Oxted, French Restaurant Guide

2022 Review: The French cuisine may not be cutting-edge, but it is both consistent and highly accomplished at this ten-year-old restaurant with rooms in north Surrey. Chef owners Laurent Pacaud and Martin Bradley ran the business as a catering company for ten years before that.

This smart neighbourhood restaurant and bar from Stuart Gillies, for many years Gordon Ramsay’s right-hand man, “never lets you down with quality, value or service – can’t get enough of this place”. The menu offers a mixture of classic British and modern European cuisine, with bottomless brunch on Saturdays and traditional roast on Sundays. There’s now a sibling restaurant on similar lines, Number Eight in Sevenoaks.

“My wife took me here for a “date lunch”… it was superb” – Richard Phillips’s well-known destination occupies an attractive and central Regency Villa and is “excellent for a special occasion” for which it provides “formal dining in the traditional manner with unusual nibbles and interesting flavours” and a high quality selection of wines. There is a luxurious à la carte menu (with mains around £40 each) or a seven course tasting menu for £95 per person. Top Tips – something of a favourite for business lunching hereabouts, they provide a lunch menu with two courses for £28 per person; “lovely terrace for outdoor dining in summer”.

2022 Review: ‘A taste of rural France on the Fulham Road’ is the promise at this ‘gourmet traiteur’ in Chelsea: an early 2020 newcomer where dishes (to go or for delivery within 4 miles) are designed for reheating at home and prepared by Chris Hill, who most recently worked as a senior sous chef at The Ritz. It’s owned by Dimitri and Mira Plaquet, of a high-quality Belgian food group called La Villa Lorraine. They must be doing something right, as in mid 2021 they launched a second store in Wimbledon.

“A neighbourhood gem” in a converted Victorian laundry beside Brixton Market – this all-day operation majors in Antipodean-style breakfast and brunch (courtesy of Sydney-born chef Sami Harvey) followed by a more European bistro menu in the evening. “The friendly staff are always happy to recommend a good-value bottle of wine” – and it may well come from Down Under: owner Melanie Brown also founded the New Zealand and Australian Cellars. There’s a large terrace at the front which is “especially lovely when the temperature is warmer and Brixton street theatre is the free show”.

A “family favourite” that “brings back memories of small French restaurants” – this “reliable” Battersea brasserie has outposts in Putney, Wandsworth Common, South Ken, the City and most recently Clerkenwell, where it opened inside Marrable’s Hotel in late 2024. Harsher reports say they can be a little “underwhelming”, though – one reporter complaining that the “cute dining room was let down by mixed quality of the food and somewhat lax Gallic service (in a bad way)”.