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St John’s robust, hearty staples have been replaced by a lighter Nordic-influenced menu but one that doesn’t skimp on flavour.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.

Grainstore, Granary Square: where veggies take centre stage

If you want to understand where the London restaurant scene is heading you need to go to Grainstore. Sure, the capital is still in thrall to pork, barbecue and street food but Bruno Loubet’s exciting and ambitious new project is a clear pointer to the way things are going.

Loubet’s been around for a while. He was a leading light of the restaurant scene back in the '90s then disappeared to Australia, returning in 2009 to set up Bistro Bruno Loubet in the Zetter which celebrated his French roots. But he’s been nursing the idea of Granary or something like it for some 20 years apparently - a restaurant where vegetables play centre stage and meat and fish are just an accessory.

The menu takes some grasping. Veggies are listed first so it’s easy to skip the fact that there’s a protein element. Main courses are modest in size - it’s all about small plates and sharing. At least that’s how the two of us justified ordering three starters. Four if you count the bread - some oddly disappointing focaccia and flat-tasting dukkah (middle eastern spice dip) which just tasted of nuts and sesame seeds.

Seared asparagus with green gaspacho sauce was a lovely idea though as were courgette, broad bean and prawn felafel (right) though the mojama in the daily special of borlotti beans and charred spring onions was a bit elusive. Early days, early days.

A main of smoky corn and quinoa tamale and properly sticky pork belly is understandably a best seller already but our favourite dish was a beautifully balanced dish of fresh salt cod, sautéed padron peppers, almonds and black olive oil (black tapenade in effect) which made me long to try it at home.

It was also a star pairing with the Roman smoked paprika white wine (yes, you did read that right) which I couldn’t resist ordering from a list of aromatised ‘Greco Roman’ smoked or herb infused wines devised by top mixologist Tony Conigliaro. It was supposed to go with the chilli con veggies which we didn't order but its smoked paprika notes just hit the spot with the cod.

So yes - trend alert! - the drinks are worth paying attention to as well. There are several cocktails which have been paired to individual dishes which are flagged up on the accompanying cocktail list. I also tried the Granary Martini, a fiery concoction of mustard vodka and dry vermouth which was recommended with the felafel but I think went better with the mealy beans but suspect there would be as many views on this as there are vodkas in Congliaro’s back bar. (You’re more likely to get agreement on the fact that £4 is a lot to pay for a small glass ‘hay and grass water. It’s pleasant, but should cost about half that. A French Blonde (grape juice, elderflower cordial, lemongrass and verjus) sounds much more exciting.)

Desserts? Yes, I loved them but suspect that those with a sweeter tooth might not - or opt for the white chocolate rice crispie and dark chocolate mousse instead. We shared a fabulously wobbly goats’ milk panna cotta with spiced candied tomatoes (look out for tomorrow’s match of the week) and strawberry and balsamic ‘jam’ with a spicy hit of horseradish ice cream (right) - neither excessively sweet which is a plus in my book.

There’s so much to take in here - not least the huge and beautiful room with its open plan kitchen - that I feel I need to go back to get a full grip on it. Preferably in a month or so once the kitchen is fully into its stride. But it’s an exciting and genuinely original project which I’m sure will be a game-changer for the London restaurant scene. If you’re remotely interested in where food is heading you should go.

Grainstore is at Granary Square, London N1C 4A, just behind King’s Cross station. Look at the helpful map on the Find Us page of the website. Tel: 020 7324 4466.

I ate at Grainstore as a guest of the restaurant. You should get away with paying about £25-30 a head for food plus drinks and service. There's a 'surprise menu' available in the evening from £35 a head but it needs to be ordered by the whole table.

Balthazar, London: beautiful but curiously dated

There’s no doubt about it Balthazar is drop-dead gorgeous. You only have to see the golden lights winking through the windows to be drawn through the door like a moth to a candle. But how does the food stack up?

I managed (with considerable difficulty) to get a table for dinner this week and found it already heaving with almost as many waiters as punters. Oddly that didn’t make the service especially responsive. They had a knack - as waiters do - of looking round the room to see if anything needed doing but managing to avoid your eye in case you actually wanted anything. It took a while - and a reminder - to get our order taken and a further prompt - after we spotted a basket on our neighbours' table - to be given some of the very good bread.

The menu is French in the way the Americans do French - i.e. with supersize portions, lashings of frites and a wildly indulgent dessert menu.

There was plenty to tempt so I suppose I shouldn’t have ordered a very un-French lobster and truffle risotto. It sounded too good to be true at £10.50, and indeed was with a strong taste of truffle oil and a mound of pallid rice that managed to be both sticky and underdone. My daughter’s frisée aux lardons was a better bet though the bacon shallot vinaigrette was bigger on vinegar than on bacon.

Her cheeseburger though was strangely gamey (the burger, not the cheese) suggesting very well hung beef - an odd way of handling a menu option that would be chosen by conservative eaters. And my steak au poivre, which I am embarrassed to admit I remember fondly from its '70s heyday, was disappointingly unpeppery with a rather dull gravy-like sauce. Top marks for the frites and the perfectly cooked spinach that came with it though.

Desserts were much better - a really gorgeous moussey, New York style cheesecake with a slick of apple purée and a light-as-air cinnamon apple doughnut and some pretty good profiteroles though with a not-quite-chocolatey-enough chocolate sauce.

Wines by the glass - a slightly tired aligoté and a very good 2009 Rasteau that was perfect with my steak - were on the pricey side at £9 a glass.

I’ve never been to the original so can’t comment on how it measures up but the obvious comparison here is with the equally glam but rather more authentically French Brasserie Zédel which is ironically run by Chris Corbin and Jeremy King, former owners of the Caprice group which has now taken McNally’s Balthazar under its umbrella. I prefer Zédel (not least for the pricing) though others in search of more of a scene might well not.

What struck me forcibly though is how curiously old-fashioned the food seems by London 2013 standards. That might seem an odd thing to say of a restaurant that pays tribute to a classic French food tradition but it harks more back to 1997 New York (the date Balthazar was founded) than the 1970s Paris that Zédel apes. There are better casual French restaurants in London - Racine and and McNally's adopted compatriot Daniel Boulud's Bar Boulud among them - and better burger joints (Honest Burger comes to mind). And the portions seem ridiculously large by today’s standards.

What was McNally’s aim in coming to London? A faithful reproduction of his New York restaurant for ex-pats? I’m sure he’ll have achieved that. A new beacon restaurant for London? I’m not so sure.

That said it already feels as if it's been there for months, never mind days. If you want a bit of New York glitz without jumping on a plane, Balthazar is for you. And knowing McNally’s reputation as a restaurateur I’m sure he’ll get the food and the service right. In the meantime stick to a couple of starters or a main course and a pud and you’ll be able to walk out feeling a little lighter than we did and with a slightly lesser hit on your wallet.

My bill at Balthazar was £115.31 for 2 for 3 courses, 2 glasses of wine, 2 lemonades and a mint tea.

Balthazar is at 4-6 Russell Street, London WC2B 5HZ (just off the Covent Garden piazza) and is currently only open for dinner. Lunches start on March 4th and brunch and breakfast in due course. There is a rather gorgeous-looking bakery next door.

The very civilised Newman Street Tavern

Sometimes it’s good to go to a place without much in the way of expectations. The Newman Street Tavern sounded on the face of it like just another restaurant climbing on the fashionable Fitzrovia bandwagon . . .

A chef who wasn’t on my radar, the usual guff about sourcing the best ingredients and a name that suggests what Americans might think of as a British pub.

In fact it’s charming and cosy, much more in the mould of two other recent retro openings, Quality Chophouse and Green Man, French Horn.

Chef Peter Weeden comes from the former Conran empire (Paternoster Chop House and The Boundary), a heritage you can immediately spot from the crustacea bar common to Conran restaurants in their heyday. Fish comes in daily from Cornwall. Meat is aged in a maturing room downstairs and butchered on the spot. Bread (good old fashioned white and wholemeal loaves) is freshly baked in house.

Our meal kicked off with briny oysters (Colchester rock served with shallot vinegar and a cucumber and manzanilla dressing) and, for the oyster-intolerant, some lovely sweet, simply dressed crab.

There was a small bowl of very intensely flavoured red mullet soup (using 'all the bits of the fish', as Weeden nicely put it) made in a British fashion with saffron but without tomato and some well-judged finely shredded orange which offset the slight bitterness of the livers.

Soused red mullet followed in a sharply-flavoured vinegary broth. You might be thinking 'too much red mullet' but I really liked the fact that the same ingredient was used two different ways because it was good and in season.

There was a perfectly judged rosy pink rib of beef served with a fiery beetroot and horseradish sauce and some amazingly good triple fried potatoes finished with a lavish amount of garlic oil from which you can see that NST would be a good place to go for Sunday lunch.

And very English puddings of the kind you'd expect to find at a dinner party thrown by a foodie friend: the inevitable sticky toffee pudding - the chocolate fondant de nos jours - and a delicious crabapple 'autumn' jelly served with rich chunks of quince and a small lake of double cream.

The wine list, which has been drawn up by co-owner Nigel Sutcliffe who used to work at the Fat Duck, is also a draw: 250 interesting wines divided up into enticing categories like Sea and Ocean and Mountain Reds. Several are available by the glass. and a good number are natural which certainly rocked my boat. The headily perfumed 2009 Vacqueyras "Les Restanques de Cabassole" Roucas-Tomba we had with the beef (albeit an eye-watering £66*) was utterly delicious. As indeed it should have been for that price though there are many cheaper options.

Bar food such as Spicy Moon's Farm beer sticks (aka scratchings) sounds fun and would make the Newman Street Tavern a good option for what Fergus Henderson of St John calls 'a little bun moment' round about 4 in the afternoon. That and its menu of Bloody Marys . . .

On the downside, it’s quite crowded and noisy, even in the upstairs restaurant and I suspect service could get a little slow at busy times.

Good for: visitors to the UK wanting a typically English experience, wine lovers

Not so good for: quiet romantic evenings, vegetarians

Newman Street Tavern is - surprise, surprise - in Newman Street (no 48) just north of Oxford Street and west of Tottenham Court Road. Tel: 020 3667 1445.

*I ate at the Newman Street Tavern as a guest of the restaurant. And we were served a set menu so didn't get a full chance to put the dining room through its paces. I would/will go back though.