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Sat at the far end of one of the The Ned’s gargantuan indoor boulevards, Café Sou is its least formal foodie offering: the Soho House Group’s attempt at a grand railway café in the Parisian mould. Très jolie it is too.
The simple menu includes baguettes, quiches, omelettes, rillettes and a few salads, plus some decent wines for lunchtime lushes like me. A mound of duck rillettes was good: black-hole dense and cool with fat, the orange preserve it came with a floral stunner. Chewy, sourdough-style baguettes were finer still, especially one filled with meaty tuna, singing of the sea but dragged flapping on to land with chopped boiled eggs and sharp vinaigrette: the kind of sandwich that reminds you why people LOVE sandwiches.
The apex? A massive slab of quiche Lorraine (the cheesy, meaty Sun King of quiches), juddering with eggy texture and easily the best savoury pastry I’ve eaten outside of, well, a railway café in France. Picnic fodder? This one was on another level entirely. And it was only £4.
This is still recognisably ‘café’ territory, however grand the surroundings: the high stools are only just comfy, and we were in and out in 40 minutes. But for swiftly sensational nosh in the City, Café Sou is hard to beat.