River Cottage Canteen, Bristol: a good place for families

I've never managed to get to one of Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall's River Cottage Canteens so was intrigued to find one was opening on our doorstep on Bristol's Whiteladies Road

There's always a slight suspicion that celebrity chefs are cashing in with these enterprises and although Hugh is a colleague at the Guardian I wasn’t expecting a great deal, to be honest. But it’s a lovely open rustic space with a very relaxed atmosphere and exactly the kind of wholesome food you'd imagine from his recipes.

As you’d expect from a champion of sustainable fishing and healthy eating the ingredients are scrupulously sourced, mainly from the west country. There’s a board on the side which trumpets the suppliers. Most vegetables are grown within 50 miles of Bristol. The menu is strong on veggies though Fearnley-Whittingstall is not too puritanical to offer chips - albeit with Maldon sea salt.

The highlights of our meal were a colourful board of beetroot hummus, carrot puree, a perfectly spiced pork terrine (rare to get that accuracy of seasoning) and a warm salad of roasted parsnip, lentil and superbly light moussey goats’ curd that wouldn’t have looked out of place in the River Café*.

Mains, being sent out in the middle of a very busy Saturday lunchtime, were slightly less sure-footed, a spicy bacon and cannellini bean stew failing to disguise the basic dullness of a generous hunk of pollock (sorry Hugh, it IS a boring fish) and the rather leaden wood-fired pizza crust needing a bit more fine-tuning, as our waitress acknowledged. But a simple dessert of poached pear with ice cream and chocolate sauce - despite its teetering pear - was lovely: a natural, not over-sweet way of ending a meal. The sort of thing you’d run up for friends - or at least I would.

The well-priced short wine list has a number of organic options though it would have been good to see a few more English wines on it. Cider comes from Orchard Pig and beer from the local Bristol Beer Factory. I had a cider called Charmer that sailed serenely through the meal.

Brownie points too for the childrens’ menu which had five main choices the day we were there including grilled whiting and salad, felafel with flatbread and hummus and a leek onion and cheddar pizza parcel (a pasty?) as well as the inevitable pasta and bangers and chips.

Given that the aim is to change the menu every day there were the inevitable glitches - a couple of missing elements like the chutney from my husband’s terrine and a side of kale that had been sent out without the advertised lemon and rapeseed oil (both swiftly rectified) but these are early days. The restaurant doesn’t officially open until tomorrow (March 4th). Service is sweet and the pricing more than fair for the quality of the ingredients.

Bristol does casual eating well so there’s plenty of competition for the RCC but few that offer quite such imaginative food for kids. Once the glitches are ironed out it will be interesting to see if it can manage to keep up the standard at these prices. All credit to it if it can.

PS One other point when you’re booking. There’s more room between the tables - and fewer buggies - on the ground floor than upstairs. Ask for a table in the window if you can get one.

*Where Hugh started his career

The River Cottage Canteen is at St John's Court, Whiteladies Road, Bristol BS8 2QY. I ate there as a guest of the restaurant.

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.

HKK - where the drinks are as fab as the food

Maybe Chinese restaurants are like buses. You don’t get any new openings for a while then several come along at once. So after Bo London the other day, it’s HKK, the latest project from the Hakkasan group.

It’s much more mainstream than Bo - no edible condoms here - but, like Bo, an unmistakeably contemporary Chinese restaurant with dishes served individually Western-style rather than placed on the table together. Which of course makes them much easier to match.

We opted for the 8 course lunch menu (£48) rather than the 15 course evening one which costs a daunting £95 (this is the City, after all). Our sommelier agreed to bring the soft drink options as well for us to try - one pairing for each couple of courses. A well-priced option at only £24 a flight.

There’s a good deal of theatre about the presentation. The main course of cherry wood roasted Peking duck (served with a lovely Pfalz Pinot Noir from Stepp & Gaul) is carved on a table in the middle of the restaurant then served with a pancake on the side rather than a basket of them for you to do your own rolling.

The dim sum* - some of the very best I’ve tasted - arrive with a small paint brush for you to anoint them with just the right amount of soy sauce. And the tonic in the 1724 non-alcoholic cocktail that was served with it was poured through a strainer full of saffron then topped with a spritz of grapefruit zest from an old-fashioned perfume spray. Stylish and really delicious.

Other highlights were a dazzling dish of steamed razor clam with steamed chillies and a deep-fried ball of mui-choi glutinous rice (below) - slightly overwhelmed by the heavyweight Barossa Valley Nine Popes that the sommelier paired with it - and two outstanding desserts: lychee tapioca with passion chiboust and passion jam (probably the best rice pudding I’ve tasted) and a pineapple fritter with salted lime jelly and vanilla ice cream - an elegant riff on the fruit fritters of more traditional Chinese restaurants.

In fact there’s little to fault. The jasmine tea-smoked Wagyu beef was a little tougher and fattier than Bo’s. You rather lost the Iberico in the Four Treasure Iberico ham wrap, pretty though it looked. And some of the soft drinks such as the white grape, prune, apple and clove cocktail were a bit too sweet and gloopy for the delicacy of the food. But this is quibbling. I wouldn’t be surprised if it picks up a Michelin star in March despite the fact that it will only have been open a couple of months.

The good news is that they’re putting on a dim sum menu at lunchtime which will probably be pricey but hopefully cheaper than the set menu. And the dim sum was exquisite. There’s also much more to explore in terms of the wine list which includes both wine flights and an extensive selection of wines by the glass. And there’s an interesting cocktail list and a tea trollley to investigate.

So, not cheap, but very, very good. Go if you can afford it.

HKK is at Broadgate West (just off Bishopsgate), 88 Worship Street, London EC2A 2BE

Tel: +44 (0)203 535 1888.

I ate at HKK as a guest of the restaurant.

* Truffle har gau, pan-fried Szechuan dumpling and sour turnip puff

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.