OK. So you want to take your main squeeze out for a nice evening somewhere pretty enough to be romantic, but not too overtly so. Even though your 30th birthday is now a distant memory, you’re looking for a place with plenty of style, good buzz, and probably some music which is not too ‘in your face’, and where conversation is not going to be drowned out. Ideally, you’d have the option of decent food if you wanted it, (but no obligation to eat if you didn’t). Perhaps because few places fit such a bill, this Belgravia newcomer has already attracted a strong following.
The division between trendy cocktail bar and quality restaurant do not really exist here. But not in the way that’s becoming fashionable – by offering ‘grazing’ dishes that can be served tapas-style – but in a new way, by offering full restaurant service at tables intermingled with the drinking areas. Our very proper dinner, for example, included good guinea fowl, an exemplary rack of lamb and a nice (if unremarkable) chocolate ‘tortino’, washed down with a pleasant and not-overpriced bottle of claret (which even had a bit of age). The meal ended with decent coffee and petits-fours. With a couple of cocktails to start with, the bill comes to just over £100 for two. For the area – and for a whole night out – the damage could be much worse.
Adjacent to, and under the same ownership as, the original London branch of Noura – a French/Lebanese group – this is an operation which struck us as offering something genuinely new and different. In the capital of England – supposedly the home of eccentricity – it is odd how often we have to rely on Gallic operators to think ‘outside the box’.
