What the experts recommend
Campania & Jones 23 Ezra Street, London E2 (020-7613 0015)
This “deliciously photogenic” Italian in Hackney, housed in a former dairy, has long been one of my favourite restaurants, says Marina O’Loughlin in The Sunday Times. I love the “hand-knitted quality” of the place, and chef Paolo De Martino’s “proper Italian food with, as the name suggests, a Campanian slant”. Heading there for my first post-lockdown restaurant meal, I was pleased to find it “as lovely as ever” – despite one or two almost comical restrictions, including having to ask staff if you can get up to use the loo. The menu here has always been short – removing the need for “Covidinduced” adaptations – and almost every dish delivered “exactly the thrill” I wanted it to. There was “oozy, lactic mozzarella fried in the lightest batter”; veal ragu coating fat ribbons of homemade pappardelle; spaghetti with “oily and bronzed” courgettes, garlic and provolone cheese – a dish of “vegetarian majesty”. We rounded it all off with “blowsy and bitter-creamy” tiramisu and shots of Fernet-Branca. “Perfect, really.” Total for two (with drinks and without service charge): £111.
Waterside Bistro and Bar Wharf Street, Shipley, Yorkshire (01274-594444)
I’ve learnt, from Twitter, that this quayside restaurant in Shipley has “a lot of customers who love it very much”, says Jay Rayner in The Observer. And having now eaten there, “I can quite see why”. The chef-proprietor Paul Huddleston’s CV includes stints at Le Jules Verne, on the second floor of the Eiffel Tower, and at the Michelin three-star Le Louis XV in Monaco. Although his current surroundings are more modest – his kitchen here is tiny – the food he prepares in it is “underpinned by big-kitchen technique”. A prawn cocktail comes with “nuggets of deep-fried lobster, and the funky kick of brown crabmeat and nutmeg”. A “great value” main, which costs £17, consists of braised pork collar and roasted fillet with “golden, bubbled fragments of battered black pudding that shatter beneath the teeth”. But the numbers the bistro can accommodate, limited “at the best of times”, have been further restricted by social distancing rules. And so although it has many loyal customers, it needs support. “If you can give it, please do.” Starters £5.25-£8.25; mains £17-£28; desserts £7.25.
La Petite Maison 53-54 Brook’s Mews, London W1 (020-7495 4774)
“Right about now, the place I feel like I ought to be having lunch is the south of France,” says Giles Coren in The Times. But it can’t be done this year – unless you’re “not at all freaked out” by the prospect of getting trapped there by a new lockdown. So instead, I go for lunch at La Petite Maison in Mayfair, “one of the best southern French restaurants in the world”. My “restaurant rustiness” shows: given the task of ordering for the table, I choose only from one side of the two-sided menu, failing to grasp that these are just the starters. As a result, my three friends and I eat “a lot of vegetables” before realising our mistake, and moving on to more sustaining dishes: a whole rack of lamb, the meat “dense” and “grainy”; a “tranche of wobbling turbot with young artichokes and chorizo”. It’s a “pretty fair substitute” for dining on the Côte d’Azur. £70 per
head, not counting drinks.