France - The Little French Restaurant

Restaurant: The Little French Restaurant

Location: 18 Hogarth Street, London, SW5 0QY

Date of visit: 10 February 2019

Time of visit: 6pm

From one extreme to another. After failing to find restaurants for the previous two countries in the project, how on earth do you chose a French restaurant in London?! Fairly quickly the criteria to help choose a restaurant was decided. Cost. It's far too easy to spend an absolute fortune when dining French in this city. It's not as easy to do it at a more standard price.

But it also had to be authentic, as always. We whittled it down to two options. Brasserie Zedel, near Piccadilly Circus. And The Little French Restaurant in Earl's Court. Both were decently priced, the former surprisingly so. I was leaning towards the latter, and Elle's thoughts decided the matter. Zedel was too "corporate" (Elle's word) and "obvious and touristy" (my words). The other restaurant was smaller, independent, and - to be honest - closer to home. And the menu looked as authentic as anywhere else.

We arrived just after 6pm. Actually, closer to 6.05pm. The restaurant opens at 6, and I didn't want to be walking through the door as they were literally unlocking it. Regardless, we were the first diners to be welcomed through the door that evening, but only by a few minutes. As such, we were greeted straight away. We pre-booked, and after giving my name, we were given the choice of any of the tables in the restaurant.

Shortly after we sat down we were handed menus, next came some sliced baguette and butter, and after a few minutes were asked for our drinks orders. Very prompt, very friendly service so far.

I tend to go for beer when dining out, wherever that may be. However, the menu has a very non-descriptive, generic entry of "Beer" for £3.50. No indication of what beer, and if it was a glass, pint, bottle or can. In any case, wine felt like the way to go. We were in a French restaurant, we might as well enjoy a bottle of French wine. The house wine, of course.

The house wine arrived, was opened, was tested, and poured. It was Italian. A good wine, for sure. But it was as French as Paolo Nutini. (I need to get one of these into every review now...)

A few more minutes passed, a few more diners had arrived. The waitress came to take our order. There was a very attractive three-course set menu offered within the main menu. A starter, a main and a dessert for £16.50, which was less than buying most two-course combinations. The selection was also very decent - offering the majority of the options from the main "a la carte" menu. Curiously, this was a cash only deal. I can't for the life of me work out why. But in any case this was well signposted.

I went for the French onion soup to start, and coq au vin d'Alsace for main.

Elle opted for smoked chicken and mushroom wrapped in pastry for starters, and chicken supreme farci duxelloise for main.

As suggested by the name, the restaurant is indeed quite small, although I did appear to have an upstairs section too. It's a very charming environment. Cosy, helped by the dim lighting and soft music. Not massively comfortable - the chairs and benches are hard wood with no padding - but certainly not uncomfortable.

The music policy was interesting. We went from a French chanson to Dire Straits, to a French standard, followed by Daft Punk (also French, granted). There was quite a funny moment when, of all French songs that could have come on, "Je t'aime... moi non plus" by Jane Birkin and Serge Gainsbourg started to play. If you think you don't know it, you do. Think French audio porn. Banned by the BBC (probably). A few seconds later the waitress decided it wasn't right for groups of strangers to listen to together whilst eating, and skipped the playlist to the next track!

To the food...

My French onion soup definitely looked the part. There was no doubt as to what it could be, served in a generously sized bowl. Deep brown, with an island of crouton and grated cheese in the middle. The soup was thick with ample slices of soft onion. The crouton (singular) didn't seem to soften in the soup in the slightest, which was no bad thing - I enjoyed the contrast in consistency. Although it's the traditional serving suggestion, I was somehow surprised to find cheese in the soup, but it worked well. The only thing that let this course down was that it was nowhere near hot. It was between lukewarm and warm. I'm not one to complain, although I'd imagine most other people would have flagged this up and asked for it to be heated up. I always just deal with it. Just the way it is. But I have no doubt that if I had flagged it up, it would have been dealt with swiftly and with apology. In any case, the soup was very tasty, helped by a generous dose of cracked black pepper.

If you hadn't seen the menu, you could have been forgiven for thinking Elle had ordered a samosa with brown sauce as a starter. The chicken and mushroom mixed with aioli mayo came encased in a triangular pastry shell. It was a decent starter... not exceptional, but decent. Pretty much as you'd expect chicken and mushroom in pastry to be. It was served on a generous helping of bordelaise sauce - a red wine and shallot sauce - with a small side salad. The dish was served as hot as you'd like.

It's probably the most predictable choice I could have made, but before I'd even looked at a menu I had pretty much already decided that I'd go for coq au vin. It's one of the most traditional of French dishes, and a safe bet. (To be fair, if beef bourguignon was an option, I'd be writing about that now...). This was listed on the menu as the "d'Alsace" variety. I wasn't really sure what the difference was at the time, but a quick look online now suggests that it might mean it's cooked in white wine, as opposed to red. But, as the photo above suggests, that was almost certainly not the case.

Anyway, I certainly can't fault the portion here. This was a very good sized piece of chicken, which was cooked perfectly. But clearly some time ago. This dish was served even cooler than the soup, which was really disappointing. And again, very poorly, I decided against raising the issue. The deeper I got into the chicken, the warmer I found the meat. Unfortunately the sauce the chicken was served with was long since lukewarm. The sauce itself wasn't particularly flavoursome, but I think that may have been more the dish itself than the way it had been made. I'm much more of a spice man, and this - along with much of French cuisine - was at the very other end of the spectrum. The chicken was topped with a good helping of bacon, the saltiness of which complemented the chicken and the sauce very well. And there was a good few, very tasty mushrooms around the chicken.

It was chicken and mushroom twice for Elle! But this time in a different formation. And the presentation was on point here - this looked like a really attractive meal, if a little on the small side. Chicken breast, sliced into four pieces, with a duxelle stuffing - mushrooms, shallots and herbs - served on dijonnaise sauce. This was a very tasty course, the stuffing in particular. But with the portion size here, it was a good move to order a side dish of French fries to share, which made this up to a main meal.

We decided on our dessert options after the first two courses. I'm not really a dessert man, nor do I usually have space for anything more than ice cream after two courses. So I went for the ice cream. Elle opted for the apple pie with cream. She got apple pie with ice cream instead. Unlike me, she did (quite rightly) raise this with the waitress (I, quite wrongly, would have left it again...) and the waitress very quickly rectified the issue, and was very apologetic. The cream came in a small dish, and was of the "skooshy" variety, as opposed to single or double cream.

The bill came quickly after asking. There was a slightly confusing aspect - the bill claimed 10% service was included in the final total. But after doing some maths we found that wasn't the case at all. I hope this isn't a mistake they make often, as they could be doing themselves out of a substantial amount of money.

I'm aware that a fair amount of this review is quite negative. And I don't like that. This is a restaurant very worth visiting. It's also well reviewed and rated. Maybe the issues mentioned above, particularly with the temperature of the dishes, was just symptomatic of a bad night. And maybe I'll man up a bit and actually politely raise issues when things aren't as they should be. That's the only way the restaurant can avoid them in the future.

Maybe it was the half bottle of wine each, but leaving the restaurant and stepping back onto Hogarth Street was almost like walking into a Bordeaux boulevard! (I'd imagine. I've never been.) It's a very small, cute, narrow, cobble-stoned street with small restaurants and cafes. And a big pub directly across the road. That was our next stop.