The Boundary

Press Reviews (9)

• David Sexton (19th June 2009)
  3/5 stars
  
  The critic visits the “open-air bar and grill” on the rooftop of Sir Terence Conran’s “big project in Shoreditch”. The view, while panoramic, is “not especially exciting”, but the “short menu” wins him over; it offers “generously proportioned” niblets, mains that are “basically top-notch barbecue fare”, plus a choice of “enticing” puddings. The “tasteful” winelist is “steeply priced”, but [p]laying a walk-on role in Sir Terence’s dream world” turns out to be a “treat” that’s “[w]orth paying up for”.
• Zoe Williams (18th May 2009)
  6/10
  
  Our scribe has “mixed feelings” about the French cuisine on offer in the “speakeasy”-style fine dining room of Conran’s Boundary Project, and is less than impressed by the long waits between courses. She speculates that perhaps the “tardy service [is] part of Terence Conran’s grand design. He has a rare gift for making you believe that you’ve arrived – not just arrived, you’ve even been allowed in! And, look, they’ve given you your very own table. It seems almost churlish to carp on about what happened next.”
• Giles Coren (20th April 2009)
  8.67/10
  
  According to Giles, having spent “100 years as a restaurateur”, Sir Terence Conran “knows exactly what we want”, and the result of this experience is the fine dining room of this Shoreditch ‘project’: “a stunning restaurant. Pretty much impossible to fault. Beautifully executed in every way.”
• Jay Rayner (16th February 2009)
  
  Jay sets the scene for this upbeat review of Sir Terence’s new venture by noting the “slender echo” that many of Conran’s past openings have offered of what someone as wealthy as he might aspire to: “like an A-level art student's sketch of a grand master”. Not so this “glittering” basement which “feels very much like a New York urban brasserie”. Staff are “eager”. As for the Gallic food it “may not be adverturous” but it is “unimpeachable”… “proper”… “without fault”… “every middle-class Englishman's Dordogne holiday”.
• AA Gill (2nd February 2009)
  4/5 stars
  
  “The first thing I noticed about it was how familiar it looked, how easy on the eye, how stylish and effortlessly Conran.” The critic is swept away by Sir Tel’s new operation, in a Shoreditch basement. “There’s plenty of space, and the menu is all the things that Conran brought to English palates 30 years ago and I’d almost forgotten about. French, rural, bourgeois food — as enjoyed by Englishmen with paunches and floozies touring Provence in open-topped Alvises”.
• Tracey MacLeod (26th January 2009)
  Food 3/5 stars, Ambience 4/5 stars, Service 4/5 stars
  
  This is a “Victorian warehouse, remodelled into a thoroughly modern East End pleasuredome”, opines the critic – “a handsome, subterranean space whose combination of bare brick walls and high-style furnishings evokes a Prohibition-era nightclub hiding in the basement of a Chicago warehouse”. On the food front, some dishes are “sub-par”, but that “didn't dent … confidence in the Boundary experience, so seductive is the room, and so winning the service”.
• Terry Durack (26th January 2009)
  14/20
  
  “Now, two years after handing over the running of his restaurant empire to D&D London, the indefatigable 77-year-old [Sir Terence Conran] has opened his 50th restaurant”, the critic tells us, as “part of an ambitious new complex housed in a converted Victorian warehouse in Shoreditch”.
• Guy Dimond (21st January 2009)
  4/6 stars
  
  “Elegant design, good attention to detail, well-drilled service, prices a bit on the high side, and menu which is more classic than adventurous” – the critic neatly (and, in our view accurately) summarises Sir Terence Conran’s new Shoreditch restaurant.
• David Sexton (14th January 2009)
  4/5 stars
  
  This new restaurant near Liverpool Street, is, notes the critic, the “supreme palais de Terence [Conran]. It’s the ideal of a restaurant he’s been pursuing all these years — the fine white linen, the handsome flatware, the heavy creamy crockery, the simple but luxurious French food, the desert island wine list … Boundary is not cheap per se, certainly not for East Shoreditch. But if you are at all up for spending this kind of money these days, it’s nothing less than a bargain”.