Restaurant-Guide.com
hand picked restaurants

Limani is the sister restaurant of the better-known Lemonia situated just across the road. However, far from being an inferior establishment Limani is establishing its own loyal clientele making booking a sensible option. The menu here is traditional Greek taverna stuff, with rough and ready retsina to accompany your calamares and grilled halloumi. The quality can be a little hit and miss but the lively atmosphere keeps most customers more than happy.

Reviewed by Linda Buttle

The growing interest in Mediterranean cuisine cannot be underestimated, and much of its popularity lies in the flexible cooking techniques, its range of ingredients and regional variations. It's also heartening to note that there are still a few places in London cosy enough to bring a smile to a diner's face, and where the chefs know how to balance flavours with care. Mem and Laz is one such restaurant, doing brisk business on Theberton Street for over ten years, with their longevity revealing that they must be certainly doing a few things right.

The quality of the food is certainly among them and the kitchen clearly harbours a soft spot for Turkish cuisine, evident in the pepper dolma stuffed with toasted pine kernels, aromatic rice and black currants, whilst Greece makes an occasional appearance with lamb kleftico and moussaka layered with potatoes, aubergine, mixed peppers, courgettes and carrots. The dessert course at Mem and Laz migrates to the British shores with a banoffee pie and bread and butter pudding.

The thought of transcending gastronomic frontiers is pleasing to most of us and that should explain the burgeoning culinary scene in the UK, and London for sure spearheads this movement. So when an opportunity presents itself in the form a Vietnamese meal, and a healthy one at that, it certainly seems like a hard-to-say-no proposition, and Viet Garden may well prove to be a real delight.

The menu is long and detailed, but one of the best things about this place is that the staff are happy for you to take your time and knowledgeable enough to guide you. Specialities here include the Vietnamese noodle soups with flat rice noodles making for a light and fragrant concoction or the hot and spicy rice vermicelli, both with beef, chicken, prawns, seafood or tofu. Add pork kho to the not-to-be-missed list as well, a remarkable combination of pork with duck eggs and pickled beans.

The smooth and fruity Coreto features on the house list at Viet Garden.

Head Chef Bryn Williams' stint at The Criterion and Le Gavroche may have offered him a chance to rub shoulders with Marco Pierre White and Michel Roux, but the best of all was prized opportunity to cook for Her Majesty the Queen's birthday banquet. Now his role as proprietor-chef at Odette's is no less alluring, and demanding in one sense, as he hopes to keep standards as high as always at this famed Primrose Hill institution.

A quick look at the menu will reveal modern British cooking techniques and Bryn makes no attempt to cloak his Welsh heritage as fine produce from this peninsular nation makes inroads into Odette's kitchen. Starters of quail's egg, English asparagus, potatoes and cress salad make way for roasted loin of Welsh lamb, and pan-fried turbot with braised oxtail, cockles and samphire. 

The tasting menu at Odette's is definitely an ode to seasonal ingredients such as artichokes and fresh pears and strawberries among others.

Formerly a grocer's shop the premises have scrubbed up well, now replaced by a very chic and attractive Fig Restaurant whose owners aim to make it the best neighbourhood food and wine experience of its kind in London.

Many, who enjoy regularly the dishes prepared by Head Chef Christoffer Hruskova would take a view that they are well on the way. This is probably due as much as anything to Christoffer's extended contacts with gourmet restaurants throughout the world. A meal at Fig could start with free range hen egg and salted fish seaweed salad, or veal sweetbread with bread salad and Jerusalem artichokes. Main course of Dorset plaice and wild mushrooms comes with blackcurrants, sweet corn and English black truffle, and puddings can include beet root and fromage Blanc with steamed sago porridge.

Fig's wine list of over 60 bins is a good effort for a restaurant where small is beautiful, and their policy is to reflect rather than contrast the inputs from the various countries.

A very well respected restaurant in a part of London where quality can always do with a booster, an influence the family run Brasserie has been supplying since 1983. Amongst its more compelling attributes is its skill in supplying what are arguably some of the best pommes frites in London, for which the place is now justifiably famed, as well as an interior that suggests a genuine compromise between French café culture and its English interpretation.

An uncomplicated menu offers a good range of starters that double up as light meals, and can include Algerian style lamb sausages with a coriander and cumin dressing, smoked salmon on buckwheat blinis with chives sour cream, a real classic Caesar salad with garlic croutons, anchovy mayonnaise and shaved parmesan, and warm duck with spring onion, cucumber and plum wine sauce.

Amongst the pasta dishes, the spaghetti with king prawns and spring onions in a chilli and tomato sauce is a regular favourite. That sometimes rather maligned dish, risotto, emerges with flying colours, and embraces broad beans, garden peas, fresh mint and parmesan. From the oven emerges braised shank of lamb with sautéed mixed vegetables, potato mash and red wine gravy, or confit of Barbary duck with puy lentils, pancetta and cranberry chutney.