Epicurus — Restaurant in London

Epicurus is wonderful, and a remarkable dining experience, to simply call it a restaurant would genuinely be an injustice.

Neatly tucked away in the stables market at the top of Camden Town, this wonderful gem fervently delivers a delightful narrative on classic American diner dishes, playfully brought to life with Israeli and Middle Eastern twists. This is a stellar example of how to do fusion without it becoming confusion.

My advice here (as I did) is to go with friends… lots of friends. That way you can order and sample more of the menu.

My hat is all the way off to the creators of these dishes, there is creativity in abundance, qualities that stand out, yet have depth and separation of flavour, everything somehow managed to be both a standout hero and team player of the other offerings on the table, there’s a communication of taste happening that you have to try to understand. To attempt to put it simply; you’re being spoken to through food.

If you’re limiting it to a select few dishes… You MUST try the shawarma pancakes, as well as a burger & fries (obviously) and the pistachio/rose/meringue dessert. It’s special.

The atmosphere was great, the music was decent, the service was snappy and yet relaxed, and the food was both out of this world and seemingly able to make it feel relatable. What an absolute success. Bravo. I’ll be...

Service was appalling. We were forgotten about and also witnessed a man who was sitting on his own being asked to move to another area to make way for another group who wanted to be out of the sun... Basically ,being penalised for being alone. Who really does that to a customer who has already purchased their food and drink?. With all that and the fact I waited more than half an hour for my orange juice and witnessing people who came after me be served I decided to not pay the service charge. The wait staff made this a more uncomfortable situation by going to speak to her colleagues twice about it then returning and adding it on to the card machine in the hopes I somehow wouldn't notice her overcharging me. I then told her I wasn't going to pay for it, and once again she made another trip back inside to speak to her manager and only then was it resolved as the manager realised I was not going to pay and they had gone back and forth for too long to resolve this tiny issue.

It was just unprofessional of the wait staff and silly that I should have to repeat myself. If you want customers to pay your service charge then do a good service, if you can't do that don't...

Well, this restaurant was just okay. Despite how whacky a lot of the dishes sound, I found that they ended up a tiny bit underwhelming. Perhaps this was because I only got to try a small part of the menu, but I can say with certainty that nothing I had was outstanding. The food was all pleasant and fine, but it just wasn’t great. The main I ordered, the chicken pancakes, had a base of very delicious pancakes, with lovely poached quince and generous maple syrup, felt as if it just should’ve been a dessert- the chicken pieces were mild in flavour and few and far between, leaving the dish feeling like a dessert with chicken… The hot dog was nice enough, but wasn’t particularly complex in flavour and didn’t quite justify the price tag. Also, service was extremely slow despite the restaurant being fairly empty, and the dishes came at very different times. The music was also extremely loud and apparently couldn’t be turned down.

Overall though, this review makes it sound very bad, when it really wasn’t- hence the three stars. The food was perfectly acceptable and the staff were very friendly and helpful. It just wasn’t nice enough to make me...