Les 2 Garçons — Restaurant in London

Inconsistent cooking of very traditional French food.

My experience was 7/10, but it wouldn't surprise me at all if on another day one might have an 8+ meal here.

Had dinner here with one other person. One starter each, one main each, one shared dessert, tap water only. Bill was just over £90 including service.

Ordered tomato and burrata from the specials and the endive, beetroot, caramelised walnut, and blue cheese salad from the main menu as starters. Tomato dish was very pleasant, nice tomatoes and a piece of burrata with a few basil leaves. For me, it's hard to justify paying something like £12 for that. At that price I'd expect another element (an olive crostini, for example). A very nice dish at 2/3 that price, but too expensive for what it was. 6/10

Endive and beetroot salad was bordering on unpleasant. In my head, the caramelised walnuts would have been plentiful and generously candied to balance the bitterness of the endive. Instead, I got a miserly dusting of walnuts, just about candied, that gave nowhere near enough sweetness to balance things. Worse still, the dressing tasted overwhelmingly of truffle oil, which paired well with the blue cheese, but meant the whole dish consisted exclusively of aggressive undertones. Get rid of the truffle oil and add in some pieces of roasted pear and you'd have a much better dish. 4/10

Mains were bourguignon with mashed potato and roasted sea bass with fennel. Bourguignon was cooked very nicely, incredibly succulent meat, but every element on the dish was lukewarm as though it had sat on the pass for an extended time before service. Onions were nice, but could have been seared harder; mushrooms were desperate for some colour and were quite bland without it. Sauce had very nice flavour, but didn't have the texture and shine that you'd expect from a really good sauce made with a heavily reduced stock and a miroire. Mashed potato was excellent, very smooth and quite obviously groaning with butter. Really lifted the dish. Little garlic parsley croute was a nice way of introducing some texture and a punch of flavour variety, but was sadly also a bit cold. Had everything been served at the correct temperature, this would have been an 8, but as it was, 7/10.

Sea bass was the standout. Cooked on the bone, very moist, with deeply caramelised fennel and a smattering of herbs. No issues with this dish whatsoever. 9/10.

Dessert was a bay leaf creme cassonade, which is a fancy way of saying creme brulee. Cassonade is a brown sugar, but they used coconut sugar for no obvious reason. I have admiration for them trying a dessert with an unusual flavour, but it just doesn't add anything. As it was, it was a mediocre creme brulee with an underwhelmingly crunchy top. 7/10

There is undeniably good cooking to be found here, but there was also a lot of indifferent cooking. The dishes are quite straightforward with well known flavour combinations. That's not a criticism, that's just an expected function of this being a French bistro. The problem, however, it that it leaves little room for error, and my experience here was that the food is very much not without error.

Quick notes on everything else. The room is quite dark and very loud and small. Some may like that, others not. It's cosy but hard to hold a conversation. Waiting staff were friendly enough, but a tad hasty. The restaurant is clearly at capacity almost non-stop, and good on...

My wife and I just got home from having dinner in this utterly wonderful restaurant.

From the outside, an attractive small fronted restaurant, lights glowing through the windows under the awning, reminiscent of a typical Parisian bistro. Entering through the door and a set of curtains, you're greeted by a full, small room (40 - 50 covers, perhaps) and very friendly staff who welcome you to your table. We had a two-seater tucked away where we could eye the whole dining area.

Nobody here is looking for you to see them, no influencers or anyone there because it's the place to be, just tables of happy customers deep in conversation, enjoying their night and the delicious food. The food...

The food is sublime. Classic, French food a la campagne. You cannot beat this kind of food for sheer joy of eating.

We had the beetroot entrée and the scallops from the specials board. I'll try not to go into detail because this review would become too long, but in short, beautiful dishes. On the beetroot one of the most majestic vinaigrettes I've ever had, and on the scallops, a delicious orange dressing. We were blown away. Then for main, from the specials, roast lamb with a dauphinoise on the side. Herbs garnished and with wild mushrooms throughout the plate, this was incredible, so tasty and cooked so, so well, to the highest level (we've been to many Michelin restaurants, I would choose this place over all of them). Before diving in, the chef brought the dish over to us in a deep pan, setting alight some of the contents and quickly closing the lid, which gently smoked out our table area with a glorious charred note - some unexpected theatre before we devoured that glorious dish.

For dessert, we weren't going to bother because we were full but after seeing the pear tarte tatin online before arriving for dinner (one of many reasons we decided to try Les 2 Garçons in the first place), we managed to nab the last one. You get the whole thing, the size of a small dinner plate. And this was also glorious, served with crème fraiche to cleanse. A dessert I'll remember for a long time to come.

Book it, eat it, come back here and tell me I'm right.

(I didn't get many pics because we were too involved in the joyous eating. Just one of the lamb, to whet...

Les 2 Garcons has been much lauded by the critics and talked about by friends, so we set off by tube and bus to leafy Crouch End (with wonderful views of Ally Pally as you come over the crest of Crouch End Hill) with high hopes indeed. And, from the moment we saw the jaunty red awning and Central Casting red and white checked tableclothed bistro table outside, we just knew we were in for a treat. And, disappoint… it did NOT. The wonderfully upbeat welcome from co-owners JC (front of house) and Rob (chef) was joyful and so we decided to splash out, French style, starting with a delicious cassis kir royale. A perfectly balanced endive, blue cheese, beet and candied walnut salad for me, perfectly cooked asparagus with the lightest, most delicious hollandaise for him were our best choices for starters (although we did manage also to squeeze in a supremely delicious onion tarte with goat’s cheese scattered on top). We then had steak frites, but this wasn’t any old steak frites. The steak was brilliantly caramelised on the outside – crusty if you will – and perfectly rare on the inside. Oh, what a joy. A shared rhum baba rounded off the evening – which was light and fluffy and soused in rum, as all good babas should be – with a theatrical flame to “pipe it in” to the table. A reasonably priced and eminently quaffable bottle of Languedoc accompanied us through dinner and we shared a glass of house red at the end, just to ensure that it was as good as we thought it would be – I can confirm, it was. And we were accompanied throughout by the dulcet tones of Jacques Dutronc and Serge Gainsbourg – belting out chanson after chanson – a pure delight it was too. There was a very jolly vibe in Les 2 Garcons and we will definitely be making regular pilgrimages to this utterly brilliant neighbourhood restaurant again (and...