soho | Fork & Talk

Bob Bob Ricard came as a natural choice when picking a venue to celebrate my Russian friend’s upcoming nuptials. What a perfect excuse to wear a cocktail dress, pop on some heels and head to Soho!

Opulent – good word to describe the interior. Huge flower bouquets spilling out of their vases on every corner, mesmerizing glistening tiles that adorn the floors, mirrors and bright coloured leather in the dining room. It’s oligarch’s dream and quite possibly the most good-looking restaurant i have ever been to. A lot of time has also been spent in the lady’s room admiring black bird print wallpaper and the gold accessories. Perfect backdrop for the classic ‘bathroom selfie’.

British/Russian menu is no short of oligarch dishes like caviar and lobster. On the same page you will find uber traditional dishes like Russian vareniki (which we all ordered with no exception) and British cottage pie.

I am not sure you can translate traditional Russian dishes to the microscopic modernist portions without losing it’s original heartiness and feel good factor. The whole point is that in Russia we love to eat and always serve dinner generously, so when I was presented with there tiny dumplings i couldn’t help but have a little chuckle with my friends over the fact how ridiculous that looked. But no matter the portion size, food was absolutely delicious.

We have thoroughly enjoyed our mains and side dishes. constantly poking our forks into each others plates. My beef onglet with onion, watercress and truffle puree was dreamy. 28 day aged scotch beef was like butter to slice.

The others ordered salmon tartare which was season to perfection, lobster macaroni & cheese which was too hard to resist and grilled lemon sole, that was a chunky piece of fish perfected by brown butter.

No special occasion is ever complete without desert, and so all five of us tucked our spoons into Dulce de Leche creme brûlée, trio of sorbet and a chocolate fondant.

Of course we couldn’t resist pressing THE BUTTON. We wondered what will happen when we do…Will there be fireworks? Will there be music?

As soon as we let go of the button, our waitress with speed of light appeared handling a bottle of rose Champagne. How fun!…and that’s pretty much it.

As we were getting ready to leave atmosphere was getting more party-like and crowd more rowdy.

Unfortunately we didn’t get to dance in their new club room. I am sure that’s a lot of fun, especially if you are pressing for champagne.. all night long!

Photography by Nata Nova.
Follow her amazing work here:
https://instagram.com/romanovadesign

Bob Bob Ricard
1 Upper James St, London W1F 9DF
www.bobbobricard.com

‘Viva la Mexico….’ is all I could say when I saw an old sex shop in Soho being converted into a restaurant. What a wonderful idea to have the shop front remain the same to fit in with the Soho grime and convert the inside into something not so seedy. This would have passers by in a daze as to why young families were popping in with their kids, what a free thinking world???

Alas, if you didn’t fancy the questionable looks of going into this hidden eatery you could use the other entrance (less fun). The sex shop front only opens at 6pm when the neon lights come alive and there definitely is a difference between the two restaurants. The Compton St tame entrance has a more modern interior and the dirty shopfront entrance is a bit more rustic and charming. Service is friendly, charming and personal which I do like about this place, waiters genuinely offering their opinions on dishes as well as asking about your plans for the day and popping in their own suggestion of what you could get up to in central.

The cocktails are divine. I can’t remember the last time I had such a tasty mock-tail.

Food is a bit hit and miss and well I think there were more misses than hits to be 100% honest. The nacho starters were great and the guacamole was one of the freshest and finest, so much so I can probably say that they are rivalling Chipotle here. However, then you have to question how can someone get nachos wrong and can this really be the only silver lining of the food here especially when the nachos are probably not made in house.

To start with we had pulled lamb tacos which were £18 for 3. I think this is actually rather over priced. We had one taco each which was enough for two bites and it wasn’t the most heaviest in flavours. I am rather sensitive to salt and am never one to add salt to food so I needed to ask Elena and our friend Vish what they thought of the salt content and both thought the taco was overly salty making it not so enjoyable. Not the best start but it kept us knocking back the drinks which increased the tab so maybe there is a thought process behind it.

For mains Elena and I ordered the Huevous Rancheros with stripped beef. Now, I love this classic Mexican breakkie dish and fell in love with it in Mexico and the Hotbox brunch version of it. Huevous Rancheros is a baked all in one dish with black beans, corn fritters, eggs, cheese and guacamole, please don’t expect this for the La Bodega Negra version. I am always open to developments of dishes as long as they are an improvement. This dish was not an improvement, the only flavour I could taste was salt, again I checked to ensure it wasn’t me being sensitive but Elena couldn’t finish her dish due to how salty it was. The meat was nice but rather on the fatty side which meant again there were bits that couldn’t be eaten. Upon investigation it came to light that the black beans were the culprits of the excess saltiness in our system but it was hard to avoid the black beans as they were covering the base of the plate so were covering all the other bits of the dish.

Our fried Vish had the chicken fajitas which looked really impressive with the heap of colours and condiments. It looked like fun having to pop each fajitas together. After trying the fajitas we can say it was nothing to rave about. Saltiness was less so than the rest of the dishes we had tried but again it was very apparent in the seasoning of the chicken.