Evening Standard
“This might just be the best-looking pub in the world”, pronounced David Ellis in his review of the latest project from the team behind the Pelican in Notting Hill and the Bull in Charlbury.
Noting that pubs serving high-quality food are “decidedly the thing at the minute”, David stressed that The Hero was well behind the most prominent current example, the Devonshire off Piccadilly Circus, in the food stakes.
“But Christ, is the Hero a looker. It’s a Dezeen wet dream of stripped wood and plaster walls, of barley leg stools and candle-topped tables…. The main dining room, a floor up and due to open at the end of June with an entirely new menu, is a proper knockout — Sessions Arts Club but with, here’s hoping, better grub.”
David Ellis - 2024-06-02The Times
Giles Coren was mightily impressed by the latest incarnation of this grand tavern, whose “ambition … smelt to me of the Devonshire in Soho – the standout pub, restaurant and general catering success of last year”.
The interior, he said, was “magnificent. Everything pared down to the bare wood, dark, unvarnished, the metalwork and beer taps in that nutty, tarnished brass that evokes a steampunk tavern style of old London town in the 1830s that never truly existed until now. Or at least until 1994.”
The food was pretty good, too: lamb ribs and cheese toasties from the ‘snacks’, plus a menu of very “pubby” dishes such as sausage and mash; ham, egg and chips; shepherd’s pie; and half a roast chicken with chips and salad for two, followed by treacle pudding and “an almost vengefully sharp lemon tart”.
Giles ate in the bar because the restaurant with open kitchen upstairs (and the cocktail bar on the second floor) were not yet in operation. “But I think you should book anyway, if it’s open by the time you read this. Because from what I’ve seen it’s going to be good. Very good.”
Giles Coren - 2024-06-16The Observer
Jay Rayner braved an “awfully polite mosh pit” made up of the “raucous west London herd” – very much not his kind of people – to sample the delights of a “shabby-chic” pub now under new management (and already well received in the Times and Evening Standard) that were rather more to his taste.
Eating in the ground-floor bar (the upstairs dining is not yet open), Jay found a “menu of very nice, simple things”, including fishcakes, sausage and mash, and ham, egg and chips, all priced in the mid-teens and constituting “an extremely decent take on the modern pub repertoire”.
The kitchen’s secret weapon is its pastry, which twice sent Jay into raptures. First with a “humble-sounding cheese and onion pie… one of those bottom-of-the-bill dishes which comes out on to the stage and steals the show”, with “the shortest of shortcrusts; a gorgeous miracle of butter and flour, which holds together more out of good manners than anything to do with kitchen chemistry”. Then came “an astonishingly good lemon tart: exquisitely thin, cracker-crisp pastry holds a zippy lemon crème of ineffable lightness and wobble.”
You know what to order.
Jay Rayner - 2024-06-30The Daily Telegraph
Settling down to write his own rave review of this universally raved-about revamped pub, William Sitwell sensed another “Bouchon Racine moment” – a replay of the unanimous praised piled on Henry Harris’s Farringdon establishment a couple of years ago that raised suspicions of “some sort of conspiracy of benevolence”.
“But we pile in for good reason. For the style and the confidence, the magnificence and the deliciousness,” William said, reminding us that nobody has yet tested The Hero is all its potential glory because the upstairs “posh” dining room is still out of action.
But the quail, cheese toastie, lamb ribs and roast chicken served in the downstair bar were all just perfect: “honestly, the cooking here is sublime.”
William Sitwell - 2024-07-21
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