There’s something reassuring about a good-quality, old-fashioned neighbourhood French restaurant
Soutine is a gigantic mood, as the kids might say. Skirting with modern parlance is an ugly game for anyone aged over 20, but still, of a Sunday lunchtime in this heaving, pretend-Parisian dining room in St John’s Wood, it’s all I can think about.
Soutine fills the space of a former Carluccio’s, and it’s almost as affordable. A croque madame with frites is just over 13 quid, or roughly the same price as one at Café Rouge, but there the similarities end. At Soutine, taut-faced ladies share plates of confit de canard with tiny lapdogs, while well-upholstered octogenarian blokes wearing billowing chinos drown out the world with a second bottle of Mercurey Vieilles Vignes; the waiting staff pirouette between the back and front dining rooms, family parties squabble, happy birthday is sung in many different tongues. The menu’s in French-sounding English, while, judging from the decor, we’re on the southern bank of the Seine, maybe in Montparnasse, in about 1928.
Related: The Kensington Arms, Bristol: ‘Brimful of deliciousness’ - restaurant review | Grace Dent
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