Rating: 9/10
Telephone 020-7242 8238
Address Bleeding Heart Yard (off Greville Street), London EC1
Open Mon-Fri, lunch, noon-2.30pm; dinner, 6-10.30pm
Price Around £60 a head, including drinks
Wheelchair access and disabled WC
This brief hiatus between the French Open that ends tomorrow and Wimbledon offers a useful chance to reflect on how incredibly hard it is for tennis players to win on both clay and grass. Clearly, if Roger Federer takes the French, this will seem arrant cobblers. But if, as seems far more likely at time of writing, the rampaging Spanish bull Rafael Nadal defends his title and so prevents the Swiss completing his set of Grand Slam titles, the difficulty of succeeding on such diametrically different surfaces will have been underlined.
What has this aimless musing on tennis, you may wonder, to do with Bleeding Heart, a restaurant (also grill, brasserie and tavern) hidden away in the heart of London's diamond district? Only that it seems to me the Andre Agassi of restaurants (Agassi is the only current player to have won both tournaments), being equally adept at catering to the romance of Paris and the commercial hard-headedness of London.
A glance at the latest Harden's confirms this long-winded analogy, the diners who contribute to that splendid guide making Bleeding Heart both the number one-ranked London restaurant for business and the third most romantic. This is a pretty remarkable display of versatility, but then this is a pretty remarkable restaurant, as well as a remarkably pretty one. Strung out over four underground, parquet-floored chambers, perfectly lit for both canoodling and discreet negotiation, variously bedecked with bookcases, wine cellars, brickwork walls and florid prints of French grapes (the wine list is intimidatingly grand), and with emblematic, gently glowing red hearts scattered everywhere, it's an attractive and atmospheric venue.
Though owned by a New Zealander, its staff are all French and, albeit a bit sombre, far less aloof than many of their brethren - the night we had my dad's 70th birthday dinner here, they could not have been sweeter; another day, when I had lunch here with a colleague, a manager thoughtfully came over to whisper about planes going into buildings in New York.
And the food ... well, of its type (Anglo-French with the odd oriental and Pacific rim eclectic touch), it is magnificent. In perhaps a dozen visits I can't recall a disappointing dish, and my friend was a convert the moment he tasted his starter of Shetland Island salmon with a seaweed tartare and sweet mustard dressing: "It's not at all what I expected, but it's lovely - a really strong flavour without overpowering." My warm quail was great, too. Quail isn't easy to cook without drying it out, but this large portion was gratifyingly succulent, and came on a bed of stir-fried vegetables and in a subtle and enhancing vinaigrette.
We were just getting stuck into the old debate about whether or not the prime minister is technically mad when the main courses came to distract us. My roast rack of lamb with a gloriously rich ragout of lamb shoulder relied on the perplexingly elusive formula of buying great ingredients and cooking them for the right length of time. So did my friend's venison, which gently oozed juices the colour, one imagines, of the lovelorn Elizabethan courtesan's heart that apparently bled interminably on the courtyard outside to give the street its name. This most princely of meats had that alluring, char-grilled flavour, and came with a mound of roast parsnips and an oddly delicious "spiced chocolate sauce".
My friend, on a diet, was especially impressed with his off-menu pudding. "That's very rare," he said when a request for a fruit salad was answered not with the usual pursed lips but with a clipped "Mais bien sûr". The result was a delectable, kiwi fruit-dominated riot of vitamins, minerals and trace amounts of pesticides. Being twice the size of Dawn French myself, I went for the chocolate pudding, which sort of speaks for itself (how could such a thing be anything but divine?).
What a fantastic restaurant this is, gliding along year after year at the same high standard, never yielding to the faddishness that plagues the industry, content to do the simple things brilliantly. For anyone poised to do a major deal with someone they intend to drag into the loos for an inter-course quickie (we target these reviews, you will notice, with ever more precision), I doubt there's a better venue in Europe.
