Le Cafe Anglais

This fabulous restaurant is located in a not so fabulous neighborhood, and a not so fabulous shopping mall called the Whiteley's. I didn't have high expectations as I entered this restaurant from the second floor, until I sat down. It's a very charming dining place with big tall windows, allowing lots of natural sunlights in. Their menu has lots of selections, and my dinner turned out to be really wonderful. Waiting staff is professional and friendly too.

Appetizer: Parmesan custard with anchovy toasts (£4.5) is the most famous dish here. Dip the toast in the hot parmesan custard.... HMmmmm

Main Course: Lampchop (£15.5) is exceptional! Very tender and juicy with crusty roasted skin on the side. Compliment extremely well with a glass of Richelieu redwine (£7.5), rich and smooth flavor.

Dessert: Chocolate souffle with homemade pistachio ice-cream (£8) This is the another highlight of the dinner.. the souffle was baked in perfection and puffy, comes with hot chocolate sauce on the side. Finished with a pot of loose leave Darjeeling tea (£2.5).

All for 1 person, total £49 including the 12.5% service charge. Yes I finished everything on my plate and I was tumbling out of the restaurant because I was so full, but happily satisfied! Must come back again!!!

From the reviews, I thought this place was going to be absolutely amazing. Well, i was only mildly interested in their food. I ordered the lamb and realized that I should've ordered two plates to fill myself up.

The service was great though. Our server was a guy from Manchester and he was very nice and very attentive.

The radishes and the bread at the beginning of the meal is a great touch. I may come back and try out something else and see if I can bump up this place another star.

If there was a fertile and beautiful island in the middle of the Channel populated by creative and perfectly balanced people - this is the sort of food they would be putting on their dinner table. Le Café Anglais uses a combination of French and English influences to create a really great menu for one of London's best (and most awarded) restaurants. The hors d'oeuvres are probably the most inventive bit of the menu and can be ordered alone in the bar area for a lighter meal. The parmesan custard and anchovy toast is special and one of their big favourites. The main courses are simpler, think brilliant roasts, grills and a few classics thrown in.

The atmosphere is clutter-free, clean cut, without music, with great cooking aromas and is lit just right in an understated brassiere way. When I went the staff were supreme - really helpful and the wine manager in particular was spot on with all his suggestions. It's expensive but totally worth it if you enjoy your food and want something that takes the average and sends it straight back to sit in the middle of a boring year 6 maths exam.

People always tell me that there is good British food out there and that I'm just not looking hard enough. Granted, over the years, I've become attached to meat pies and the occasional roast dinner. But this restaurant might actually tip the scales for British cuisine (sure there are French influences here and there). The dishes are not complex, but done to perfection. If you were looking for something that tastes like pictures in food magazines look, then this is it.
I ordered the thai curry, which may have been a mistake given the more basic the dish, the better... but it was still good. The desserts are amazing. Thumbs up on the ice creams. Over all, my favorite thing about this place is the starters. Definitely order a few.

Also, WTF?! In a shopping mall?

I came here for dinner on my birthday with my family because 1) they are nearby to where I live, 2) Yelp reviews were fairly good and the sentiment was seconded by a coworker, and 3) they are a 1,000-point table on Opentable.com!

They are indeed inside a mall although if that bothers you, you can go in on the ground floor, there's a lift up to the main restaurant and you never have to feel that it's in the Whiteleys complex.

Food was delicious! Salads were light, imaginative, and tasty. My fish was perfectly tender. I tried the two different lamb dishes that my mom and sister had ordered. I don't even like lamb in general and I thought they were good. The summer pudding for dessert was pretty, but way too tart.

Overall, I was very happy with the food and experience here. It was a little challenging to flag someone down to get the check in the end -- the restaurant is quite large, but they do manage to fill it up. It is too pricy to patronize for anything other than a special occasion though.

There should probably be a snidey joke about eating in shopping centres somewhere here but Le Cafe Anglais is no food court cop out. Sure, it's occupied the top floor of handsome from the outside Whiteleys for five years now, but if the shopping centre trades on past glories Le Cafe Anglais resolutely doesn't.

If you'd been told that Capice Holdings or Corbin & King had a hand in the place you wouldn't be surprised (they haven't to the best of my knowledge) - it displays several hallmarks of a well designed, well run restaurant by their exacting rulebook. Attentive, individual staff; an eye for detail; simple tastes and flavours and great, great quality ingredients.

The food was simple and excellent. It breaks neither budget nor boundaries but delivers a solid performance for £30-£35 a head. From an expansive brasserie menu I went for plump, juicy if teeny tiny scallops followed by a simply grilled veal escalope. Good as it was to tuck into after a week of more challenging dining, i admit to slight food envy watching my guests tuck into a perfect piece of muscly firm hake, served under a snappy salsa verde atop dense sticky lentils. Competence can be used as an indicator of the ordinary or prosaic, here it was sublime.

The dining room is grand. High windows open up the light flooding over chandeliers and sassy banquettes. Beautiful floral displays set off the crisp white linens and serried tableware. If I had to find fault here it couldn't be with the front of house look or the intelligent wait staff, though I whoever chose such an awful, artless Jackson Pollock for public transport carpet for the space needs their head examining.

Other than that godawful floor covering; if there's a fault, it can only be in the location. It's a shame someone as talented as Head Chef Rowley Leigh was forced to spend his time leaning next to the pass checking his phone and chatting to regulars rather than locked in the kitchen. Maybe the ladies who lunch do so during the week, but you won't find much better cooking at this price level and style within the area and it's a shame that on this Saturday lunch at least, it didn't have a more appreciative audience.

there is nothing more frustrating to have to book months in advance for a restaurant in London when there are so many - but none come close to this place. I love the staff, i love the Location (a fan of all things tacky) and i love the little nibbles - the Parmesan custard and anchovy toast is amazing - i always say 'next time i am ordering it for my starter main and pudding'

i realise raving will only make my frustration more frustrating

This place is worth a visit, especially if you're in the mood for a good meal that feels like it's in an episode of Poirot.

Service has always been good here, if ever so slightly aloof. Food has never disappointed, the parmesan custard being a high note. It won't come cheap, but they serve up a nice meal.

Overall: Exactly the kind of food that stodgy poncy ppl with cauterized taste buds (thanks to years of Mummy's Yorkshire puddings and runny onion gravies) would call "appetizing". Also, why does everything have bacon bits/strips in it? Felt like my senses were being bludgeoned by overpowering sauces that all tasted the same (for both apps and mains). Good recipes gone bad. Like kobe beef made with hamurger helper.

Price: about £45pp including 2 drinks pp

Location: Wouldn't have expected to find this restaurant above a bowling alley, but meh!

Ambience: Like someone else said "very Poirot". Not bad.

Service: Good, not overbearing, but not v.helpful (e.g. did not make recommendations, "If you have such and such as first course you should try such and such as main course" etc.)

What we ordered:
First Course
Pike Boudin: best dish we ordered (except for the super-buttery sauce)
Riggatoni with Cabbage and Chicken Livers: Had expected a traditional Italian variant with sage etc.. Got a version that was swimming in Knorrs beef stock. Ewww!

Mains
Pigeon w/ Lentils - nth to complain abt but certainly nth to write home abt
Veal Kidneys w/ mashed spuds - WTF? It was like the Noah's ark of veal kidneys in a post-diluvian flood of overpowering brown sauce. Kidneys were supposed to be med-rare but came out well-done and shrivelled. Sent it back ASAP.
Chicken with bread sauce and onions - Chicken was juicy but seriously bland. Sauce was trying but did not reach! WTF Jeeves?

I really wanted to try this place which had been talked about a lot in the press (probably at great PR expense as they even managed to get a whole front page of the FT Weekend to hype it up before the opening) and the result is rather mixed. The pluses are the room's volume (and the location for me as I leave nearby), with a great dining room with huge windows giving a lot of light at lunch time and a great sense of space in the evening, an elegant but not stiff art-deco room with a choice of square, round and oval tables, not too close to each others, and - importantly - comfortable chairs. If you get in via the entrance on Porchester Gardens you forget that you are in a shopping mall (and that this great space was occupied by a McDonals restaurant until last year!). The food and the price is where it starts to go wrong. The menu is very long and they have come up with some sort of small appetiser portions a bit like tapas. Good idea except that most of that food isnt made for tapas - trying too hard really. I had a very French dinner starting with Paté de Campagne, then onto roast Rabbit with Spinach and then Chevre cheese. The Paté was average and did really feel home made, the rabbit was more bone than meat and I had to get a sharper knife to deal with it (!) and the cheese was ok but nothing spectacular (I asked for the Vacherin but they had ran out). I guess the menu will be evolving as I am not sure having roast as a central part of the food served really works. Overall we spent a good evening because the service is good, the setting is good, and the place feels buzzy without being too noisy but for that price I was expecting better food and my neighbour, who does not leave in London, summarised it well saying that compared to Paris or Bruxelles many London restaurants felt superficial. Le Cafe Anglais feels new and the menu is a bit too conceptual, neither cafe, nor anglais nor French really - a kind of London thing. In the area, for that price you should try the Angelus restaurant with better food, better service and a more appealing menu.


Note 1: just been back a few months later, a bit less buzz in the room but was positively surprised by the food which was consistently good, especially the roast meat and poultry. Still expensive but I did have the £5 omelette and I could have lived on that for the evening really.


Note 2: It is interesting to see that someone (the owner?) is busy writing 4* and 5* reviews on this business using different user names (easy to spot as most of those do not write on anything else). Is this a sign that clients are not showing up in those difficult times? I will go for an omelette and report!