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Set within the enclaves of the short-lived Strand Dining Rooms, Bronte is an all-day diner offering a broad smattering of Antipodean and Pacific plates, accommodating service and OTT interior design by Tom Dixon.
The food is promisingly conceived, yet resolutely underwhelming. ‘Grapefruit salad’ was an acceptable tabouleh dotted with a few spare chunks of dragon fruit, slivers of grapefruit and not quite enough tahini yogurt – fine as a side dish but an aggressively overpriced main at £13. A soft-shell crab burger was fine, but hardly a seminal example of an increasingly faddy dish. Better was salt-baked celeriac with truffle cream and pomegranate – a bizarre mish-mash of flavours. It was perplexing, if only for the Proustian tang of penny sweets that a creamy, truffley pomegranate mix apparently evokes.
Dixon’s design, meanwhile, is less louche mid-century lounge, more cruise-ship gift shop – the blushing pastel hues and burnished gold details offset bizarrely by glass cases of dinosaur skulls, ersatz Egyptian artefacts and nobbles of quartz. ‘Interesting’ all round, then, but overwhelmingly a case of garish form over function.