At this time of year I like to look back on the most exciting meals of the previous 12 months and acknowledge my extreme good fortune in writing this column. This is not something I take for granted.
I must also begin with an apology to all those restaurateurs, chefs, sommeliers and their teams who live and work in the southern hemisphere. I am sorry that I have not been to enjoy your hospitality this year. Although we have travelled as far west as San Francisco and as far east as Tokyo we did not venture further south than Marrakech. Much as I have enjoyed eating out in Mendoza, Mexico City, Sydney, Melbourne and Cape Town in the past, I have not been to any of these cities this year. Perhaps in 2026 …
I am also fully aware that the website I write for is one for wine lovers, one of whom is me and another my constant dining companion, so that I have to pay as much attention to any restaurant’s wine list as I do to its menu. Both of these have to be equally attractive but somewhat inevitably – with Il Vino in Paris closed several years ago and its policy of you choosing your wines first and then the restaurant producing a menu around the wines, a fond but fading memory – it is the menu that any customer is inevitably offered first.
And yet the wine element in every new and consistent restaurant is growing in importance. As I wrote in September after attending the Best Wine List Awards dinner organised by The World of Fine Wine magazine, as world wine consumption declines, many wine traders are now turning to selling their wines to restaurants, an area where the possibility of late or even defaulted payments used to put them off. The international success of Star Wine List – whose objective is ‘to guide wine lovers to the best wine bars and wine restaurants’ – is further testimony to this development.
In this review, it only seems fitting to start at the top, physically at least, and to record that one of my most memorable meals of the year was our recent lunch at La Tour d’Argent in Paris. This was our first visit here for five years and a great deal has changed in the restaurant and in the kitchen. But the €10 million which owner André Terrail admitted to have spent has been well used, and he has been sensitive not to change any aspect of their extraordinary wine list. This list weighs five kilos and encompasses 14,000 bottles, virtually all French, housed in the restaurant’s atmospheric cellars and managed by 34-year-old Victor Gonzalez, while the impressive food is the responsibility of Yannick Franques. This is a restaurant, like The Ritz in London, which I would happily enjoy once every two or three years.
The place I would feel far more comfortable is the island of Sylt off the north German coast, once described as Germany’s equivalent of Martha’s Vineyard. Here, over four nights, we ate and drank so well that my notes filled two articles. Forty years ago the views, the walks, the wildness (no Patek Philippe shops!) of this popular island must have been even more breathtaking. But then chefs as talented as Jorg Müller began to arrive and to set in motion a gastronomic virtuous circle: as the food and wine on offer improved by leaps and bounds it attracted more and more visitors and as they increased they demanded even better accommodation, food and wine. Hence the success of Hotel Jorg Müller, restaurant Sansibar, Söl’ring Hof Rantum and Johannes King – and the challenge any reader will have in securing a reservation during the height of their not so hot, and decidedly windswept, summer.
The same informality that prevails at Müller, Sansibar and King was also much in evidence at Enoteca Baldi in the hilltop village of Panzano in Chianti Classico country. Their wine list is impressive, too, but it is the warmth of the welcome and the service that I will long cherish. Along with, of course, the smiling face of its chef/proprietor Domenico ‘Mimmo’ Baldi as he switched from restaurant chef on the Friday when he cooked an entire fish menu (including a coulibiac of sea bass for 12) to meat chef on the Saturday – a risotto for 20 followed by a gran pezzo of beef – to a pizza chef on the Sunday cooking in the embers of the oven from the night before.
Back in London, after many an email back and forth with the ultra-patient Maxine, I managed to secure a table for two at Soho’s French House. And it was well worth the wait. While head chef Neil Borthwick sat in a corner of the bar downstairs, his team served up a memorable ajo blanco, fillets of John Dory and a Pump Street chocolate mousse.
The same experienced simplicity is on show in Crouch End, north London, at the aptly named Les 2 Garçons, where chef Robert Reid partners admirably with his front-of-house Jean-Christophe Slowik and where a bowl of fish soup with all the trimmings and a nougat glacé were memorable.
Then there were my couple of meals at Kima, a small Greek restaurant specialising in the creative cooking of fish, in Marylebone and its bigger sister restaurant, Opso, directly opposite. I wrote about my first meal, ‘My dish, described as a shank of sea bream (£36) was striking: two fillets of bream, crisp on the outside, stood proud round a mound of long green beans.’ The skills of the chef Nikos Roussos were admirably matched by the warmth of the Greek waiting staff.
Finally, in the UK at least, the charms of Ruth Leigh and her husband and chef, Ollie Brown, contributed enormously to our exquisite Saturday lunch at their restaurant with rooms, Updown, 15 minutes from Deal on the Kent coast. As well as the vignole (a Roman vegetable stew), the Dover sole with blood oranges and the ice cream, the sunshine, the fresh air and the comfort of all that this couple have created in the lovely Kent countryside will long stand out.
And, while I would never swap what is on offer on my doorstep in London, certainly not in terms of the creative sweep of the menus on offer and the breadth of the wine lists, I did feel a pang of envy for the citizens of Tokyo, who are always able to enjoy the charms of Shimbashi Shimizu and Noyashichi; of Sonoma, who can chose from the delicious food and wine and charming service on offer at Valley or the exquisite cooking of Brian Limoges at the two-Michelin-star Enclos; and of Roanne in south-east France, who can take advantage of the charms on offer at Le Central and the whole performance organised by Michel, César and Marie-Pierre Troisgros at Maison Troisgros only eight kilometres away.
But, as the saying goes, absence only makes the heart grow fonder. And I would add the stomach, too.
France
- La Tour d’Argent 15–17 Quai de la Tournelle, 75005 Paris, France; tel: +33 (0)1 4354 2331
- Le Central 58 cours de la République, 42300 Roanne, France; tel: +33 (0)4 7767 7272
- Troisgros 728 route de Villerest, 42155 Ouches, France; tel: +33 (0)4 7771 6697
Germany
- Johannes King Gurtstig 2, 25980 Sylt, Germany; tel: +49 465 1967 7790
- Söl’ring Hof Rantum Am Sandwall 1, 25980 Sylt, Germany; tel: +49 465 183 6200. Dinner only at €319 per person; wine from €100–€180
Italy
- Enoteca Baldi Piazza Gastone Bucciarelli, 25, 50022 Panzano in Chianti, Italy; tel: +39 (0)558 52843
Japan
- Noyashichi MIT Yotsuya 3-chōme Building, 2-9 Arakicho, Shinjuku-ku, Tokyo 160-0007; tel: +81 (0)3 3226 7055. Dinner menu 30,000 yen (about £160) per person
- Shimbashi Shimizu 2-chōme-15-10 Shinbashi, Minato-ku, Tokyo 105-0004; tel: +81 (0)3 3591 5763. Dinner menu £150 per person
UK
- The French House 49 Dean Street, London W1D 5BG; tel: +44 (0)207 437 2477. Restaurant closed Sunday.
- Kima 57 Paddington Street, London W1U 4HZ; tel: +44 (0)77 4520 5136. Closed Monday.
- Les 2 Garçons 14 Middle Lane, London N8 8PL; tel: +44 (0)20 8347 9834
- Updown Updown Road, Betteshanger, Deal, Kent CT14 0EF; tel: +44 (0)78 4224 4192
US
- Enclos 139 East Napa Street, Sonoma, CA; tel: +1 (707) 387 1724
- Valley 487 1st St West, Sonoma, CA; tel: +1 (707) 934 8403
Image at top by Erich Westendarp from Pixabay.
Every Sunday, Nick writes about restaurants. To stay abreast of his reviews, sign up for our weekly newsletter.
