Restaurants

It’s difficult to imagine what else you could want from a super-cool restaurant beyond what the Square already dishes up. A nicer looking building from outside, perhaps? A few more seats in the bar, maybe? Nothing too important, anyway. Discerning food lovers come here for Phil Howard’s consummate cooking plus an inspiring wine list, excellent service and comfortable, stylishly metropolitan surroundings. The carte and tasting menus are where the food gets intensely serious (in a good way), but the modestly priced set lunch is still difficult to beat for quality, and the experience is pleasantly devoid of tedious celebrity cheffing and the annoying reservation procedures that go with it. Clean-flavoured, dill-infused risotto was perfect for a sunny day: nuttily al dente, packed with crisp asparagus and succulent salmon flakes, hidden under a cheeky asparagus foam and trimmed with a soft boiled gull’s egg. Following on from this – on the set lunch menu there are just two starters, two mains courses and two desserts to choose from, plus cheese for a supplementary fiver – came new-season English lamb: pink, sliced and tasty in light jus with a fresh pea and broad bean cannelloni, another foamy sauce and refreshing little braised spring onion bulbs. The wine was lovely (an unusual, richly perfumed Austrian grüner veltliner) and laudably available by the glass. Staff were lovely too, treading that precarious line between attentiveness and interference. Desserts looked so good we could hardly bear to eat them; they are lessons in the art of pastry making and might include delicious mysteries such as truffled hydromel jelly and smoked chocolate.

Time Out Eating & Drinking Guide 2008