Just off Carnaby Street, an amiable bistro (on the former site of Benja, RIP), offering a top-value steak/frites formula in a tightly-packed communal setting surprisingly evocative of Old Soho.
The name nearly put us off checking out this new bistro, just off Carnaby Street. Yet another hommage àDowntown NYC? And, to make it worse, located just a few doors from the seminal bare-bricks-and-filament-bulb shrine which is Polpo.
Turns out, though, we’d missed the space in the name. Though the title is presumably intended to echo the moniker of the early-wave Gotham skyscraper, it is in fact all to do with the US cut of steak they serve (known in England as a Butler’s Steak) which, foodwise, is essentially all they do.
For a tenner a time, though, we doubt you’ll find much better meat, certainly not in the West End. You can have a small but tasty steak, with a (modest) bowl of very good chips, a (very small) salad, a (tiny) pot of béarnaise and a 250ml carafe of wine, all for under £20. No wonder this tightly-packed communal-tables space was pretty full on our early-days lunchtime visit.
Regular readers may know we’re rather bemused by the current rage for huge steakhouses serving enormous chunks of meat at prices to match. This amiable bistro – which, despite its name, conjures up something of the atmosphere of ‘Old Soho’ – seems to us to offer a great corrective.
photo credit: Paul Winch-Furness