cocktails are good, and the wine list has a reasonable selection. It is also pretty good value for its position right between the Strand and Covent Garden. We had a lovely meal, and I fully intend to return.

Brinkley’s Kitchen, Bellevue Road, Wandsworth, London SW17

Wandsworth is a suburb of South London that is well served with places to eat. Bellevue Road in particular is an attractive road with the broad expanse of Wandsworth Common along one side, and an array of restaurants, pubs, artisan tea rooms and independent shops along the other. Brinkley’s Kitchen is near the top of this road, we chose it for a late lunch on a Sunday afternoon.

The restaurant is decorated in a smart contemporary manner. The photos on its website show it as very bright and airy, but the blinds were all drawn on the afternoon we were there. There was no tablecloth on our table for three, but it does have linen napkins, nice cutlery and glasses. The brunch menu has good choice, we opted for roast beef and a steak. The wines by the glass had a more limited selection, for example they only had one rose. When I asked the waiter what it was like – as I didn’t know it – he told me it was very good. I said I was hoping for a more descriptive reply, he just said “you will love it”. So, I asked to taste before I chose and it was fine, although I suspect the whole bottle cost a fraction of what they charged for the glass.

The food was good but unremarkable. The beef was overcooked for my taste but the gravy was nice. When I pay top end prices for a Sunday roast, I would expect the Yorkshire pudding to be freshly prepared. These had clearly been made earlier and reheated. The ribeye was okay and the chips were hot and fresh. When my friend asked for tomato sauce for her chips, they brought a bottle of ketchup to the table, at least it was Heinz. It came without the lid, so much hitting the bottom of the bottle was required to get any out.

The service was entertaining, every different waiter who came to the table enquired “How is your day going?” which became a little Stepford Wives creepy after the sixth time of asking, especially after the busboy asked it twice in five minutes without waiting for a reply. I didn’t like the fact that they brought us the bill without us asking for it, I felt they were rushing us to finish our drinks.

Overall, Brinkley’s Kitchen served us reasonable quality pub food, but charged high end restaurant prices. In an area, indeed even a street, where there are so many fine places to eat, it will not be difficult to find somewhere that gives far better value for money.

Porches Velho, Porches, Algarve, Portugal

Porches Velho is a restaurant that could be called a hidden gem. Porches is an attractive village about three kilometres inland from the Southern Algarvian coast, between Carvoeiro and Armacao De Pera. It is quiet and calm, with narrow cobbled streets and is relatively untouristed, even in the height of summer. The area is famous for its pottery and the local workshops are certainly worth a visit. However, the largest of these are on the nearby N125 and not so many people go into the village itself.

The village has a pretty church. Its bells rang (8pm on a Wednesday, if you would like to try to recreate the effect) as we walked up the hill to the restaurant and a sliver of moon shone over its steeple, making us feel a little like we had stepped into a spaghetti western, so the romantic scene was set even before we entered the restaurant. The room itself has high vaulted ceilings, it is a 200 year old converted wine cellar. It has thick whitewashed walls decorated sparsely with antique agricultural equipment, tiles and old fashioned lamps. It oozes Portuguese tradition from every beam.

Porches Velho is a “Restaurante Tipico Potugues” which means that it serves classic Portuguese food. The tables are dressed in white linen with white napkins and soon after you are shown to your table the waiter brings the couvert dishes, fish paste, olives, pickled carrots and pickled beetroot, also a basket of sliced local bread with oil and butter. The wines are all Portuguese and there is a full list to choose from.

The starters consist of fish, soup or vegetarian dishes. We had a Portuguese Gazpacho and the vegetable soup. Both were excellent, the vegetable was thick and hot and the Gazpacho was spicy and juicy. The main course menu has many traditional dishes. Rabbit Cataplana, Alentejo Lamb and chicken casserole are among the interesting choices.

We went for the Old Portuguese Style Steak and the Medallions of Black Pork Tenderloin. The Pork was perfectly cooked, and served with a sauce of wild mushrooms on the side. The sauce was delicious and thick with different types of mushroom. The Steak is served in a deep dish, covered in serrano ham, surrounded by sliced potatoes, in a thick brown gravy and topped with a fried egg. This is a traditional way to serve steak in the Algarve and many restaurants offer this dish. This particular version though, was beautifully tender, the steak was very good quality and one of the nicest that I have had.

For the dessert offering, the waiters come to your table carrying the choices available. This is a clever idea, as one is much more likely to be tempted by seeing the dishes than by reading about it on the menu. The ice-cream is homemade and I can certainly vouch for the chocolate one being rich and flavourful.

The service was very good, we felt that they were genuinely interested in our opinions of the food and went out of their way to ensure that we had a good evening. Porches Velho is a wonderful Portuguese Restaurant with lovely traditional Portuguese hospitality. It is a hidden gem of the Algarve, a little of the beaten track but all the better for it and certainly worth the trip to visit it. Highly Recommended.

The Patate, Kerb, Camden Market, London NW1

The next step on our hunt for London’s best burger led us once again to Camden Market. This time we went on a dreary damp Monday in December, and still the place was mobbed. We had friends visiting from Ireland, who combined the trip with some light Christmas shopping. On a side note, the market appears to be a very good venue if you are searching for unusual and funky gifts. The Patate is unit 215, the centre of a bank of three purpose built food stalls facing into the square. The main sign says French Burger with The Patate in smaller letters underneath.

 

The have a pot of boeuf bourguignon heating on the griddle and it is this that they make their burgers from. They are very specialised, that is all they do. You can have it with or without cheese and with or without fries. They do have three different types of cheese, and they do have béarnaise sauce to go on the chips, which you can have with added chilli. When you order, they take the beef bourguignon and make it into a patty on the griddle and cook for about five minutes drizzling the gravy over as it cooks.

We had one with Raclette cheese and one with a Camembert Blue. The hamburgers were beautifully moist and the meat was incredibly tender. This burger is probably not for you if you do not like your meat to be well done, but there is still a lot of taste in this meal because it has been cooked in the gravy from the stew. The cheeses were both delicious and creamy, unusual for a hamburger, but they set off this particular one very well. The chips were nice and crisp and the béarnaise was divine.

Once again, being from a street food stall, there was no knife and fork, but I guess we knew this would be the case when we came. The burger was delicious but if you are a person who chooses to have their meat rare, or even medium, you will not have that option here. A great meal, lovely friendly service and for a tasty variation, I would certainly recommend it. If we were looking for the best burger in Paris it might be the one, but its a bit too sophisticated for the best burger in London.

Mac & Wild, Great Titchfield Street, London W1W

Mac & Wild is a restaurant that markets itself as serving the highest quality ingredients in its dishes – with a Scottish bias. It is known for its venison, steak and salmon. It is listed in the 2018 Michelin Guide and the Evening Standard named it in their “5 best places to eat game in London”. In 2016 it won the award for the best burger in the UK and it is in Time Out’s list of the best in London.

It opens for dinner at 5.30pm and we arrived, without a reservation, before 6. The place seemed pretty quiet, but they told us they would be able to squeeze us in at a table near the window. It was a damp autumnal Tuesday so I was a bit sceptical, but sure enough, by twenty past six they were turning people away and the restaurant was packed by the time we left at 7pm.

The room is long and narrow, decorated in a rustic style, with plain walls, rough hewn wooden tables and chairs and monochrome photos of Scottish countryside on the walls. There is a cellar room too, the same shape and decorated similarly. Even the bathrooms continue the rustic theme, with an old fashioned overhead ceramic cistern and a chain pull flush.

The menu is basically steak, venison, salmon, cod or hamburger. The sizes and cuts of steak vary according to their stock, they have a list on the wall and cross them out as they are sold. There are vegetarian starters and one main course on the list.  We ordered the scotch egg and fish bites to start. The fish was delicious as was the egg. We were here late October and the Scotch egg came Halloween style – stuck with a syringe and oozing blood! Very funny, but possibly not for the fainthearted.

The burger has two patties, one beef and one venison, it comes with caramelised onion melted cheese and béarnaise. The taste is good, a nice meaty flavour, juicy and with a lovely texture. Be aware that it will come rare unless you ask for it to be well done, unusually they did not enquire when we ordered. The bun is a nice toasted brioche and the chips are skin on and tasty.

It is served on a tin tray, with the chips in a small metal bucket by its side. For a restaurant that is proud of its Scottish heritage, a plate seems like an odd thing for it to forgo. At least it did come with a knife and fork. The lager was quite pricey, a hair under a fiver for a small tin. There are a number of wines served by the glass and the Pinot Grigio Rose was good. The service is excellent, the waiters are likeable and honest, they seem genuinely invested in making sure we had a good time.

All in all we had a really good experience. Mac & Wild are proud of the provenance of their ingredients and this shows in the quality of their burger.  If you plan on going, I would certainly recommend that you book – even as we left there was a couple standing outside in the drizzle waiting for us to pay the bill, so they could have our table.

 

Burger and Beyond, Unit 62 West Yard, Camden Market, London NW1

The hunt for London’s best burgers in unlikely places has brought us to a petite market stall, hidden deep inside Camden Market. When we arrive, we find that it is not quite as strange as it sounds, there is a street food section of the market, nicely situated just by the canal, which has lots of very trendy stalls and vehicles selling quirky upmarket indie food. Even at four o’clock on a Friday afternoon this place was packed to the gills and finding a seat at which to eat our burger in comfort involved some sharp elbow use.

Burger and Beyond occupies an internal corner of this little enclave. The menu is tiny and your food is cooked to order. It basically does a hand pressed burger, you can have it with cheese, bacon, onion, jalapenos and mayo or any combination of the above. It does fries and something called Tater Tots, which seem to be like griddled or fried rosti potatoes. There is also a choice between one or two beef patties.

They sell their fare well, we don’t just have a beef burger here – we have hand pressed patties made with 45 day aged beef from rare breed cattle. According to their marketing, the same people who own the stall are the ones who run the farm, so there is no ambiguity in the provenance of their food.

Whatever the publicity says, the truth of the quality of their burger is in the taste, and this is good. The beef is succulent and tasty, you can tell that the meat is good quality. The toppings are good too, the bacon is crispy and slightly smoked, the cheese has that just on the edge of runny condition. They obviously train their people to cook their burgers just so. In terms of their menu, the adage small is good, works very nicely here. The Tater Tots were satisfying too, an interesting change from regular fries.

My one quibble is that they are difficult to eat. They are not served with a knife and fork, it is a street market stall, so I did know what I was getting in to. They are too large to fit in your mouth without dripping bits everywhere – the double patty ones must be truly messy. I managed to procure a knife and fork from a different stall nearby, but it would have been nicer to be able to get one from Burger and Beyond itself.

Obviously, word of the quality of their food is spreading, because I believe that they are about to open their first permanent restaurant, in fashionable Shoreditch no less. Their burgers really are good, so if this restaurant has cutlery, they will certainly be in the running for the best burger in London!

The Bad Egg, Barbican, London EC2Y

This diner turns inner city dystopia into a design concept. Set in the corner of a tower block the dual aspect dining room overlooks concrete pathways in one direction and a 1960s brutalist car park on the other. Plain wooden tables, leatherette banquettes and wood and metal chairs seat the customers. The look is finished with matt metal grilles and a neon WC sign to guide you to the toilets. It has the feel of a set from a scary 1980s film about street gangs in New York.

The food is basically classic diner fare. Breakfast, brunch, burgers and hashes. They do a bottomless brunch at the weekends which are reputedly very good and very boozy. We were here for a meal before going to the theatre, so tried a burger; the G’Ambal and a hash; the Bad Egg Burger Hash.

The G’Ambal consists of 2 beef patties, a spicy hash brown, caramelized onion, mustard and liquified cheese – all inside a burger bun. It was huge, messy and delicious. We also ordered a side of chips, these were good too, thin shoe lace fries, but to be honest the burger was so filling that we did not need to get them.

The Bad Egg Burger Hash is basically a broken up burger, fried potato, onion, spicy nduja melted cheese served with a fried egg on top. This was also a large portion, nicely spicy and the meat was really good quality. The food here is very good, but I suspect that this would not be the place to come if you are on a diet. They do have vegetarian options, the bean burger was so nicely described that I almost ordered it, but remembered just in time that it is the burgers and boozy brunches for which they are famous.

They have a number of Korean inspired dishes too that look interesting. The service was good, our waiter appeared genuinely interested in our opinion of the food. The music is kind of retro urban, and a good level – conversation is still easily heard. The choice of wine and beer is limited, they had no beer on tap when we went, but they did have bottled Heineken and Corona.

The atmosphere was good, we enjoyed our meal. If you are looking for somewhere a little bit out of the ordinary to have good quality comfort food, The Bad Egg is worth looking up. It is very close if you are going to something in the Barbican or near Moorgate. A nice burger and an interesting restaurant. Sometimes its good to be bad!

Honest Burgers, Oxford Circus, Kensington, Borough Market, Holborn, Bank…….

The trend for upmarket burgers shows no sign of abating in London, and the competition for the best burger in town keeps on running. Honest Burgers seems to be doing well from this fashion. A quick look at their website tells me that they are just about to open their 29th restaurant. This is a very fast expansion for a brand that started in 2011 by making burgers at festivals.

One of the biggest advantages that Honest Burgers has, is their reliability. When you walk into one of their outlets you know where you are and you know what to expect. The décor is a bit rough and ready, there are no tablecloths.  The sauces and mayonnaise are served from the bottle, but they are good brands. They know their market and customers are not here for a romantic dinner for two, they don’t care about the accoutrements  -they are here for a good quality burger, probably on their way to or from another part of their time out.

Honest burgers are appetizing and satisfying. The ingredients are good quality, the beef patty is tasty and the cheese and bacon, if you choose them, are nice. The chips are good, they come as rosemary salted, but you can ask to have them plain if you prefer. The chicken burger is flavourful too, as are the honest brunch and  the avocado on toast from the breakfast menu. They do offer a few vegetarian options for the non carnivores amongst us.

I am not totally on board with all their concept options, but they obviously work for them and I guess I must be in the minority. They serve their food in tin bowls, while this is better than a slate or a wooden board, I just wish we could go back to plates now. I also dislike having to ask for a knife and fork each time. Although they always have them,  it makes me feel like an old fogey to ask, and really, how hard would it be to offer? I’m also over cocktails that come served in jars, this seems so dated. Beer served in tiny tins at high prices may be very lucrative, but I’m not sure how honest it is.

However, these quibbles aside, the burgers are good, the service is always friendly and efficient, and you know what you are going to get – whichever branch you go into. When out and about and looking for something to eat, Honest Burgers is always a reliable option. This is why they are able to open their 29th restaurant in under eight years… and now that there are so many, chances are that there will be one nearby.

 

Gillray’s Steakhouse & Bar, County Hall, Westminster Bridge Road, London SE1

This restaurant is inside the Marriott County Hall hotel. If you arrive by car the entrance is from Westminster Bridge Road through the hotel. The most attractive entrance though, is from Queens Walk, beside the river Thames. A sweep of steps leads you up from the walkway into a bright relaxed bar area and the restaurant entrance is a few steps to the right inside the door.

The room is sunlit and airy, light wood walls with large windows along one side overlooking the river. The view is lovely on a summer evening; people walking beside the river, the London Eye to the right and Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament across the Thames to the left. We were here quite early, a pre-theatre dinner before a show at the National, which is a couple of hundred metres away along the South Bank. They have a pre and post theatre offer, it has a wider choice than many set menus and it is good value too.

There is a starter of chicken and mushroom roll, this is pleasantly spicy, a nice combination of flavours. We also tried the crusted pan fried mackerel, which was really a Caesar salad with mackerel, also good – the crusted fish taking the place of croutons. There is a choice of six mains, three steaks, a lamb, a fish dish and a vegetarian choice. The rib eye was nice, a little undersealed to be perfect but a good flavour. The lamb yorkie pie is a lamb casserole inside a large Yorkshire pudding, a clever serving idea. The lamb was nice, although the Yorkshire was more like a carvery pudding which is made in advance and kept warm.

I felt that the drinks were a little overpriced, the beer especially. The happy hour offer of a house gin and tonic for a fiver is not necessarily so wise, as this makes one aware of how much one might be paying for a branded gin at other times. The service was good, the staff were attentive and available whenever we needed them.

Overall, we had an enjoyable dinner in very pleasant surroundings, so if you have a show on the Southbank, Gillray’s Steakhouse and Bar is certainly worth considering.

House, Restaurant & Bar, National Theatre, Southbank, London SE1

House is the name of the most upmarket restaurant in the National Theatre complex. It is open from 5pm to 11pm daily, and it does lunch on the afternoons when there is a matinee performance. The décor is modern and understated. The linen is crisp and white. The cutlery, china and glassware are high quality. The sound level is low, so conversation is clear. They give warning announcements when shows are about to start. All in all, the perfect place to meet for pre or post theatre dinner.

They offer a set menu as well as an a la carte. The set menu is good value but the choice can be limited, the only vegetarian option was asparagus for both starter and main course on the day we were there. The a la carte menu is relatively short too, but this is often a good thing, it keeps the quality of the food high. The goat’s cheese brulee starter was delicious, although it was not not particularly brulee. The trout was good too, the presentation of both was excellent.

The steak main course was good, rump cap is not the greatest cut but it was cooked nicely. The plaice was fine too. The nicest of the three mains was the smoked pork belly – the meat was succulent and full of flavour, it went very well with the cabbage, which had a hint of sweetness and a good crispiness.  Once again, care had gone into the presentation, they all looked very appetising as they arrived to the table.

We ordered desert too. Like the other courses, they looked fantastic, tasted good and the portion size was modest. The wine list has a good range but quite expensive for what they are. Service was impeccable, efficient and unobtrusive.

It is usually relatively easy to get a table except on opening nights or press nights. It was less than half full on the evening we were there, but this was after the show. It would be safest to book if you wish to eat just before curtain up.  Everything about House is good; the food, the service, the ambience, but the cynic in me says that they are aware that people will pay a premium for the convenience and this is reflected in their prices.