Tag Archives: london restaurant review

Porte Noire Review

Posted on by under Europe, restaurant reviews, Restaurants

There’s dog on the menu and a lot more besides at this cool wine bar slash restaurant beside the canal in Coal Drops Yards.

Okay I admit the dog bit is pure click bait. There is indeed a dog at Porte Noire but he’s very much alive and wagging. After a fraught, irritating, windswept search for the restaurant located in the base of one of the old gasometers, now fancy apartments, his happy face behind the glass doors waiting to welcome us cheered us up no end.

His name is Cooper and he belongs to the co owner  David Faber, the founder of Connaught Wine Cellars and his presence rather sums up the wine bar’s character – warm, welcoming and cheerful. The other co-owner is Idris Elba, by the way, also a bit shaggy and loveable and curator of his very own champagne brand, Porte Noire, after he and David visited the Sanger Viticultural School in Champagne in 2018. His Porte Noire champagne and cognac are on the drinks menu, of course.

David has taken his own vast wine knowledge and placed it in a restaurant setting and the result is a place that is a wine lover’s ideal spot, but  the food makes it not just a banlieue for the bibulous.

The curve of the old gasometer makes the room pleasingly unusual, while the metal of its construction blocks out mobile signals. This was not deliberate, but it does have the effect of making people put away their phones and concentrate on wine, food and friends. Given the amount of tech types in the area this may be the only oasis they have away from their screens. I don’t think there is any guest wi-fi available, at least none showed up on my ‘phone.

Outside is seated and canal facing and I can well imagine how nice it must be come the summer. Incidentally if you follow Google Maps from Kings Cross you will arrive from this direction and you won’t get as lost, as we did. Once at the door you pass by an impressive wine wall at the entrance, where you can also catch a glimpse of cabinets of cured meats

The menu is short, compared to the wine list, which is long. I believe there are over 800 wines in the cellars. I do like wine, but I make no pretense of knowing a lot so we gaze at the wine list rather blankly, while eating from an excellent charcuterie board. There are cornichons, I do love the crisp vinegary tang of cornichons, but  I would have also liked some sliced baguette and a big cold lump of butter as well.


Wine help is at hand from the sommelier, who doesn’t make us feel ignorant, but is friendly and keen to find us wines we’ll enjoy. Prices are reasonable I suppose for London, but one can still wince a bit at £12.50 for a small glass. Still you can pay close to that for rubbish wine in many places, and these wines are very good, Plus what does a pint of cooking lager in a London pub cost these days? Almost £7.00.

With the charcuterie devoured we turned our attention to Truffle and mushroom arancini n and truffle mayo, and Devonshire hand dived scallops , Bresaola crisps which we drink with Chateau Paillas, Cahors. This  pairs well with both the shellfish and the arancini. The scallops are butter soft and creamy, with a gently spicy sauce buoying them up, the bresaola a salty texture contrast.

Arancini are crispy fresh and the bosky flavour of the mushrooms is set off by the rich truffle in an unctuous mayo. When no one is looking I use my finger to scoop up the last of it.


We move to a glass each of Lyseras Blanc 2023, a soft yet zesty white which is parfait with my stuffed squid. Not the most elegant of dishes, it looks like a Zeppelin has landed on my plate, it’s a powerfully flavoured dish thanks to a rich stuffing of chorizo and a bed of sun-dried tomato tahini.

The squid is a little bit tough, nothing to worry about, but it could have been softer. It’s a good bistro-style dish overall and I like the crispy cavolo nero on top. Cavolo nero is a type of kale and baking the oiled leaves makes it very palatable. Boiled or steamed, it usually comes out as more of a penance than a pleasure.

M is on, Shropshire duck breast, chestnut puree and a pinot noir jus. He really loves that puree, mentioning how nice it is several times. The jus is jus(t) great too, he reckons and the duck is perfectly cooked, a hint of pink and no more. He also gets those cavolo crisps and likes them as much as I do.

Unsure what to have on the side, we order the ‘famous’ chickpea chips to share. Like panisses, the south of France street snack, these are based around Gram (chickpea) flour. A thick batter that once set is deep-fried. Delicious and addictive, especially when we dob them into the thick luscious mayo served generously with them.

We end with Burnt Matcha Cheesecake  on a raspberry puree, and a chocolate cremeux with Calabrian olive oil and Maldon sea salt. The latter was a bit too heavy for me, although chocolate fanatics would love it. The olive oil worked surprisingly well, but personally I would hold back a bit on the salt. The cheese cake was gone in seconds, so that was clearly well liked.

Cooper came round on his patrol, seeking more head rubs and praise, which we were more than happy to give him. Praise to David and Idris as well, they’ve created a lovely little place at Porte Noire that has a lot of taste and a lot of style.

A bit hard to find (again, use Google Maps and not Apple), it’s hard to beat for a relaxed glass or two and some highly competent food.

Valentines’ Day sees a candlelight dinner at Porte Noire with live music

Wine is available to buy both in the ‘shop’ and online and there is a set lunch every weekday.

Gasholder 10 , Unit A 1 Lewis Cubitt Square

Barshu Soho, London. Review

Posted on by under Europe, food, restaurant reviews, Restaurants

Still hot, numbing and exploding with flavour. Barshu has not thrown the baby out with the bathwater with this new makeover.

One pm in Soho, Friday, on the corner of Frith Street. ‘Where is everybody?’ says H peeking out through the slats at Barshu and out into the road.

Where indeed?  Back in the day, pre-Covid, on a Friday lunchtime there would have been people everywhere in Soho – standing outside the pubs, packed into the restaurants or just moving purposefully about.

‘It’s not the same,’ she sighs, tweezering up a crispy piece of salt & pepper squid and popping it ruminatively into her mouth. ‘Nothing is the same’.

It’s true, even Barshu, where I’ve been eating on and off for over ten years, has had a makeover. It still feels the same though and the staff behind those fatuous paper masks still have the same cheerfulness of old. It’s just brighter and better now

And the food is still as good as ever, but now with extra dishes, and they’re still serving the kind of authentic Sichuan meat dishes that scare most non-Chinese half to death, including me.


Dishes such as  ‘Assorted meats in fiery sauce (duck blood, honeycomb beef tripe, beef tripe, pig’s intestine, luncheon pork, etc)” for example. I wish I had the bottle to try it.

The menu is new,big and glossy, clearly fresh from the printers, and full of high-quality photographs. It goes on for pages and pages and you can easily find yourself going back and forth forever. Just what to have?

Well a mix of old and new suited us for starters, that classic salt and pepper squid for example. Colourful, crispy and fresh,  all the dish lacked, for me, was more salt. Perhaps I was wrong about that, because I did end up drinking almost a gallon of Barshu’s excellent jasmine tea over the course of lunch.

Classic too was the sweetcorn soup, perhaps the first Chinese dish I ever ate when Chinese restaurants were still a novelty in the South London suburb where I grew up.

Back then I loved the strange glutinous texture of the soup and the egginess. I still do and Barshu, with the benefit of no doubt plenty of chicken bones for the stock, does an excellent version. Comforting and familiar, deeply flavoured

Unfamiliar can be good too though, and Sichuan pea jelly with chopped salted chillies was just that. Translucent green ‘logs slippery with fiery sauce. Handling them was like trying to pick up dropped shower soap with chopsticks, I finally resorted to fingers.

We liked the cool refreshing tones of the pea jelly against the chili, this would make a good vegan main with rice, depending on what’s used to solidify the jelly of course.

Sea bass has long been a Barshu staple, I had to have it but this time instead of the usual oven-roasted we had it in ‘soup’, Barshu calls it ‘boiled’ which rather undersells it.

We had Boiled Sea Bass fillet with chilis and Sichuan peppercorn, which was superb.

In the broth, semi submerged, was lots and lots of pure white seabass fillet lurking under environmental-disaster-sized slicks of fragrant oil. Slippery mushrooms and sweetly sour tomatoes evaded the spoon like playful dolphins, and everywhere bobbed the Sichuan peppercorn that makes this food so different from the largely Cantonese cooking of nearby Chinatown.

We ladled it over plain steamed Jasmine rice, because that broth was born to be absorbed and raved over our fish even as the peppercorn did its business on our lips. Why do we love the numbness and the citric shock of Sichuan? What alchemy makes it so addictive?


We didn’t need the Ma Po tofu, here given its less attractive name of ‘Pock-marked old woman’s beancurd’, but it was loaded with peppercorns and chili and was hard to resist, so we didn’t.

Barshu is not cheap, although you can always find plenty of well-priced dishes that deliver plenty of taste. Splashing out one of the sea bass dishes, which are easily shared is well worth it though. Go as a crowd and you can really dive into the menu.

Hopefully Soho will return to life and when it does Barshu will once again be one of its premier places to eat.

barshurestaurant.co.uk

28 Frith St, London W1D 5LF