The food is fine, but you’ll hunt high and low for a frisson
From its position sandwiched between two theatres, it’s not hard to figure out whom this new opening is targeting. Owners the Soho House group have captured the movers and shakers with their elitist clubhouses around the globe, and the hipsters lacquering moustaches with meat juices at their dreary Dirty Burger and rather better Chicken Shop. So what’s left? Ah, yes: normcore.
Cafe Monico looks appealing from the top of the 38 bus. In its pleasingly fusty way, you can totally believe it to have once been the haunt of bespectacled intellectuals and phlegmy old thespians. It is, however, brand new. On board as consultant chef is Rowley Leigh, that rarest of creatures, the chefs’ chef: his Kensington Place was at the forefront of the capital’s 80s culinary renaissance, wowing pie-crust-bloused princesses with foie gras and sweetcorn pancakes. (There are shades of his later gig, Le Cafe Anglais, on Cafe Monico’s modern brasserie menu, notably parmesan custard with anchovy toast.) And from our mezzanine eyrie we spy him at the pass, hectoring his brigade. It’s all shaping up nicely, in an unchallenging, middle-aged kind of way.
Continue reading...