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Yauatcha Comes to The City

Saturday, November 14th , 2015

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Yauatcha City is spread over a vast site in the Broadgate Circus development. I can never quite figure out how the Hakkasan Group manage to get such consistency from their kitchens given the vast scale of Hakkasan and Yauatcha. This latest site is no exception, the winning formula of all-day dim sum faithfully recreated from the Soho original. The steamed buns are hard to fault, the baked venison puff as lovely as at its older sister restaurant, the char sui as light and fluffy as you could wish for. Even the desserts are a hit, with a chocolate delice genuinely top notch.

Hoppers is the latest restaurant from the Trishna stable, this time concentrating on the cuisine of Sri Lanka. Hoppers is a no-reservation, casual format place, but the food shows good attention to detail, with a pork curry with hopper (appam) the star dish at the meal that I tried. Just days after opening there was already a queue outside the door before the lunchtime service. This is understandable given the carefully made food and tolerable prices.

L’Amorosa is my “go to” Italian restaurant these days. Andy Needham’s restaurant has a more casual feel than his old home at Zafferano, but he can still make excellent pasta dishes. This week a saffron risotto was genuinely classy, and tagliolini with seasonal porcini was also lovely. The modest pricing and friendly staff here are icing on the panettone.   

Hedone now has a new layout and serves just 22 diners at a time, allowing the kitchen to develop a more elaborate take on the already superb cuisine. At this, my 62nd meal here, highlights were red mullet with potato crisp and a gloriiously rich hare royale. As ever, the key is the obsessive search for only the highest-grade ingredients by chef/owner Mikael Jonsson. When you work with produce of this quality then you are off to a racing start, and for me there is no better food to be found in London than here.

The Olympic Studios is an unlikely food destination, it being the café of a boutique cinema in Barnes. Yet the culinary ambition of the kitchen goes well beyond popcorn, its chef having formerly been head chef at Garnier. At my latest visit here a carefully constructed chicken and quinoa salad was very good, as was venison with kale, but the star dish was an excellent chocolate and raspberry bar. You don’t have to watch a movie to eat here, and it is a restaurant that deserves greater attention than it gets.

The Germany 2016 Michelin guide came out. Amador closed, but Kevin Fehling retained his three stars despite moving premises to Hamburg. This means that Germany now has 10 three star restaurants, 39 two stars and 241 one stars. 

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