The Giaconda Dining Room

Press Reviews (8)

• Giles Coren (17th November 2008)
  Cooking 6, Smiliness 9, Depression-busting 9, Score 8
  
  People, noted the critic, “have gone mental for the Giaconda Dining Room in grotty old Denmark Street behind Charing Cross Road”. It’s a sign of the times that people are so interested in “a straightforward French corner bistro, using cheap cuts, packing a lot of people into a small space and smiling a lot”. The food he enjoys is sometimes a bit evocative of “the 30F menus [the critic encountered on] mid-Eighties school trips to Rouen and Le Havre”, but the whole venture is “so bonkers and unself-conscious and original that it makes perfect sense”.
• Zoe Williams (4th November 2008)
  6/10
  
  An only moderately upbeat review of this basic bistro newcomer, near Centre Point, which has generally received something approaching raves elsewhere – “[a]s reasonable as the prices are, it needs more consistency before it becomes a gem”.
• Matthew Norman (20th October 2008)
  9.5/10
  
  In between fantasies of whipping and shackling TV chefs “who deploy name recognition to fleece the innocent”, Matthew Norman cites this “absurdly miniscule” venture as “how it should be done” – not just “the most impressive new restaurant [in] ages”, but also “an uncannily perfect template for the recession/depression”. “Everything is so spot on here that it borders on indecency”: there’s “an unusual and richly enticing menu”, “the best waitress”, and a “lack of artifice stretching from the cosy, upmarket cafe aura… to the prices”. Aussie chef Paul Merrony “unleashes the rigorous accuracy of classical French technique on the kind of inexpensive ingredients… of which we'll be seeing more in the years ahead, and makes them sing like angels”.
• Jay Rayner (2nd September 2008)
  
  The critic visits a new West End venture which “pulls on a gastropub ethic, only without the gastropub”. He likes it very much: it is a small, humble, perfectly positioned restaurant, doing what it does very well. And… we have very little of that in Britain today.”
• Guy Dimond (21st August 2008)
  5/6 stars
  
  TO’s head man has been doing his research – or perhaps he just got a press release. The name of this newcomer by Centre Point, we learn, refers to “Caffè La Giaconda (‘Mona Lisa Café’) that used to be on the site in the 1960s”. Forty years on, its successor “is a very satisfying place to eat, on many levels. The cooking can be excellent, yet there’s no showiness or pretension [and] the atmosphere relaxed and surprisingly neighbourly for W1”.
• Jan Moir (14th August 2008)
  
  “Chef Paul Merrony has done a really smart thing”, says the critic. “He has moved into an old Indian restaurant on London’s decrepit Tin Pan Alley and spent zip on it… Yet none of this really matters. What is important is that this Australian chef, a big name in the Sydney restaurant scene throughout the Nineties, is cooking up a storm in the tiny kitchen – he claims it is the smallest in London – and keeping the prices down”.
• Fay Maschler (31st July 2008)
  3/5 stars
  
  The critic is generally impressed by this new dining room, near Centrepoint, which is “furnished with unadorned wooden tables and a wall of wine”. Her review, however, defies neat summarisation.
• Terry Durack (15th July 2008)
  15/20
  
  Well here’s a bit of a surprise: the critic (who’s an Aussie) gets a bit of a scoop with his review of this new Covent Garden bistro from an Aussie chef, Paul Merrony, who’s apparently quite a name Down Under. (“He left Sydney as a young gun to work with the Roux brothers in Britain and La Tour d’Argent in Paris in the 1980s, before becoming one of the big names of the burgeoning Sydney dining scene well into the 1990s”.)