The Brackenbury: a rather nice restaurant

My father, a sweet man who was never unpleasant about anyone had a phrase for people or places about which he couldn’t summon up much enthusiasm. "Rather nice."

The Brackenbury is rather nice. The food is nice. The wine is nice (actually very nice). I just can’t get quite as excited as I feel I should about it.

That’s partly due to the burden of expectation I brought to my first visit last night. Back in the '90s, when it was run by Adam and Kate Robinson it was one of the most popular restaurants in London. To hear that it had been taken over by Ossie Gray former manager and wine buyer for the River Cafe (and son of the late great Rose) and the well-qualified Humphrey Fletcher who had also cheffed at the River Caff, Kensington Place and all sorts of other worthy places promised a return to the good old days

The food is certainly hard to fault kicking off with the stylish little ‘plate of savouries’ we ordered while we were trying to decide what else to eat - olives, capers, a very good egg mayonnaise and a couple of mini bruschetti, topped with softly cooked onions and anchovies.

My starter of vodka-cured salmon with roast baby beets and a punchy horseradish dressing was delicious. My host had a generous scoop of very well made rillettes and celeriac remoulade. Classic.

We both opted for fish as a main course, in my case a satisfyingly chunky piece of Skrei cod which broke into beautiful pearly flakes. It came with salsa verde, radicchio and (very slightly underdone) potatoes. My friend had a nicely cooked (drat that word keeps creeping in) fresh lemon sole with braised peas and lettuce

He had cheese - a slice of well-matured Lincolnshire Poacher, home-made chutney and oatcakes. I went for Yorkshire ginger pudding with butterscotch sauce - basically a gingery sticky toffee pudding. Ni... No, I’m not going to say that. Perfectly fine though I think I should have ordered the rather more glamourous iced Paris brest, a giant profiterole with hot chocolate sauce which I spotted sailing past.

We ordered a glass of pinot bianco (impeccable) and a classy bottle of Selvapiana Chianti* which would probably have cost at least a tenner more at the River Café.

So what’s the problem? I guess it’s that the restaurant, so fondly remembered for having bags of personality just doesn't have much. The rooms, painted off-white the way TV experts advise in order to sell your house, feels designed to cause minimum offence. There are no pictures. The lights are too bright.

The service while perfectly competent lacks warmth and thoughtfulness. No bread is offered with my salmon, an extra spoon would have been welcome with the pud. It would have been sensible from the restaurant’s point of view to offer a glass of dessert wine. They just don’t go the extra mile.

Maybe it’s simply that it’s not the old Brackenbury but. be honest, who else cares 20 years on? The locals clearly love it and I don't think Gray has any ambitions other than to create a good neighbourhood restaurant. That he's done. I would undoubtedly go regularly if I lived on the doorstep but I’m not sure it’s worth crossing London for these days.

The Brackenbury is at 129 Brackenbury Road, London W6 0BQ. Tel: 020 8741 4928. We spent about £136 but did choose quite an expensive bottle. I reckon you could get away with £40 a head on food.

* an odd choice with fish you might think but it was a light elegant wine which went perfectly with the cod and salsa verde

Worth the detour: Mayfields, Wilton Way

If you’re not familiar with London Hackney sounds a heck of a long way to go for dinner. But believe me Mayfields is worth it.

And it’s actually not that far. Take the Victoria Line to Highbury & Islington, change onto the overground, a couple of stops to Hackney Central and walk 7-8 minutes. Or jump on one of the many buses that pass nearby*

When you see the restaurant you might not think it’s that special. It's really quite small, more like a café or a chic Parisian restaurant that only insiders know about. The menu’s short too but interesting - REALLY interesting. It’s hard to make a decision about what to eat - always a good sign.

How to describe the food? It’s hard to pin down. Some Asian influences, some Italian ones - if I had to choose one word to describe it it would be bold. Big flavours, no shrinking from offbeat combinations or unusual tastes and textures.

We ordered a number of small plates which came in random and not totally logical order - a feature that will no doubt irritate some who like meals to proceed in a more orderly fashion. I don’t mind, myself.

Barely cooked mackerel and squid come in a vivid green watercress sauce. Fine silken slices of scarlet venison carpaccio with an intriguingly smoky flavour are anointed with grated horseradish, perched on rough sourdough toast and cubes of pear.

A brilliant veggie dish of salty monk’s beard (almost like samphire) is partnered with earthy sweet turnip, mealy beans and bottarga. Super-fresh dab tempura with dashi. Incredibly rare, almost raw duck breast with Jerusalem artichoke, carrot and rhubarb is the only dish that doesn’t quite work. Too rare, even for me.

We have to have the chocolate mousse and kaffir lime ice cream which is even better than it sounds - a smooth, warm, velvety chocolate goo, with the fragrant ice-cream melting over it. But the cheese isn’t too shabby either. A really well chosen Abondance and Cathare goats cheese - the former particularly good with a Jura Chardonnay.

The list which is put together by Borough Wines opposite will make anyone who’s into organic and biodynamic wines very happy. Everything is available by the glass. As well as the Jura (Philippe Vandelle’s Blanc l’Etoile) we had a glass of crisp, refreshing St Esteve Blanc de Blancs sparkling ugni from the Luberon (£6.50 a glass), a glass of Thierry Germain’s ‘Soliterre’ Chenin (£6.25), good with practically everything but the duck, and shared a glass of Chateau des Moriers Moulin à Vent Beaujolais (£6.75). It’s a rewardingly offbeat list.

If you don’t go mad you could get away with around £25 on food and £14 for wine a head, so just over £40 with service which is more than fair for an exhilaratingly good meal. I just wish it was on my doorstep but even if it isn’t on yours, go. Go ...

Mayfields is at 52 Wilton Way, London E8 6GG. Tel: 020 7254 8311. The menu changes regularly so you may get offered something quite different - but hopefully that kaffir lime ice cream.

For a full list of buses see the Find us page of the website

I ate at Mayfields as a guest of the restaurant.

First Impressions: Ember Yard, Berwick Street

As the fourth restaurant in the Salt Yard Group which specialises in Spanish and italian food Ember Yard has a fine pedigree but does it live up to its stablemates?

Certainly first impressions suggest the group is after a rather different customer from its normal hispanophile clientele. It’s expensively kitted out in a smooth international traveller kind of way - the brightly coloured rough-painted mural of vineyards could come from any 5 star hotel while the pre-Christmas the office parties (hopefully now firmly back in their offices) gave it a vibe that felt very different from the group's other bars.

The food is, as always, good - in the case of some dishes excellent. The menu is similar to their other joints (why change a winning formula?) - platters of charcuterie and cheese and more substantial small plates of 'modern tapas' but, as the name of the restaurant suggests, there’s a greater emphasis on grilling.

There’s a discrepancy between the size of the portions that makes it a little hard to order. I resented sharing my rather delicious smoked bream carpaccio but the generous portion of chargrilled chicory with vin cotto would have served up to four. Veggies are also priced at not much less than dishes with more expensive ingredients. As is generally the case with this style of eating it’s easy to run up a sizeable bill particularly if you cut loose on the excellent wine list.

Given they make a feature of sourcing and sustainability I was surprised to see courgette flowers on the menu in December but otherwise what we ate - some wickedly good quince glazed iberico pork with celeriac purée, parsnip chips with manchego (now why has no-one thought of that before?) and an intensely rich chocolate ganacha with salted caramel ice cream felt spot on for the time of year. Oh, and don't miss the flatbread!

I suspect the best way to use Ember Yard - as with other restaurants in the group - is as a glass-and-a-dish-or-two tapas bar. As a well-placed refuge from the steaming hell of Oxford Street, I liked it more than enough to give it another go but suspect my favourite restaurant of the group will remain the rather cosier Opera Tavern (in Covent Garden).

Ember Yard is at 60-61 Berwick Street, London W1F 8SU. Tel: 020 7439 8057. The website is emberyard.co.uk though at the time of writing it’s not yet fully operational. Their other restaurants are Salt Yard and Dehesa.

I ate at Ember Yard as a guest of the Salt Yard group.

Peckham Bazaar - well worth the detour

The thing about neighbourhood restaurants is that they’re a pain to get to if you’re not a local. In general that’s not a problem. They’re nice for those who live nearby, you tell yourself, but you don’t envy them unduly. But Peckham Bazaar is another matter ...

It was on my radar already as one of my occasional contributors, ex-sommelier Donald Edwards (right), is one of the partners and had put together the winelist (more on that in a minute) And I’d read some great reports on the food so when I took up temporary residence in East Dulwich over Christmas it seemed too good an opportunity to miss.

Talking of missing things you could easily walk past. It would be an understatement to say it isn’t smart. Basically it’s a shack with an outdoor barbecue and a main room that looks more like a community centre for disaffected yoof than the deli it apparently was in its former existence. I say this not because it's not congenial (it is) but because I don’t want you to go trekking across London thinking you’re heading for some polished designer joint.

The food - billed as pan-Balkan by Albanian-born chef John Gionieka - is something else, though. We went on a Sunday night, just after Christmas, just as they were closing, which must have been the worst possible time for them. They’d run out of a couple of dishes* but that didn’t stop them serving up a feast.

Our two shared starters (the octopus was sadly off) were some irresistibly fat, juicy, smokey chicken ‘winglets’ with tsatsiki and sucuc, a spicy sausage with shakshuka, the middle-east’s answer to ratatouille.

Amazingly the mains - a let-down in so many restaurants - were even better: slow roast lamb with a punchy citrussy avgolemono sauce, a sublime beef stifado with cauliflower purée and, because they’d run out of the other mains, a hefty slice of grilled manouri with butter beans and a generous dollop of skordalia. No pretty pictures of the first two because the light was dim and stews never look that alluring. But what a relief to have food that tastes better than it looks. Give me substance over style every time.

The only disappointment was a slightly stodgy pistachio and orange cake with poached quince ice-cream. I’d venture that desserts aren’t their strong suit. If I were them I’d just stick to a selection of ice-creams which would reduce the pressure on the tiny kitchen.

Oh, and the wine. The wine list is brilliant - quirky, adventurous, full of rare treats from Greece and elsewhere in the Eastern Med (so massively on-trend). Several like the Simcic Opoka Ribolla - an orange wine from Slovenia are quite out there, others like the Greek reds, rather more mainstream. If that still makes you nervous stick to the basic Bulgarian house white and house red at a very reasonable £16.50 a bottle. Oh, and the Eduardo Miroglio Brut Zero, an amazingly classy Bulgarian sparkling wine is a great way to kick off the evening.

This is the kind of restaurant you (or rather I) wake up in the middle of the night dreaming about. The kind of place where chefs head after work and the sort of food I’d make myself if I had time, lived in Albania and had an outdoor grill. Not flash food to impress but food to feed the soul.

* apparently they normally have a longer menu - take a look at the old menus on the site. Actually take a look at them anyway. You'll want to go even more.

Peckham Bazaar is at 119 Consort Road, London SE15 3RU and is open from 6-11 Tuesday-Friday, 12.30-11 on Saturdays and 12.30-8 on Sundays. Phone number - not listed on the site but how else are you to book? - is 07875 107471. They're also on Twitter @peckhambazaar.

My son and daughter-in-law took me there so I don’t know what they paid for the three of us but I’m guessing about £25 a head for food. Ridiculously good value.

More about the delights of sarf London here.