St. John

Posted on 2010/07/10 15:57:38 (July 2010).

[Thursday 8th July 2010]
After the previous two fairly low key evenings of entertaining our visitors at work, tonight I was determined to really pull out the stops, and do my best to impress them with just what a great city London is.

So we started out the evening at the Whisky Society (one of our visitors was a keen whisky enthusiast), and then followed that with the obligatory visit to Ye Old Mitre.

The main event of the evening was then a late dinner at St. John, which I think went down really well with our visitors. Here's my review:

These people really know what they're doing - from their deceptively simple menu to the extremely on-the-ball staff, to an atmosphere which is quite unique - filled with fashionable young creative types. It's the sort of restaurant I can imagine would make other restaurant owners jealous.

As a vegetarian I had never really thought there would be much in it for me, with their "nose to tail" philosophy and everything. However I had heard from a woman I got talking to on a plane recently that apparently they always have something vegetarian on the menu, and it is always consistently good.

The menu changes daily, having looked at the menu on a few different days in the run-up to our visit I'd seen that the vegetarian option changed wildly from one day to the next. On the actual day we went, it was a characteristically basic sounding "girolles on toast". It may come across as more of a starter or a light lunch sort of a meal, but this was actually an extremely satisfying main course - some excellent bread, some fantastic wild mushrooms, and a simple but very flavoursome (and perfectly seasoned) sauce of butter and herbs.

I just loved this refreshingly minimalist and unfussy approach to cooking - all of the main course seemed to be just one or two things, using the best ingredients, perfectly cooked, on a simple white plate. This wasn't nouvelle cuisine or anything - the portions were all a reasonable size - it was just really good food paired down to the absolute bare essentials.

I'm really looking forward to going back, and introducing more people to this exciting place.

Sounds good, we should go!

Posted by Simon at 2010/07/13 16:13:50.

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