Erstwhile Goldman Sachs banker, Soren Jessen is nowadays a restaurateur with a track record. He is the man behind one of the City’s top gaffs – One Lombard Street – which successfully combines a fine dining room with a popular bar/brasserie. His name is also a bit of a magnet for hipsters. (This reputation has survived his recent reformatting of Mayfair’s Noble Rot as a more mass-market brasserie, called Kilo, and even the botched launch of Graze – but, then, who ever goes to Maida Vale?)
We arrived at his latest, discreetly-located opening with clear expectations: this was to be a good-looking bar/brasserie for the jeunesse dorée of Brompton Cross. We had it half-right. It is certainly an attractive place: the former Mao Tai premises have been given a welcoming makeover, inspired by the Belle Epoque. Absent, however, was the expected bar: it turns out that this is a ‘proper’ grown-up restaurant, complete with agreeable, professional staff and a wine list of note (something of a Jessen hallmark).
The ambitions of the cooking are set at the ‘posh comfort’ level. A set lunch, for example, consisted of good bread, solid rillettes, a tasty but small rib eye steak (with unusually good thick-cut chips), as well as a fruit ‘n’ fromage frais desert that was rather lacking in inspiration. A la carte, a generous rack of lamb was particularly enjoyable. Ice creams were prettily presented on a flower and ice platter.
Posh comfort, in fact, seem to be the general watchwords here – the place doesn’t seem to want to push back the frontiers of gastronomy, but it does seem to be aiming to be an ever-agreeable stand-by. Nothing wrong with that – nearby Daphne’s, with the occasional flashy interlude, has succeeded on the back of such a formula for decades.
