St John Hotel, 1 Leicester Street, Soho

Manzi’s was the first posh restaurant I ever went to. The year was something like 1990, I was eight or so, and we were up in town to have lunch and see Les Miserables. I don’t remember much about the meal, but I definitely enjoyed it, for how grown-up it made me feel and for the inklings it gave of another world, full of pleasure and ritual and butter. I think I had some sort of white fish with a creamy sauce – possibly turbot, possibly champagne-based. Though my memories are faint, I have long seen that trip as a kind of beginning: of a love affair with good cooking; of a fondness for tradition in food and history in restaurants; of a life-long tendency to overspend on eating out; and of complete incomprehension of musical theatre. 

When Manzi’s closed its doors for the final time in 2006, it had been serving seafood in Soho for 78 years. It’s difficult to imagine any new restaurant enjoying that kind of longevity in London again. But with St. John Hotel, on the old Manzi’s site just off hellish Leicester Square, owners Fergus Henderson and Trevor Gulliver promise to give it a good go.

  

We went for lunch the day before Easter, when London was hot and empty. A cool dining room was sparsely populated, peaceful and, for those who know the other restaurants in the group, comfortingly familiar. 

I started with lamb sweetbreads, butter beans and wild garlic, a friendly mixture of thick, beany stock and sweet offal. It was marvellous, almost conspiratorial, the kind of dish you’d sooner run away with than share. £8.20 is hardly cheap, but when something is a good as this, almost any price would represent a good deal.

Another starter, of potted pigeon with quince and toast, didn’t quite reach the same heights, but it was still superbly fatty, peppery and lumpy. 

  

For mains, we ordered ‘Snails & bacon’ and ‘Broad beans, artichoke and Berkswell.’ Now, I’m not normally one for vegetarian main dishes, but with broad beans so smooth and artichoke so delicately fennelly, this was a great option. Berkswell cheese, grated on top and mixed through, brought everything together in a messy, brilliant mesh. 

And then snails and bacon. Until this point of the meal, I thought St. John Hotel was doing a competent impression of St. John – were that the case, it would still be a far better restaurant than most. But the snails and bacon were better than anything I’ve eaten at St. John, or at St. John Bread & Wine. Frankly, they were better than most things I’ve eaten. The snails, braised in cider, stood out sweet and tender against luscious, caramel, smoky bacon chunks and soft, sweet shallots. Underneath it all, a thick piece of fried bread soaked up the liquor, rewarding every mouthful with satisfying crunch. I’d return for this dish alone, day after day, if I could, and I don’t care that it cost £19. After all, that’s the same price as Behind the Black Door, Sarah Brown’s Downing Street memoir. 

Desserts maintained the ridiculously high standard. An enormous piece of custard tart featured gravity-defying, crème brulee-like custard dusted with nutmeg and cinnamon. This was so good it was almost moving (or at least, when it was finished, I nearly cried). 

And as a final flourish, a bitter chocolate ice cream. In Nose to Tail Eating (my favourite cookbook of all time), Fergus Henderson admitted that he had yet to achieve or even eat the kind of chocolate ice cream he wanted. Well that was then. I don’t know if Mr. Henderson likes head-chef Tom Harris’s version, but it was certainly the best chocolate ice cream I’ve ever tasted. 

A glass each of the excellent house white and a couple of coffees brought the total bill to £86 for two. St. John Hotel is not cheap, but it’s better than, say, Dinner by Heston (which was really great), and therefore good value in my book. I can’t remember having enjoyed a meal so much in London, and I didn’t even have to sit through a musical afterwards.

Phil Letts’ take: 10/10

Vrisaki, 73 Myddleton Road, Wood Green

‘Hell > Wood Green’ (anon. ,Facebook status update, 2011)

I suppose if you believe Hell is an actual place, it must indeed be greater than Wood Green, which is relatively small, and prison to fewer damned souls.

That said, it’s easy to see why, in non-mathematical parlance, you might consider Hell the better location. I guess it depends what you’re in for, but it’s certainly easier to get to on a Friday night in rush hour.

We visited (Wood Green, that is) in order to eat at Vrisaki, a Greek restaurant far closer to Elysium than Hades. It’s a bustling dining room behind a regular kebab joint, full of Greeks and Greek waiters, dressed up in ties and suits and generally making everything feel old-fashioned and no-nonsense.

All four of us ordered the set meze, which at £38 for two people, promised an awful lot. And it largely delivered, with large being the operative syllable. The quantities of food at Vrisaki are staggering. Our starter platter included more dishes than I can remember, but certainly lentils, beans, tuna, taramasalata, hummus, pitta, beetroot, olives, tsatziki, potato, assorted salads and pickled shellfish. And while it’s true that food is about quality, not quantity, it’s also about quantity.

In any event, the quality was pretty good too, especially those dishes that you felt hadn’t come out of large vats or jars. Copious Aphrodite (a wine) was cheap and flirty, helping to smooth out the rougher edges of the food. 

Next came a fish, ham, halloumi and veg course, featuring excellent asparagus, decent prawns, and smoked salmon presented in the style of a 1970s Sheffield cocktail party. Piping hot, gigantic garlic mushrooms were hearty, while deep-fried calamari limped a little. Ham and halloumi was pretty awful, to be honest – salty to the point of inedibility. Copious Aphrodite (a wine) was cheap and flirty, helping to smooth out the rougher edges of the food. 

By this stage, I couldn’t tell you which course we were on (I don’t think they all have names, and this was at least our fourth new set of plates at the table), but whole trout followed, firm and flavourful, accompanied by more prawns, butterflied and grilled. Copious Aphrodite (a wine) was cheap and flirty, helping to smooth out the rougher edges of the food. 

And then on, unabashed, to some meat: about six whole quail in a salty, slightly spicy rub, and some absolutely fantastic sausages, herby (mint and sage, at a guess) and juicy and great. Oh, and a tomato and feta salad, for some reason. Copious Aphrodite (a wine) was cheap and flirty, helping to smooth out the rougher edges of the food. 

A glass of metaxa and a coffee finished the meal off perfectly, and if Wood Green is Hell, well then I’m Beelzebub.

Phil Letts’ take: 6/10

Moro, 34-36 Exmouth Market, Clerkenwell

There are a couple of reasons why you might spend three and a half hours over one meal in a restaurant. But on a midweek night, with work the next morning, it’s unlikely to be because you want to linger long, indulging yourself over a slow-burning tasting menu, quaffing big wines and luxuriating as the late evening stretches.

At Moro, everything took too long. The table was booked for 7.30, for six people. We’d all arrived by about 7.50, admittedly a little later than ideal. Our order was taken at about 8.15. Our starters arrived around 8.45, mains at 9.30, dessert menus (after some prompting) at about 10.05, desserts at 10.30, and the bill sometime after 10.45. We were in no particular rush, fortunately.

Service apart, Moro is a decent restaurant, capable of real excellence, though not consistently enough to be truly great. My starter, a spiced farika (grain), veal and chopped almond soup, was a meaty, earthy concoction, smooth, rich and filling, but with a pleasing almond crunch that prevented it becoming too much. At £7.50, it was the cheapest first course on the menu, though that belies its quality.

The other starters varied from the brilliant (pigeon breast and piquillo pepper with garlic puree) to the merely adequate (a white and green asparagus and egg dish that was overwhelmed by dill). Morel mushroom and prawn revueltos seemed an odd idea, but the scrambled egg mix somehow worked, while butifarra sausage and warm grelos (turnip tops) didn’t.

Mains were similarly variable. Mine, wood-roasted kid with garlic and mashed potatoes, was an excellent reminder of why we should cook more goat in this country. Intense animal flavour combined with a superbly crispy skin and comforting mash made the £19.50 it cost seem reasonable.

Four out of the six mains available were ‘wood roasted’ on the menu, when roasted might have done. I do understand that they want to advertise the woodiness of the roast, but if you start the majority of your menu descriptions with the same phrase, there’s a danger of overemphasis, making customers think that the importance of their ‘wood roasted grey mullet’ and ‘wood roasted kid’ lies in wood roastedness, not meat.

Wood roasted pork with artichokes, chickpeas, sherry, and spinach was very nicely cooked and generous, but it seemed like discrete dishes (chickpeas and pork) that had been thrown together without a thought for whether that was a good idea. Wood roasted chicken with caraway, yoghurt and lentils, was beautifully soft but rather underpowered, neither especially woody nor very interestingly spiced. The caraway shadowed the chicken, when it should have taken it on. A gigantic mixed vegetable mezze was better, with notably excellent beetroot pilau, crispy flatbread and assorted tasty lentil numbers.

I shared a cheese plate in lieu of dessert, and it was marvellous. Various Spanish treats (especially the wonderful blue Picos de Europa) were the right temperature and the right taste. A chocolate and apricot tart was similarly inspired and lighter than expected, while a rhubarb and rosewater fool topped things off ideally.

With a couple of bottles of red and one of champagne (it was a birthday celebration, after all), the bill came in at about £55 per head, including a small discount for the tardy service. Food alone was about £35 each. For what I ate, that seemed reasonable, but I know others disagreed. If you pick well at Moro, then you’ll have an excellent meal. But really, with its reputation and pricing, it should be doing a little better.

Phil Letts’ take: 7/10