Evening Standard
Jimi Famurewa kicked off the Gallic theme that dominates the week’s reviews with his visit to “a supremely creative and confident new-wave bistro” from the team behind Soho’s Ducksoup, where he found an appetising menu to back up his theory that “modern London’s urbane food cognoscenti now tend to eat like Gascon farmhands”.
There was “nothing especially light or newfangled” about the cuisine – but that was precisely Jimi’s point, as he sang the praises of dishes such as “rosy pink slices of Hereford onglet in a peppercorn Café de Paris butter so dark and rich it’s practically a makhani sauce”.
Jimi Famurewa - 2024-03-03The Guardian
Grace Dent was relieved to find an influencer-free zone at this hot spot in
Borough Market – a “gratifyingly traditional, classy dining room that could be
from the 1950s”.
“Chef Elliot Hashtroudi… seems to have taken his experience from St John,
packed it into the boot of a Citroën 2CV and driven the back roads all the way from Bayeux to Marseille while smoking Gauloises and trying to work out what everyone’s grand-mère is cooking.”
The result, she says, is “copious amounts of garlic in the sauces and dressings” that will render you “whiffy and unsnoggable”. Speaking of whiffy, Grace also noted “wild amounts of methane in the gut” as a result of eating Camille’s Jerusalem artichoke.
Grace Dent - 2024-03-18Daily Mail
Tom Parker Bowles added his voice to the chorus of critical approval for this new bistro from the team behind Ducksoup, with its menu of “unashamedly robust, no- nonsense, nose-to-tail stuff, a sort-of tour around France in an old Aston Martin”.
There was plenty of “blood and offal” on offer, including calf’s brains “as good as brains get”, and – as an “elegant riposte” – a less visceral crab on toast with a “bisque sweet and subtle”.
Tom Parker-Bowles - 2024-03-25The Times
Giles Coren insisted that he “loved Camille. The space, the staff, the chutzpah, the menu, the beer, my second bottle of wine and about two thirds of the cooking”, before complaining at length that he had been misled by fellow-critics into thinking it would be “somehow very French (more than one literally wrote, ‘Oh là là).”
“It’s painted red and they have baguettes,” he conceded. “But that doesn’t make it Café Rouge. Thank God.
“Sorry, but where is the terrifying garlicky French food? Not an escargot or
coquille St Jacques in sight, nor a whiff of andouille or boudin blanc or any of that.”
The terrine, meanwhile, was “more St John than Jeanne d’Arc”. Which is not a criticism. Just an observation.
