February Restaurant Openings - julib.com

Read up on the sexiest new openings in the capital this month: Julib London February Restos

Don’t Ask for Dessert at Bocca Di Lupo

I never made it to Bocca di Lupo when it opened in Soho late last year. It's still one of London's most talked about restaurants, most searched for restaurant entries on websites like Time Out, and seems to have been unanimously hailed as the best thing since Italian sliced foccacia by London's food critics.

Needless to say, I have been excited about last night's visit ever since I booked a fortnight ago.

The restaurant was much smaller than I was expecting, with no more than 15 tables in a bright, square dining room topped by a stunning glass panelled circular chandelier and surrounded by peach wall paint. The front section of the restaurant is devoted to a long bar area and downstairs there's a private dining room.

The Good (a mini ramble about watermelon):
The cocktails! I chose a basil and watermelon martini and despite the misleading title (the drink was actually vodka based) this was one of the smoothest tasting wonderfully concocted fruity delights ever to meet my lips. The basil and watermelon were a powerful flavour combination, so perfectly blended that I envisaged a fine figure of a barman poring timelessly over my drink as he measured out the perfect quantities of each ingredient to the exact millimetre, before crushing the watermelon by hand and then sieving the liquid through ice to get it to the optimum temperature.

The Menu:
...is a headache for the indecisive and a treat for any foodie. There are eight sections and every dish is offered as a starter or main. By the side of each option you can read which region of Italy it comes from, or if it's a creation of Bocca di Lupo's chef Jacob Kennedy it is awarded a 'BDL'.

After an hour of discussing our dishes and bugging the waitresses for translations of cotechino (a type of sausage cured on site), orecchiette (pig's ear shaped pasta) and guinciale (bacon made from pig's cheek), we were ready to go in for the kill.

I started with a BDL invention – shaved radish, celeriac and pecorino salad with pomegranates and truffle oil. It was fresh, zingy and bursting with truffle aromas.

Then I settled for a partridge seeing as it's game season and I've been reading and writing about the damn little birds for over a month now. The meat was juicy and rich and tasted great with side portions of wet polenta with Parmesan; borlotti beans with tomato and basil; caponata (summer vegetables in agrodolce with anchovies); and Romanesco broccoli served with parsley and Parmesan. Ahem, not all just for me of course.

Bocca di Lupo is special. The food has that homely, rustic, good-for-the-soul quality to it as well as the notion that time, love, thought and skill has been invested into each dish.

The Bad:
We didn’t order our food until an hour into our 2 hour and 15 minute slot and so sadly when the waitress put the dessert menus on our table she followed by saying we had come to the end of our time slot and didn't actually have time to order.

So, humph, we left without dessert and moved on to Soho's best-kept drinking secret 23 Romilly Street.

Oh well, next time I'll have to book for dolci and drinks only and finish off what I started.

Friday Night in Soho - Yalla Yalla and Jrink

When I close the office door behind me on a Friday evening and burst out on to the streets of central London, the feeling of relief of not having to return to work for a whole 72 hours is always a liberating one.

London is great in late September. The sun is still shining, the air is still warm and the evenings are still light.

I stopped off at Office in Covent Garden and bought a lovely pair of black boots (oops, naughty) before meeting some friends for drinks.

When I asked around the office for a good cocktail bar in Soho someone said try Jrink. It’s at the top of Frith Street near Arbutus. Just £4 for cocktails at happy hour between 5pm and 8pm and it wasn't ridiculously busy like most bars on a Friday night. We knocked back some rasberry Mojiots in quick succession.

The night's mission was all about visiting the new Beirut street cafe Yalla Yalla. Since receiving a glowing write up in the Metro and and similar praise from Charmaine Mok in Time Out, it's been hard to get a table.

Down an alley of sex shops, Yalla Yalla makes for a wholesome contrast. We didn’t realise it was quite so cosy.

There's just a handful of seating, dotted around, in front of a counter laden with baklava, pickled chilli and Lebanese pastries.

If you're after a boozy Friday night, this probably isn’t the place for you, but for a homely lunch or afternoon catch up with a friend or two it's perfect.

Yalla Yalla is snug and inviting and serves up simple but tasty Middle Eastern treats. We had babah ghannouj, hummus and fattoush salad followed by a mixed meat grill and moussaka with rice, and flat bread that lived up to its name wonderfully, eg. very flat!