The Venue
Le Bouchon Breton is located on the upper level of Spitalfields Market with plenty of terrace seating front and back. Pots of cyclamen add a splash of colour but it’s the large light panels (that change colour through a rainbow spectrum) that really lifts the area surrounding the restaurant and if you’re dining at the back of the restaurant there’s the added benefit of an unplanned light show. Inside, it’s a comforting mix of industrial (exposed iron girders and large floor to ceiling windows), French brasserie (burgundy leather banquette seating juxtaposed against tables laid with crisp white tablecloths) and Art Deco (intricately wrought lamps stand at each end of the custom built pewter bar and even the restaurant’s logo that’s etched onto the windows is lavish).
The Atmosphere
Friendly French waiters (and no, that’s not an oxymoron) set the tone and there’s plenty of beaming smiles and laughter that drifts over from each of the well spaced apart tables. They could easily have packed in more tables but it’s to the restaurant’s credit that they’ve opted for diner privacy over elbow-to-elbow dining as you’ll often find nowadays at even the most high end restaurants.
The bar area is popular for pre and post dinner drinks and many diners join bigger groups of friends at the bar after their meal adding an upbeat informality to the restaurant which works well although the Euro pop that’s played at night jars a little. Surely the French First Lady, Carla Bruni’s latest album would work much better? That said, it’s a small quibble and doesn’t impact that much on the atmosphere at night and if you’re after a croissant and a coffee to start your day whilst browsing the papers at the weekend, it’s cosy and calm with the familiarity of a neighbourhood restaurant.
The Food
Le Bouchon Breton offers superb seafood and the selection includes French and British oysters (starting at £1.80 and £1.60 per oyster respectively) and large plates of seafood sized for two to share start at £35 for a selection of eight oysters, tiger prawns, a crab, mussels, whelks, winkles and two varieties of clams, with the most expensive platter including a whole lobster priced at £58.
Typical French fare is on offer and both Michel Roux Jr and Head Chef Olivier Ripert have sought inspiration from grand Parisian brasseries such as La Coupole and Le Train Bleu whose influence is evident throughout the menu. For starters, if you’re not opting for seafood the soups are a good option. Fish soup (£8.50) and onion soup (£5.95) are always a good test of a French restaurant and Le Bouchon Breton triumphs at both. Whilst the fish soup isn’t served in a giant pot with a ladle as it is in the South of France the bowl is nevertheless generously sized and served with plenty of Gruyere cheese, croutons and dollops of garlicky rouille. Similarly, the onion soup is a world away from the average offerings you often find at French restaurants in the capital with cider enhancing the sweet flavour of the onions once you break through the refreshingly crispy grilled topping of croutons and cheese.
A big portion of moules et frites is really reasonably priced at just £13.95 and is ideal for a quick lunch or dinner. However, the other main courses really showcase the chef’s talents. The corn fed chicken breast (£14.95) is served with apple and wilted gem lettuce plus plenty of sweet Breton cider sauce and is so plump and tender that you could get away with eating it with a spoon rather than using a knife. Similarly, the roasted rack of lamb swimming in rosemary jus is so full of flavour that you’ll find yourself lingering over every mouthful and the accompanying ragout of flageolet beans and richly ripe tomatoes is the ultimate comfort food during colder months.
Don’t get too carried away with the other courses as the dessert selection is well worth leaving room for. Aside from the cheese trolley featuring over forty regional French cheeses where you can choose a selection of three (£6), five (£8.95) or seven (£12) different cheeses, the dessert options are just as decadent so it’s definitely worth ordering a selection to share. A giant glass of chocolate mousse (£6.50) decorated with langue de chat finds the perfect balance between dense chocolate and finely whipped cream and is so light that you’ll be halfway through the glass before you’ve paused for breath. The tarte tatin served with caramel sauce and a scoop of vanilla ice cream (£7.95) is generously sized and incredibly authentic however, it can’t compare with the stand out dessert – the clafouti (£7.50) that’s dotted with brandy soaked prunes is a perfect example of the typical Limousin dish and its light custard cake consistency makes it easy to eat even at the end of a filling meal. In fact, the clafouti is so good that even if you don’t want a full meal it’s worth dropping by for a slice whenever you happen to be passing.
The Drink
The sommelier at Le Bouchon Breton was also previously at Le Gavroche and there are over 700 bins including an impressive Breton wine list. The restaurant’s dedication to fine drinking is not only evident in the long pewter bar, there are also plenty of bottles of wine displayed on the walls in the bar area. As you’d expect the Champagne offering is equally showstopping with vintage and non-vintage bottles depending on your budget. Classic cocktails and pints of beer and cider are also extremely popular.
The Last Word
Offering fine dining in one of the capital’s most fashionable areas, Le Bouchon Breton is an impressive restaurant set within Spitalfields Market whose easy brasserie approach makes it just as popular for breakfast as it is for late night dining and sipping Champagne.
Still, despite its mix of high-class dining and rowdy drinking, Le B-B has a fair deal to recommend it. The classic French brasserie food is good, the excellent wine list is so hugely long you half wonder if it’s fibbing, and the room is handsome, with exposed girders, huge windows and comfy studded leather banquettes.
Finding a proper, non-chain restaurant in the now-soulless Spitalfields Market is also a great relief. Since this once-handsome Victorian building was gutted and replaced by a hideously bland plate-glass mini-mall, most of the restaurants look like they’ve escaped from an airport concourse, so Le Bouchon’s relative individuality is most welcome.
Back to the menu: it’s a well-assembled all-day mix of steaks, seafood and other hearty French grub, with a good selection of fish in particular. Our seafood platter offered a proper range of shellfish (cockles and whelks, plus the usual suspects), of which the crab especially was to die for. The pile of interesting smoked meats and sausage with my main course of sauerkraut was also good, though the cabbage itself had lost a little too much of its natural sharp brininess.
Gilthead bream with a rich saffron-infused fish sauce came with some fantastic fennel that almost compensated for the fish fillet’s unfeasible tininess. The classic French desserts are expensive but good – my gorgeous profiteroles were light, crisp little meringue-like sandwiches.
But the service! Four days after opening, a total farce. Several waiters could speak only basic English and struggled just taking our order. There’s also some weird dysfunctional hierarchy going on. Two waiters felt unauthorised to bring wine, so just ran off never to return when I asked for a glass.
Likewise, our starters were bussed to a service point virtually next to us and just left there for two minutes, until our designated waiter arrived to rescue them. Opening week jitters also meant we waited an hour between ordering and receiving our main courses. They threw in a free glass of wine to mollify, but as I didn’t really want one, it didn’t work.
No doubt things will improve but, on our visit, Le Bouchon Breton felt like the dining room of the Titanic, just before the ship went under.
The menu is a deeply traditional brasserie menu, serving the kind of French dishes that are evocative of Edith Piaf (playing in the background) and waiters in black jackets and crisp shirts (ditto). It’s so traditional that it’s almost a parody, with a seafood selection, snacks and everything else all together on a two-sided carte of dishes that wouldn’t look out of place in a French costume drama.
Our dishes were adequate, but not a single dish from the ten we tried really impressed. Fish soup wasn’t especially Breton – despite the restaurant’s name, there were few Breton influences on this menu – but was rich, full-flavoured and served with the right garnishes. Frogs’ legs were the first real disappointment, deep-fried and blander than chicken. The choucroute dish, originally from Alsace, contained saveloy-style sausages among the more appealling cuts of meat; daube of beef was nicely braised, but the red wine stock was nothing extraordinary. But the prune clafoutis was most disappointing: it’s a simple dish that costs pennies to make, but we paid £7.50 for a sweaty, chilled sliver.
Bouchon Breton does some things right, such as the attentive, enthusiastic service, and it really knows its wine. However, the prefab feel of the place is disguised with French clichés (pewter bar, black-and-white tiled floor, banquettes) that are merely a substitute for real atmosphere, while the dishes and especially the wines are prohibitively priced – unless you’re one of the minority still able to dine out on expenses.
Of the first, York & Albany, we expected great things. Angela Hartnett was in the kitchen and, although no one claimed this was going to be another Murano, where we had a good experience recently, she can usually be relied upon to send out a solid meal.
Of the other, Bouchon Breton, we expected little even though the menu had been constructed in consultation with Michel Roux Jr. It was, after all, situated amongst the dross of Spitalfields' chain restaurant dining quarter and is the sister restaurant to Bouchon Bordelais in Battersea, an area of London where you are more likely to find Lord Lucan than a decent meal. Added to which, we have experienced enough faux brasserie meals in our capital to dampen any expectation that this would be any different.
While I can appreciate the notion of letting restaurants bed in for a while before visiting, neither of these two places offered a soft opening and the hubris of charging full whack from day one means that they should be subjected to the same critical examination as if we were to visit in two weeks or indeed two months time.
It says much about the London’s inconsistent dining scene that we came out of both restaurants shaking our heads, but for very different reasons. York & Albany because, quite frankly it crashed and burned delivering a bewilderingly average meal, Bouchon Breton because, despite everything stacked against it, it proved to be the real deal and one of the better DH experiences since my return to the UK.
It didn’t start well. As we moved to the cavernous dining area, the only diners in the restaurant, the staff decided that we should be treated to the traditional Gallic sounds of Gloria Estephan & The Miami Sound Machine at full blast. The Maitre D’ shook his head and in pure comedy French muttered “They want Saturday Night Fever and it is only Friday” before running off and making them change it for the more appropriate sounds of Serge Gainsbourg talking about shagging.
The menu reads like a dream for any Fracophile and even for me who isn't and thinks that Paris is a dreadful, ossified chocolate box of a city. But, none of that would matter if, as is so often the case, the cooking is lousy. The taste of some excellent butter with simple baguette gave a clue that they might give a damn. So too did the fact that they took the time to present three meaty Belon oysters, which HP chose as a little pre-appetizer, with the same care as they would a dozen.
Our starters were brought in two courses, another nice touch, so we could share more easily and the arrival of a plate of frogs’ legs covered in a crisp, feather light batter told us that, while the chef in the kitchen may not be a celebrity name (formerly of Le Gavroche, I believe) , he certainly knew what he was doing. Accompanying the legs was a small pile of equally dainty sweet onion rings and a terrific tartar sauce.
We were still cleaning the batter crumbs from the plate with licked fingers when they came to take it away and replace it with a platter of Burgundian snails in their shells, which had been stuffed with parsley, garlic and enough butter to leak out into pools on the plate. I had forgotten just how good a dish this is when done well and both HP and I ate in silence as we pulled the snails from their shell and then mopped up the juices with more bread. The sort of dish that makes you realise why you fell in love with food.
As indeed was the main event, which of course, the moment our eyes lit on the words “Cote De Boeuf” was never going to be anything else. 28 day aged and from a range of Angus, Limousin or Charolais cattle, the 1kg steak comes in at a hefty £45 for two but is worth splashing out the cash for. Perfectly prepared, rare as requested, and carved at the table by the Maitre D’ the juices leaked pleasingly over the wooden board on which it was served. What’s more, it smelled and tasted of beef, a feat that York & Albany singularly failed to achieve earlier in the week when their own attempt at steak was napped in a bog standard El Gordo veal reduction so you could taste nothing else. This was seriously good steak and with it came a well made salad, a huge sauce bowl of béarnaise and a barrel load of excellent, crispy frites. Steak frites done properly. It could catch on.
Desserts were always going to be an anti-climax after that and they didn’t let us down. We left a good looking cheese board well alone and went for a perfunctory selection of ice cream for HP and, for me, a Dame Blanche, named after the three act opera, which brought together chocolate sauce, chantilly cream and ice cream to no great ovation.
I suspect that Bouchon Breton is the only restaurant in Spitalfields with a sommelier, also formerly of Le Gavroche, and he earns his corn carrying around a weighty list with bottles priced well into the hundreds to attract city types with any money left. They could do with a few more entry priced bottles, for rubes like us, but a bottle of Buzet at £27 was presented with as much care as if we had raided their stash of Petrus.
That and two glasses of white with our starters brought our bill to a not inconsiderable £130 including service, but unlike a similar amount at York & Albany, I don’t begrudge a penny of it for a food and service that shows what a place can do on opening if it sets its mind to it.
The question at York & Albany is, can it get any better particularly when Angela Hartnett scurries back to Murano in search of her star? The question about Bouchon Breton is can it keep up these standards? I am pretty sure I know the answer to both of those questions.
Oct. 24 (Bloomberg) -- Fancy a leisurely lunch with expensive dishes and fine French wines? No, I thought not.
These days, people are canceling lunches, saying they don't want to be away from their desks for hours at a time because of the markets. I suspect we are all becoming a little more price- sensitive, too, as bonuses shrink and jobs disappear.
Cue Le Bouchon Breton, a new French brasserie, Champagne and shellfish bar in Spitalfields market, handy for ABN Amro Bank NV's London headquarters and as many bankers as it takes to fill a venue that can accommodate 320 drinkers and diners. There's a 2001 Petrus for 2,200 pounds ($3,413) if you are feeling lucky.
The food prices are, shall we say, ambitious. Steak tartare, for example, costs 18 pounds for 200 grams (which I ordered as a starter) and 25 pounds as a 300 gram main. Now, this is no bog- standard steak tartare, admittedly. It's prepared tableside with raw chopped fillet of beef by a manager who previously worked in London at Brasserie St. Jacques.
I know that because he served the same dish there, under the supervision of the three-star Michelin chef Pierre Koffmann. It's an epic steak tartare, with fantastic texture and flavor. But Brasserie St. Jacques, not a cheap venue, charges 9.50 pounds for the dish as a starter and 16 pounds as a main. At Racine, another respected eatery, steak tartare is 8 pounds and 16 pounds.
Le Bouchon Breton is brought to you by a heavyweight team. It's the brainchild of the restaurateur and former broker Ian Stoppani, with Michel Roux Jr. of Le Gavroche as adviser. The chef (Olivier Ripert) and manager-sommelier (Francois Bertrand) are also ex-Le Gavroche, possibly London's finest pedigree.
Gallic Treats
This new brasserie is attractive, though the location isn't ideal, perched above what is now effectively a shopping mall. You can stand outside and still have to ask where it is. Once inside, there's a beautiful tiled floor and comfy banquettes. The long menu -- with its art-deco typeface -- is full of Gallic treats, from snails and steak frites to profiteroles and creme brulee.
There are many good things about Le Bouchon Breton. I had a homemade game terrine with hazelnuts and Madeira jelly (9.95 pounds) that was as meaty and coarse and authentic as you would wish. A main of pan-fried veal kidneys with tarragon sauce served with tagliatelle and mushrooms (16.95 pounds) had all the full-on flavor you'd want. Ditto the ox cheeks. The fries are good and the all-French cheese board is a match for almost anywhere in London.
But I kept stumbling over the prices, including 15 pounds for a pan-fried foie-gras starter, and some dishes were less than stellar. For example, a main of grilled fillet of gurnard, squid in garlic and parsley butter with ratatouille lacked flavor. I'd resist paying this much out of my own pocket for brasserie food.
Pork With Mash
Desserts are modestly priced at 6.50 pounds to 7.50 pounds. I did try the set lunch, at 18 pounds for three courses and it was a bit dull, particularly the main of roast pork with mash. If I were on a budget, I'd try St. John Bread & Wine, over the road.
The French-dominated wine list is a thing of beauty, with modest markups by London standards. The house Champagne, Henriot Brut Souverain, is good value at 34 pounds a bottle, or 10 pounds for a glass. The sommelier turned up a beautifully smooth red from the Rhone -- Saint Joseph ``Les Rocailles'' Domain Finon 2004 --for 35 pounds with smoky black fruit aromas and a lot of oak.
If you can afford to pay more, Meursault ``Vireuils,'' Domaine Guy Roulot 2006 offers value at 86 pounds. Meursault, Domaine Coche Dury 2005 is another for the connoisseurs and costs 125 pounds. There are more than 700 other options.
So there you have it. Drinking at Le Bouchon Breton can be a bargain, while eating there can leave you feeling short-changed. You really need to order carefully. The excellent steak frites (starting at 16.50 pounds) are the way I'd go if I returned, and I'd trust the sommelier to find a red that wouldn't -- how shall I put this? -- break the bank.
Le Bouchon Breton, 8 Horner Square, Spitalfields Market, London, E1 6EW. Tel. +44-800-019-1704 or click on http://www.lebouchon.co.uk/
The Bloomberg Questions
Cost? About 40-50 pounds a head, plus drinks.
Date place? No.
Inside tip? Good place for Champagne.
Special feature? The wine list.
Private room? No.
Will I be back? Yes, if in the area.
Rating? **
(Richard Vines is the chief food critic for Bloomberg News. Opinions expressed are his own.)
To contact the writer on the story: Richard Vines, in London, at rvines@bloomberg.net.
