Restaurant awards and restaurant reviews
Restaurant awards
Square Meal's "Best New Restaurant" Spring 2008
Time Out Eating and Drinking Award "Best New Restaurant 2008"
UK Good Food Guide "Upcoming Chef of 2008"
Professional restaurant reviews
Bloomsberg
Good Food Guide 2010
Just off Marylebone High Street, this bijou other “Pied” is a relaxed and accessible version of its renowned big brother Pied a Terre. Not surprisingly, it too is a class act, serving food of ambition and style. The fashionable décor fits the bill, too, pleasant without being edgy or pretentious, and featuring backlit flower-pattern glass panels, silk wallpaper and chic seating. Forgoing the formality of tablecloths and stiff service, it’s a kind of entry-level haute cuisine with reasonable prices: “one goes for the food rather than the surroundings”.
Choose the lunch/early-evening menu for a limited choice, three-course “bargain”, perhaps showcasing loin of Gloucestershire Old Spot, served with tarragon pomme puree, crushed carrot and swede, and a thyme jus. Young Marcus Eaves appears to take it all in his stride, delivering ambitious, complex food noted for its seasonality, light touch, balance, texture and emphatic flavour.
From a winter carte, pan-fried Pollack partnered with potato gnocchi, chanterelles and Vacherin Mont d’Or has been praised, as has the citrus fruit bavarois with black cherry sorbet that caught one reporter’s eye at dessert stage. One niggle is portion size – just right for some, but “tiny” to others. Wines are keenly priced, well chosen and Eurocentric with a strong by-the-glass selection. Bottles start at £19.20.
Hardens
“A worthy little sister to Pied-à-Terre”, say fans of this year-old bistro, who laud its “adventurous” dishes and ‘fabulous-value’ set menus; the ‘cramped’ Marylebone premises “have bad feng shui”, though and a few critics find the whole experience simply “overhyped”
Timeout
Just because this is the downsized younger sibling of Pied a Terre, don’t go thinking it’s a bistro version. True, the price differential between the two is considerable. But for a less eye-watering outlay, a meal in the handsome rooms decorated with modern take on chinoiserie still offers complex and nuanced cooking. An enticing selection of wines is available by the glass and 460ml carafes. With a light touch and subtle use of herbs, chef Marcus Eaves doesn’t, however, stint on the dairy, as demonstrated by an indulgent basil-infused buttery sauce with spring vegetables on swathes of silky-textured pasta; and by a deeply savoury, intensely creamy mushroom and leek risotto. This wasn’t just risotto; it was served in a copper pan along with a plate decorated with a slick of shallot puree, dots of watercress puree, two baby leeks and micro leaves – a fiddly contrast to the sublime rice, but a sign of the restaurant’s ambition.
Rolled breast of Lamb (a fatty cut rendered tender; on the a la carte it would be saddle) was accompanied by indecently buttery carrots. The small bare wooden tables are swept of crumbs by very young staff. Despite the trappings of somewhere that takes food very seriously, L’Autre Pied is accessible and relaxing – and the kitchen didn’t put a foot wrong.
Zagat 2010
Food: 25/30
Don’t be deceived by it’s “casual, no-fuss setting” in “the heart of Marylebone” – “this baby brother of Pied a Terre is a worthy relative”, offering “imaginative” Modern European fare, “beautifully presented” (the “plate is just like a painting”) but at comparatively “economic” prices, especially at the “bargain lunch”; if staff are “still finding their feet”, they remain “ gracious”.