Dabbous, Modern European, London

In his review of Dabbous, Jay Rayner writes: “Oliver Dabbous is being hailed as the next big thing. There’s only one problem: you’ll never taste his cooking.”

Well I did. Because on the 16th of May, when I was seven and a half months pregnant with the twins, I wrote them (Dabbous not the twins, although it would have been nice to have some email correspondence to agree on acceptable sleeping times) an email and said I would like to come for lunch any day in September. I knew that by September I would be feeling a lot like Pandora and Dabbous was meant to be my hope in the chest of challenges I had opened up.

(My husband went one further booking a non-refundable, 6 day car rally in the south of France. “Networking”. He says. I say. Aha. I play Fabienne to his Butch – can you believe how young Bruce Willis looks in that clip?  My husband did say that I could / should come with him.  Which is a bit like Marie Antoinette declaring “Qu’ils mangent de la brioche” when the poor people complained that they had no bread. This is what our trip looked like last June.)

Here is the thing about Dabbous; their lunch menu is £26! It can cost you that much to have lunch at Giraffe if you get enticed into ordering a silly sounding smoothie.

Dabbous serves beautiful food without the pomp.  My starter of peas features a mousse, a granita and tender tendrils. It’s so sweet, it tastes like they must be growing peas on the roof and picking them for every order.  For my fish course I had ling.  It was a pale looking dish, punctuated with 3 petal pink discs, which turned out to be slivers of pickled garlic. Read more of this post