Vauxhall restaurants

This cooperatively run vegetarian and vegan restaurant was initially set up back in the '80s to serve the local community – many of whom were squatting nearby. Today it retains the community feel, with a collective of cooks keeping the pans hot. The clientele tends to comprise locals and regulars, too.  Menus are dictated by the chef, and usually by that chef's homeland. Expect, then, dishes influenced by Japan, Italy, France, America and Portugal, all with a vegetarian or vegan bent. And if you really like what you were served on a given day? You can check online who did the cooking and make a beeline for their next shift.  It's also worth noting that Bonnington Café is BYO, and cash-only.  Visit more community cafes in London

Daebak opened in late 2017, just over the road from fellow Korean restaurant Jihwaja and is a worthy alternative if you don’t want a side order of karaoke with your kimchi. It’s taken over the site of a long-standing greasy spoon and, for better or worse, it still feels like a caff. Tables are tightly packed, the radio is way too loud and it doesn’t take cards for less than £10. But prices are low, portions are large and the chefs know their way around a fryer. The Korean classics (kimchi, glass noodles, bibimbap) are all here, along with Japanese imports in the shape of katsu curry, tempura and teriyaki. Seafood pajeon had prawns and spring onion set in springy golden pancake batter; the starter portion was enough for two to share and would easily feed one as a light main course. Nicely marinated beef bulgogi and crunchy chunks of fried chicken with a punchy soy and garlic sauce also impressed. The only dud dish was a plateful of greasy dumplings in which it was impossible to tell one mushy filling from another. Local word-of-mouth is filling the place out, with even lunchtime tables hard to come by towards the end of the week. In Korean, ‘daebak’ means ‘awesome’. It’s getting there.

Twentysomethings, with digs in the locality, love this no-frills venue on snug little Wilcox Road, bringing a hip vibe that’s accentuated by the deep purple walls, mosaic framed mirrors, and fairy lights in the windows. The no-corkage BYO policy is a big draw (there’s an off-licence next door), but so is the food – freshly prepared in the open kitchen at the rear. There’s a brief menu of standard North Indian dishes, as well as daily specials. Expect complimentary popadums with decent chutneys to start. Highlights include sag chicken (bursting with the flavour of spinach) and piping hot chana dahl, but parties of ‘leave it to the chef’ diners fare best, with a wider variety of dishes conveyed to their tables (such as tandoori chicken wings). Our bill, like theirs, was £15 a head.

It’s hard to know where the restaurant starts and the karaoke bar stops at this little warren of a Korean joint on Kennington Lane. Even the tiny ‘main’ dining room is loomed over by a giant screen of silently warbling Asian teenagers, and some speakers haphazardly tacked to the wall. Next, time, I’ll ask them to get the mics out.Maybe. Ah, but the food: pretty decent, if effectively an extended riff on sugar and soy. But there was one killer dish. The ‘cheese ramen’ was utterly filthy, a synthetic cheese slice melting into a bowl of Maggie-style noodles and a chilli-fired cloudy broth. My companion baulked; I wolfed the lot. Self-respect who? What followed couldn’t quite hit the heady heights of that dirty dish du jour, though the crescent-shaped pork and veg mandu dumplings were surpringsly delicate, their thin skins just crisp and the piggy, pasty interiors juicy and lousy with scallions. More texturally interesting still were the fried cigars of seaweed, packed with wormy, slimy glass noodles. The de facto main event was a massive, steaming bowl of fried chicken. God knows how they get the texture like this: it was chewy, crisp and lip smackingly sticky all at once, and absolutely honked of garlic. There was a whole bird in there too: it was, I admit, my first time chewing on a chicken neck, and the rippling, HR Giger-esque appearance of the meat definitely puts it in ‘adventurous eater’ territory. But that reflects more on me than the kitchen (and, to clarify, it tasted

The Crowne Plaza hotel's terrace restaurant. Stop in here, on the fifteenth floor, for Lebanese Japanese fusion food, brews and views.

Remember Pharmacy? A restaurant-inside-an-art-installation, co-owned by PR guru Matthew Freud and with designs by fellow co-owner Damien Hirst, it first opened in 1997. With wall-to-wall pills and wall-to-wall slebs, it was, for a brief time, the hot ticket: the sort of place you’d take someone whose knickers you wanted to get into. But selling out to the City within nine months spelled doom (worse even, than being forced to change its name, the Royal Pharmaceutical Company having successfully argued it could confuse anyone looking for an actual pharmacy). It fell suicidally out of fashion, was bought out by a bar chain in 2000 (at which point Hirst jumped ship) and eventually closed in 2003. Don’t feel too sorry for Hirst though: he flogged the fixtures and fittings for a cool £1.2m.Now, it’s back. And this time, called Pharmacy 2 (I’d have preferred ‘Pharmacy II: the Revenge’). It’s the new restaurant of the Hirst-owned Newport Street Gallery, where he exhibits works from his personal collection.Aesthetically, it’s still great fun: colourful, creative, thought-provoking. Even after all these years, the concept, with its rows of medications, ‘100 most prescribed pills’ wallpaper and pill-shaped bar-stools makes for an intriguing backdrop. But Hirst has missed a trick here, in not applying the same ethos he applies in the gallery – showcasing relative unknowns – to the kitchen. It would, for example, have been exciting to see a rotation of up-and-coming chefs shaking the pans

POTUS – a presidentially themed American restaurant in the coldly upmarket Crown Plaza hotel near Vauxhall (and, by extension, near the new US embassy) – is, on paper, a dreadful concept: so wilfully cloth-eared that it’s hard not to feel like it’s an April Fool’s joke. In reality, it’s fairly innocuous: an atmosphere-light room with a monochrome palette and a photo wall of old presidents chin-wagging with Her Maj. The food – which is on the pricy side – ran the gamut from bang average to appalling. Battered and fried softshell crab didn’t look the part but turned out to be crisp and light; while a finely chopped and mildly greying steak tartare, sandwiched between sheaves of fried chicken skin, might have had a certain filth-food appeal, had it not been acrid with the taste of synthetic liquid smoke. A rolled chicken breast with sweet potato purée was no more ‘Cajun’ than a pile of Iceland potato wedges, but the worst came in the wretched form of a ‘truffle mac ’n’ cheese’ that saw vertical rigatoni baked dry, sitting in a thin, parmesan-infused puddle and caked in musty truffle ash. A delicate chocolate tart was a brief respite before an abominable take on the New Orleans favourite of bananas foster, reconfigured into a stodgy brick of banana bread. As the White House’s current incumbent might say: Bad!

The Hoist you may or may not already be familiar with. If not, it’s a select  and discreet club in Vauxhall where mature gentlemen can enjoy themselves, and each other, on all manner of Heath Robinson contraptions. Sandwiched between this local landmark and the orifice that is the back end of Vauxhall station, you’ll find Dirty Burger. No, not an actual dirty burger, but Dirty Burger, second branch of the achingly fashionable burger shack. It keeps things simple: burgers, fries, and – best of all – breakfast buns, from 7am. Sausage and egg in a bap? They don’t come runnier. Unlimited coffee? Enough to keep you up all night. It’s open until 2am on Friday and Saturday nights, and at  only £4 for such prime beef and firm buns, we can see it spanking the competition in Vauxhall for late-night eats. 

Oriental fire meets the subtler seasonings typical of the Horn of Africa, by way of standard breakfast fry-ups, in this multifunctional Vauxhall café. The split personality is down to the fact that Kitfo House is essentially an Eritrean restaurant that likes to make the most of its Thai chef at lunchtime. The Thai options are cheaper than the African ones: powerfully flavoured kaeng pa (jungle curry), served with a mound of rice, costs just £5.50. The Eritrean version of scrambled eggs, jumbled with green chillies and chopped tomatoes, is a gloriously tasty dish. It can be served with pitta, or, like the rest of the Eritrean specials, with a whole basket of rolled-up injera (spongy and slightly sour: the national bread) that you use as a scoop or plate. Vegetarians can choose delicious messes of spinach, lentils and cottage cheese, while meat eaters are wowed by tender beef stewed in spices – the restaurant’s namesake dish. As a grand finale, treat yourself to the Eritrean coffee ceremony: it’s a heady and stimulating experience, with incense and popcorn as the trimmings.  

Like King’s Cross before it, dingy, dirty Vauxhall has long been a hub you pass through via tube, train or bus en route to somewhere better. But things are ever-so-slowly changing, as the railway arches and its surrounds become populated with restaurants of serious aspiration, alongside the area's numerous clubs. Counter is the smartest addition yet – a beautifully designed space with echoes of art-deco whose mirror-adorned walls and comfortable booths are picked out in grey, with warm yellow lighting creating a cosy vibe despite the industrial surrounds. Its premises span the entire length of one arch, but it’s been cleverly divided into two dining rooms so as not to feel cavernous. With the main entrance just yards from the tube and train exits, lots of punters are likely to be frustrated commuters who’ve missed their connection – and that’s what the long, four-sided bar is for, its upbeat cocktail menu peppered with local references, such as the Vauxhall Vesper. Once ensconced, there is much on the French/US brasserie-style menu to tempt you to stay longer. Everything we ate was commendable and well-meaning without blowing our socks off. A bulbous deep-fried duck egg with frisée, beetroot cubes and crunchy croûtons was a little overcooked on the inside, a little undercooked on the outside, while a small fillet of mackerel, though expertly cured in gin and lime, lacked flavour despite a scattergun salad of almonds, chard, cucumber and pear. A main course of beautifully tend