Boulestin, St James’s Street: London’s latest French restaurant isn't quite there yet

You’d think London had enough in the way of new French restaurants lately but along comes Boulestin in another bid to seduce the city’s Francophiles. Does it succeed?

I have to admit I didn’t eat there in ideal circumstances, with the edge taken off my appetite by a caviar tasting (first world problems . . . ) but food wasn’t really the issue.

For a high profile opening - and a Thursday night - the room was strangely empty and lacking in atmosphere. We later spotted that there was a terrace outside where several diners had been eating on an unseasonally warm September night and a full private dining room downstairs. It’s still early days for the restaurant so maybe they didn’t take as many bookings as they might have done? Or maybe it’s just not a great site (at the bottom of St James’s Street) which could be more worrying for new owner Joel Kissin who formerly worked for Terence Conran and should therefore know his oignons.

He should also know how to train his staff. Our rather flappy and over-effusive waiter was clearly of the school that thought it strange for a couple of women to be dining on their own and therefore that we had to be incapable of choosing our wine. Which was ironic as he clearly didn’t know his own wine list, offering me a glass of St Chinin (sic) which was only available by the bottle rather than the (perfectly nice) Minervois ‘Cuvée Orlic’ above it which was listed by the glass.

Staff hovered to whisk away our plates the moment we’d set our cutlery down meaning we got through a three course meal in an hour and a quarter. Hardly relaxing.

That said, the food - or my food at least - was very good. Given the caviar episode we stuck to salads to start with: my nicely conceived artichoke salad with fennel, tomatoes and preserved lemon being way more interesting than my companion’s (the other Fiona) endive, French beans and Per Las blue cheese which was significantly short of beans.

They were frustratingly already out of the plat du jour - “chef ‘ad to send the rabbit back”, according to The Deeply Annoying Waiter but a huge hunk of dark sticky daube of beef* with mash and beautifully cooked carrots and turnips more than compensated (and was very good with the Minervois). Sorry the photograph's crap, I know. Taking pictures of braised meat in low light is never a good idea but I wanted to give you an idea of the size of it.

The other Fiona had grilled wild seabass with fennel which she thought was marginally overcooked but, being more conservative about my fish, I thought was fine.

I also fared better with my dessert, a fabulously wobbly Sauternes custard with the consistency of a crème brûlée, served with Agen prunes in armagnac. In normal (non-caviar) circumstances I’d have ordered a glass of Sauternes at a pretty reasonable £10.85 to go with that. Fi’s rather solid lemon cheesecake, an odd inclusion on a menu that also featured lemon tart, was less impressive.

There were some other appealing dishes on the menu, especially the game (wild pigeon, girolles, lardons and kale would certainly ring my bell) but if you’re not careful it would be easy to rack up a significant bill - unless you go for the well priced pre- or post-theatre prix fixe at £19.50 for 2 courses which happily includes the daube.

The main problem for Boulestin though is that there’s a lot of competition if you feel like a French meal at this level including Brasserie Chavot just off Bond Street which has just picked up a Michelin star. Despite the quality of the cooking it doesn’t have enough going for it as a restaurant experience to make me want to go back. Except possibly for that custard . . .

Boulestin is at 5 St James's Street, London SW1A 1EF. Tel: 020 7930 2030. There is also an all-day café in the front of the restaurant, Café Marcel.

London's leading critics seem divided on the restaurant. Read Jay Rayner of the Observer's review here and Nick Lander of the FT's here.

I ate at Boulestin as a guest of the restaurant.

Otto’s, London - the perfect place for a four hour lunch

If you’re a reader of - er, hem - a certain age who longs for the days when French food was fancy and lunches lasted until dinner you’re in luck.

Otto’s is a true blast from the past: a style of food - and service - you thought had disappeared back in the days of nouvelle cuisine.

Not that you’d know it from the outside. I’m sure Otto would be mortified (yes, there is an Otto) but it looks indistinguishable from the breakfast cafés that dot the insalubrious Gray’s Inn Road. Apart from the posh bottles of wine in the window.

Inside is grander but in a splendidly baroque way. There are statuettes and bas-reliefs, and black and white film posters. And strange African figurines on the tables (why?). There is a large duck press - probably the only one in London but I’m sure we’ll have copycat duck presses popping up all over the place in no time. A pop-up called The Duck Press, even.

What you really want is a table where you can watch Otto whisking away at the bloody sauce - and here I’m being descriptive not blaspheming - that goes with the duck. Table 9 at the back is the ringside seat.

Not feeling quite up to it appetite-wise or financially (it has to be pre-ordered at a cost of £120 for 2) I went for another dish that had to be prepped at table: the steak tartare which arrived with a whole trolley of condiments. Our waiter asked me how I liked it (spicy but not too hot) then seasoned it exactly right. If I’m finding fault which I’m not really inclined to do, so charming is Otto’s, it would have been better served with chips than the rather solid rosti cake that accompanied it. But with tartare that good I'm not complaining.

My starter was slightly bizarre though. Having not read the menu carefully enough I assumed tête de veau would be cold but it arrived in slightly gelatinous warm chunks scattered on a mound of beets, carrots, onions and croutons - not unappetising but way big enough for a main course.

My companion's (blogger Zeren Wilson), colourful monkfish and red mullet terrine (below, right) with blobs of saffron aioli was lovely though and a very good match for the well-priced half bottle of gloriously creamy Domaine Larue Saint-Aubin Les Cortons 1er cru we had ordered to kick off. His duck sausage (a skilful use of leftovers?) was also top notch making the set price lunch at £24 an absolute steal. Just don’t expect to go back to the office - or anywhere that doesn’t have a sofa - afterwards.

Cheese is - what else? - selected old fashioned cheeseboard after a lenghty discussion on preferred styles and we somehow - God know's how managed to fit in a pud - a rather lurid but strangely delicious strawberry and pistachio 'macaronade'. As I say the lunch did take a good three and a half hours.

The wine list is a joy: well-priced and surprisingly eclectic (so not just French). Champagne (a well aged Ayala) is served in unwisely large glasses. We also recklessly ordered a youthful Bachelet Monnot 1er cru Maranges as neither of us could remember trying Maranges which Otto ceremoniously decanted. I vaguely remember thinking it went better with my tartare then Zeren’s more robust duck sausage and could have done with a couple more year’s ageing.

All in all this is a fabulous place. Totally, refreshingly original, bohemian and a great deal of fun. If you want to escape the relentless hipsterism of the current London dining scene, go. I’ll certainly be back.

PS There’s a large (private-ish) room downstairs with a huge table which would be perfect to book for a fiftieth - or possibly even an eightieth - birthday if you last that long after eating a few times at Otto's. I’m sure he would do you proud.

Otto's is at 182, Gray's Inn Road, London WC1X, 8EW. Tel: 020 7713 0107. Expect to pay about £40-50 a head for food - and roughly the same for wine unless you're careful.

One Leicester Street: an oasis of calm off Leicester Square

It would be unfortunate if One Leicester Street became known as the restaurant that used to be St John’s Hotel. Not least because the chef Tom Harris, who used to front the kitchen there but has stayed on to run his own show, has put his own individual stamp on the food.

St John’s robust, hearty staples have been replaced by a lighter Nordic-influenced menu but one that doesn’t skimp on flavour. That said - I remember having the first dish we tried - some puffed up Quaver-like pieces of pigskin with a delicious sharp, salty cod's roe dip - in the St John days.

We cruised our way through a series of small plates including some a lovely dish of crab with home-made (I would guess) rye crackers smothered with a creamy purée of the brown meat, topped prettily with white meat, dill and purslane (below), pig’s cheek ham and fennel, grilled leek and hazelnut purée and pheasant’s egg (yum) and smoked herring and beetroot (which I found a bit oily). Oh - and a perfect fresh lettuce and radish salad with a buttermilk dressing. This seems the best way to go at lunchtime at least.

Cheese courses are unusually imaginative - I loved the pickled gooseberries and homemade crackers that were served with the Sparkenhoe Red Leicester - why can’t more restaurants do this? Puds, by contrast were possibly a bit clever-clever - salt caramel apple and hazelnut was a busy plate of jagged shards of hazelnut tuile, dried apple and the now-mandatory crumbs (below) while the flavour of violet in a dessert of chocolate, honeycomb and violet was drowned in a sea of chocolatey topsoil. Unlike the rest of the menu it all seemed to be striving a bit too much for effect though I’m probably the last person to pronounce on puddings.

The wine list is short but imaginative with a particularly good selection by the glass. My crisp, dry Petrucco Friulano 2011 from the Friuli was the perfect foil to the dishes we'd picked. Service is friendly and unsnooty and prices more than reasonable for the area. There’s a working lunch and pre-theatre menu of two courses for £16 and £19 for three.

Will it work better than St John’s? Who knows? It was worryingly short of bums on seats when we lunched there a couple of weeks ago but it’s had good reviews and is in a part of town (just off Leicester Square) where there should be plenty of punters.

Basically it’s a modern, sophisticated reasonably priced restaurant in a place you wouldn’t expect to find one. A good spot to meet a friend in central London.

One Leicester Street is at (surprise, surprise) One Leicester Street, London WC2 7BL. Tel: 020 3301 8020.

I ate at One Leicester Street as a guest of the restaurant.

Les Grès, Lindry - a breath of fresh air in Burgundy

Burgundian restaurants are some of the most traditional in France but Jérôme Bigot’s charming, original Les Grès wouldn’t disgrace Paris’s fashionable 10th arrondissement.

It’s in the depths of the country in a tiny village outside Auxerre* yet managed to pick up an award for best ‘bistrodidacte’ this year from the influential restaurant guide Le Fooding

The evening menu - no choice 7 course tasting menu - ticks all the contemporary boxes - local sourcing, smoking and pickling (there are, unusually for France, well-thumbed copies of the Noma, Faviken and Mugaritz cookbooks on the bar)

While we were waiting for the meal to begin they brought a pretty-as-a-picture amuse of pickled vegetables, fruits (including the local Yonne cherries) and (surprisingly delicious) pickled elderflowers. The chef used to be an painter and it shows.

There was a superb dish of incredibly tender squid and mealy fresh coco beans in a natural, sweet tomato broth, a cumin-spiked sardine with a bold slash of smoky aubergine purée and a perfectly cooked piece of rare duck (sous-vided, I’m sure) served with pickled cucumber and mushrooms about which my husband raved. And he doesn’t like his duck rare.

Then a fantastic dish of bavette with miso and a smoked red onion purée, a startling combination of almost raw meat, smoke and umami. The cheese dish too was brilliant - a scoop of ivory-white fromage blanc floating in an emerald green soup of basil and coriander topped with oregano flowers.

Inevitably with food this experimental a couple of the dishes didn't come off. Snails, in my view, need a more robust accompaniment than cucumber and capucines (nasturtiums) and a dessert of finely sliced peaches, apricots, confited black olives and chibouste had a bit too much going on but then I can remember eating dishes that didn't work at El Bulli.

Two other things might put you off. They obviously like to serve everyone at the same time so if you arrive early, as we did having skipped lunch, you may find yourself waiting for a good three quarters of an hour for the first course to arrive.

And the short, carefully chosen wine list, which has been put together by Jerome’s wife Marie Hélène according to this blogpost, is made up of natural wines - but that’s a plus in our book. And no, that doesn’t mean they’re all ‘cidery’ or funky - there’s plenty to please more conventional palates including Thomas Pico’s pristine Domaine Pattes Loup Chablis ‘Vent d’ange’ which we tasted at the domaine the following day and the bottle we ordered, Fanny Sabre’s fresh, elegant Bourgogne Passetoutgrains, which suited the food very well.

You can also opt for the ‘menu carafe’ which has four well-chosen matching wines but which adds another 30€ each to the bill.

You wonder at first how they can survive in such a remote spot but they’re well within reach for Paris weekenders and holidaymakers a large party of whom were in the restaurant with their very sweet, well-behaved kids, all tucking into this crazy colourful food.

If you’re after traditional Burgundian cuisine, Les Grès won’t be for you but we loved it. One of the best meals of the year.

Our meal cost 49€ for 7 courses plus 25€ for wine. There's a lunchtime option of 29€ for 4 courses though it's closed on Mondays. It’s a small restaurant so you’ll need to book, especially at weekends.

Restaurant Les Grès, 9, rue du 14-Juillet, Lindry (89240 ) Tel: +33 9 52 31 64 10

* yet just off the A6 motorway