Cocoon W1

Some restaurants are just really worth knowing about. Not because they’re necessarily the brightest or the best – more that they’re in a handy location and reliably good enough. (They mustn’t be TOO madly popular either: no good if they’re always booked out.) Cocoon is such a place.

On the location front, it’s difficult to beat this first-floor dining room – as near to Piccadilly Circus as you can get without the tackiness of actually being there. The site originally became a restaurant (as L’Odéon) in the mid-90s boom. As someone who knows about these things once explained to us, its kitchen is ‘in the wrong place’, organisationally speaking. This may be why, when the restaurant closed in the early ’00s, it stayed ‘dark’ for a number of years.

The site is now in the same hands as the trendy ‘Eclipse’ bar chain, and its current style – based on six individual ‘cocoons’ – makes more sense when you know it’s by ‘Miami’s leading designer’, or so they say. Clubby designs often don’t work by day. But this one does, and, in fact, makes a well-spaced lunch spot, as well as a suitably funky evening hang out: by night, the bar here is the happening scene you might expect.

And the ‘kitchen’ problem? Well, the food here – an oriental mix ’n’ match menu offering quite a range of dishes and styles of ‘cooking’ – is not really the main point. And the sushi and sashimi, for example are actually made at counters in the dining room itself, so to some extent avoid the constraints altogether.

The food offers the occasional pleasant surprise, but this is not a foodies’-choice sort of place. It’s just one of those places really worth knowing about – for lunch, for dinner or a late-night drink.