The Riding House Cafe, 43-51 Great Titchfield Street, Fitzrovia

Celebrity chefs, nutritionists, the government and even ‘doctors’ agree: breakfast is the most important meal of the day. They’re wrong, of course, having confused ‘waking up early’ with virtue and ‘lack of coffee’ with fatigue. The most important meal of the day is, quite obviously, brunch, even more so if the day is Sunday. With all the benefits of breakfast and none of the puritanical insanity, it is both the most leisurely and the most fully enjoyable of meals. If you eat a huge brunch, you have most of a day to work it off; try that size of meal for dinner, and you’ll be fat and sleepless.

The Riding House Cafe understands this, which is why it confines ‘small plates’ to the lunch and dinner menus, when people can more easily be persuaded to overspend on bite-sized eating. It offers proper, full-bodied breakfast-type dishes from 9 until 12 on Sundays (starting at 8 during the week), and it’s all the better for that.

The ‘full & proper breakfast’ was far too big for an early morning repast, but hit the spot perfectly at 11 o’clock. With plenty of superb Orkney bacon, excellent black pudding and a fantastic pork sausage, alongside the other standard trappings of a full English, it was worth the hefty £9.40 price tag.

Cured sea trout with crème fraiche and toast was delicate and subtle, a lighter, more refreshing alternative to the brunchy big guns, and at £7.50, decent value. For the same price, an Orkney bacon sandwich ought to have been excellent. It was, if only because it contained about 10 rashers of bacon, rather than the usual couple. The bacon at the Riding House Cafe is a wonder, thick, sweet, and far more porky than normal.

All this was good, and avocado on toast reached a similar standard, but perhaps surprisingly, the best things about brunch at the Riding House Cafe were the drinks. Served in an old-style milk bottle, an oat, natural yoghurt, orange juice, honey, cinnamon, banana and spirulina smoothie revitalised and lubricated, while apple, ginger, beetroot and carrot juice felt easily healthy enough to counterbalance the less wholesome elements of the meal. Even the coffee was excellent.

Immediately after this meal, I went shopping in Selfridges. It’s a testament to the quality of brunch at the Riding House Cafe that it saw me through this most unappetising of experiences. Indeed, I managed two hours of West End shopping and a whole wedding reception without screaming at anyone. I’d say that makes it worth a visit.

Phil Letts’ take: 8/10 

CAU, 274 High Street, Guildford

Food in Guildford is a bit of a mystery. The city that brought us the scary cathedral in The Omen is prosperous, stockbroker-full and pleasant. There’s plenty of money floating around and yet, in the 20 or so years that I have known it, I can count the genuinely good restaurants that have come and gone on two fingers. One, an excellent curry place, closed down after someone (quite possibly a rival) threw a brick through its window and generally made life difficult, while the other, Thai restaurant Rum Wong, remains. Guildford should have good places to eat, but it doesn’t, preferring mediocre chains or the odd nice pub instead. 

So when somewhere like CAU opens, it feels quite unusual. This Gaucho Grill-alike, sister of a restaurant in Amsterdam, could pass almost unnoticed in London, but in Guildford’s culinary wasteland, its opening is a bit of an event.

The premise is straightforward: steak like South Americans do it. Yes, there are assorted fishy and vegetable starters available, the odd salad, even a chicken sandwich, but you wouldn’t really go here unless you wanted red meat.

We decided against starters, more than making do with crispbread and delightful tomato and aubergine dips, rich and smoky.

For mains, everyone had steak. Mine, a 12oz ribeye at £18.50, was extremely good, beautifully blue, thick and full of flavour. Horseradish sauce on the side was pedestrian, but it hardly mattered. When a steak restaurant is good, there’s a limit to what can be said about it, but a Brazilian-style tapa de cuadril, thinly sliced and fatty, was well-textured and nicely charred, while lomito medallions had more flavour than you might expect from a largely fat-free cut. 

Thrice-cooked chips were decent, as was a mixed salad, though the latter was forgotten, along with a water jug, for what seemed like ages but was probably a few minutes. Onion rings proved suitably greasy, but not at all soggy. 

A good malbec is really the only thing to drink with steak in my view, and so we did, for about £22.

CAU’s dessert menu is full of dulce de leche. ‘Banana split with a twist’ was delicious – American in its style and indulgence. Plum and strawberry crumble was just ok, while dulce de leche pancakes with caramel ice cream were as sweet as they sound. 

CAU stands for Carne Argentina Única. It’s hardly unique, nor are the dishes uniformly Argentinean, but it is good, and at about £35-£40 per head for two courses and wine, just about worth it, especially in Guildford - the kind of place @philippawl (twitter follower number 300) might like, assuming she's not vegetarian. But there is still, surely, room in the city for somewhere really good. Anyone?

Phil Letts’ take: 7/10

San Francisco, the Napa Valley and Heathrow Airport (part two)

It has been, quite literally, 34 days since I last posted anything on this blog. A potent combination of frenetic busyness and frenetic business, coupled with a congenital inclination to laze, has made the last few weeks completely impossible, rendered palatable at all only by memories of California.

With work finished and leisure begun (see part one for more on that), restaurants could be picked for their promise, not their practicality. San Francisco is a cooking pot of cultures, with Asia especially well-represented.

We began at Akiko’s, a Japanese restaurant near our hotel (the Hotel Des Arts, a treat for those on smallish budgets). With a superb array of nigiri, brilliantly explained by our excellent waiter, we sampled delights ranging from barracuda to tuna, from arctic char to sea urchin and quail’s egg. While it wasn’t cheap to follow the waiter’s suggestions (about $60 per head without much to drink), the quality of fish put most London sushi restaurants to shame, while the decor fell on just the right side of the line between intimate and cramped.

After something like 7 different nigiri, of which the sweet, oily mackerel and smoky barracuda were my favourites, we needed something a little more chunky before braving the evening’s bars and their inevitable Anchor Steam. What with being in California, we considered California rolls, but went instead for the remarkable ‘Forty-Niner’, a shrimp tempura, salmon, avocado, and sesame number that crunched and piqued in all the right places. Akiko’s comes highly recommended, not least because it was the only place we visited where the 20% suggested service charge didn’t make this Englishman blench.

Phil Letts’ take: 8/10



The service at The Slanted Door, a dockside Vietnamese restaurant and Bill Clinton favourite, is pretty good too (but then, that’s true of most places in America). The food is remarkable. Now I’m certainly no expert on Vietnamese food, so you’ll have to forgive me, but this place did the whole ‘fresh, sweet, soy and gingery’ experience better than anywhere I’ve tried in London.

A green papaya salad kicked things off. Refreshing and tangy, it was a textural joy, with crunchy peanuts perfectly complementing the rigid, watery fruit and soft pickled carrots. A Vietnamese crepe with shrimp, pork and bean sprouts explored similarly playful territory – crispy crepe, plump shrimp and sweet, giving pork, engaging easily with rice wine, brown sugar flavours and pert bean sprouts. 

Lemongrass pork with a crispy imperial roll and noodles added to the collection of flavours, while bringing a much-needed oiliness to proceedings. 

These all proved mere preludes however, both temporally and qualitatively, to ‘Hanoi style halibut vermicelli’. According to our waitress, this dish hails from a particular street in Hanoi, and is almost unknown further afield. Reading the description, you can see why – the halibut is served with turmeric, dill and a pineapple and anchovy sauce. It sounded revolting, so we ordered it, on the logic that the confidence required to put it on the menu might translate into serious quality at the end. It was a complete, genre-trumping triumph, part pina colada, part kedgeree, part Hawaiian pizza but mostly, simply, superbly cooked fish against vivid flavours that felt like they’d just finished a violent argument with a bout of sticky lovemaking. 

The Slanted Door must surely be the best restaurant at a ferry terminal in the world.

The Slanted Door: 8/10



A ferry ride and car journey later, we were in Yountville – the Napa Valley’s answer to heaven, but with rather more rich people than camels and needle eyes would have you believe. Thomas Keller is the man down here; his French Laundry has been rinsing best restaurant lists for years. Mindful of budgets, we tried its cooler, more relaxed sibling, Ad Hoc, itself a linguistic companion to Keller’s New York effort, Per Se.

All this Latin confuses me, but Ad Hoc was, inter alia, fun and good. You can’t choose what you eat – the menu is put together on an ad hoc basis (boom boom), from whatever ingredients seem best and freshest at the time. Ergo, on the night we went, there was a heavy emphasis on simplicity; food here is given space to speak for itself. Exempli gratia¸ our starter – a clean salad of lettuce hearts with anchovy, tuna, almonds and mandarin, lightly dressed and unchallenging. It was delicious on a hot evening, though not terribly exciting, and the tuna was more cooked that I’d have liked. 

A main course of veal fillet on the bone was much better, with a creamy risotto that, surprisingly, did it no harm, and beautiful fresh peas and carrots. The veal was cooked perfectly, tender and slightly pink; the risotto came rich and white. The portion was enormous. 

Then came the cheese course. I’ve always been wary of American cheeses, suspecting that they only really exist to adorn burgers or make up the numbers in a thick, unhealthy dressing. Well, Leonora, a goats’ cheese from Napa, is far too good for that. It was a glorious, nutty delight, complex and creamy. 

A chocolate cake with caramel ice cream excelled as well, proving the rule that a good meal starts light, progresses richer, and ends heavy. Yountville residents are few in number, yet blessed with an obscene number of excellent restaurants. Ad Hoc was full to bursting. They are doing something very right.

Phil Letts’ take: 7/10



Post scriptum: Ad Hoc typically charges $55 for dinner.