Reigate, French Restaurant Guide

2022 Review: The French cuisine may not be cutting-edge, but it is both consistent and highly accomplished at this ten-year-old restaurant with rooms in north Surrey. Chef owners Laurent Pacaud and Martin Bradley ran the business as a catering company for ten years before that.

There’s no doubting the “fantastic location” of this link in Raymond Blanc’s Heartwood Inns collection – a nook and cranny-filled boozer on pretty Downside Common with a heated outdoor tent and beer garden for added measure. Its victuals aren’t fancy but are “generally good” by common consensus, and continue to be of note for their moderate price tags (especially now they’ve relaunched their bargainous seasonal set menus).

With its array of “silky-smooth croquetas” and other tapas favourites, backed up by “a great choice of sherries”, this popular gastropub-with-rooms in the Surrey ’burbs from Spanish maestro José Pizarro is “one of the best places to eat for miles around” – and, as you’d expect of this much-fêted ambassador of all things Iberian, “makes a decent stab at a Hispanic vibe”.

2022 Review: ‘A taste of rural France on the Fulham Road’ is the promise at this ‘gourmet traiteur’ in Chelsea: an early 2020 newcomer where dishes (to go or for delivery within 4 miles) are designed for reheating at home and prepared by Chris Hill, who most recently worked as a senior sous chef at The Ritz. It’s owned by Dimitri and Mira Plaquet, of a high-quality Belgian food group called La Villa Lorraine. They must be doing something right, as in mid 2021 they launched a second store in Wimbledon.

2023 Review: This “lovely local friendly coffee shop” with a French accent and pastries is a spin-off from Eric and Sarah Guignard’s French Table next door, and does a particularly good Gallic take on the English afternoon tea.

This “lovely, small and very French restaurant” opposite Hampton Court Palace has been wowing guests for almost 30 years with its “well cooked food (nothing pretentious)” at “not greedy prices in the now very expensive restaurant world”. Chef-patron Jean-Philippe (JP) Gravier is joined by his daughter Victoria in the kitchen, with his English wife Kim running the FOH.

A “family favourite” that “brings back memories of small French restaurants” – this “reliable” Battersea brasserie has outposts in Putney, Wandsworth Common, South Ken, the City and most recently Clerkenwell, where it opened inside Marrable’s Hotel in late 2024. Harsher reports say they can be a little “underwhelming”, though – one reporter complaining that the “cute dining room was let down by mixed quality of the food and somewhat lax Gallic service (in a bad way)”.