Cafe Rouge - Hampstead

Café Rouge has around one hundred branches throughout Britain all offering a wide range of dishes drawn from the French cuisine. Slightly less than half their branches are in or close to London. Almost inevitably the décor and design of each restaurant differs from the others, but there is a general curtsy towards La France.

Many restaurants do an excellent breakfast, or shall we say petit dejeuner, at which such delights as scrambled eggs, croque Madame, croissants and eggs Benedict make welcome appearances, and to their credit the English traditional gets top billing.

An array of hors d'oeuvres takes in classic French onion soup with a melted gruyere crouton, Café Rouge mussels in white wine, herbs, garlic and cream served with the insolent bâton du pain. Salads, tartes and sandwiches feature largely, as do baguettes and croques. Quick dishes, ideal for lunch, include smoked salmon tartlet, a mushroom penne pasta, or a creamed spinach tartlet.

Moving on to more serious stuff we find steaks, classic beef Bourguignon, and those wonderful spiced Toulouse sausages (still, however, not up to a good Cumberland sausage). No French menu would be complete without the poulet Breton, or a steak frites before moving on to the crème brûlée, the tarte citron and the crêpes filled with banana and warm chocolate sauce.

Almost invariably the coffee tastes like coffee should, something that sadly can all too often still not be said of our English restaurants, who depend too much upon technology and too little on the acquisition of a certain flair for this important conclusion to a meal.

By now we all know that the French, despite their distinctive habits when it comes to matters of satisfying the inner man, maintain a miraculous longevity of life. This is generally attributed to a number of causes, of which a measured consumption of decent wine is foremost. Café Rouge, you may be pleased to hear, encourages this with a well-chosen selection of French wines. Their price fixe lunch and meals for children, both at a very reasonable figure, also offer excellent value.