Bluebird Dining Room

Bluebird Dining Room

350 Kings Road, London SW3

Tel: 0845 345 1727

Type of food: Traditional British

Average cost per head, including wine - £40




The Bluebird Dining Room is Tom Conran’s sort-of reinvention of one part of his father’s empire, and the public part of the Bluebird Club. The plan was to encapsulate the spirit and glamour of the 20s and 30s and, on first glance, it’s not a bad approximation of such a vision.

My first reaction to the room was to scribble the word “divine” in my notebook. And it is. This is a great room, and a place that reeks of leisurely lunches, business deals, grand passions and, presumably, several combinations of the above. It’s a big space but feels intimate and well, classy. Yes, it’s a much-overused term but there’s no word more apt. The place feels classy. Even the dominance of the huge skylight - which must be glorious on summer days - is controlled by canny lighting, which draws the room in. The sum of the parts is that the Bluebird Dining Room feels as comfortable as an old leather armchair. Oh, and the tightrope walkers made of nuts and bolts are a witty contrast to the otherwise very industrial looking skylight.

This positive first impression continued through the bread - good, dense, crusty and well-flavoured - and the drinks list, which arrived with a flourish via the waiter who, like his colleagues, was of the unflappably pleasant and telepathically efficient variety. I mean, I don’t think I opened a door all evening. The drinks list is excellent, comprehensive and very British, covering everything from ginger beer (£3.75 a glass and very good according to my teetotal companion) to cider brandy. It also features nine different gins although it’s hard to see why they bother when you don’t get a choice if you order a G&T: not much of a complaint, as complaints go, but it did irk a little.

The menu also makes excellent reading in its fantastically, unashamedly British way. Even the font is reminiscent of an old music hall playbill, a suitably eccentric touch on a piece of A4 that celebrates British food to this extent. Ingredients include Innes Farm goats cheese, Cornish crab, Severn & Wye oak smoked salmon, Denham Estate Hampshire Mutton, Cairngorns venison, Loch Bevan lobster and Cheltenham beetroot. It feels that everything on the menu can trace its heritage, as if the list has been compiled by Burke’s Peerage. Then again, we’re in Chelsea so that’s entirely possible I suppose…

The combinations of these great British ingredients makes the menu one of the best reads I’ve had in a restaurant for some time. It’s a mouthwatering collection of dishes… which makes the execution all the more disappointing. Despite some fine individual ingredients - and I’m a great champion of British food, as anyone who’s followed me around Borough Market can testify - everything we ordered was found lacking.

Warm salad of smoked bacon, snails, duck hearts, watercress and parsnip crisps (£8.50) sounded like it should have exploded in little clusters of earthy flavours. It didn’t but was probably still more successful than my Warm potato drop scones, Cornish crab, landcress, crustacea oil (£10.50). When the potato scones are as strongly flavoured as the crab, you tend to think there’s a problem. Actually, given the strengths of the setting and the set-up, you tend to think it must be your own taste buds or just general bad luck, but future dishes were equally laid-back, flavour wise. And I seemed to have no problems savouring the excellent Riesling Beblenheim (£8.50) from the limited but impressive selection of wines by the glass.

Roast Cornish pollack, sprouting broccoli, Morecambe Bay cockles, mussels, shellfish liquor (£17.50) smelled authentically of the sea - as you’d expect! - but seemed underpowered on the tongue. As did my peppered Cairngorn venison cutlets, creamed cauliflower, bitter chocolate, winter truffles. The first mouthful hit the spot. The second and subsequent mouthfuls provided diminishing returns, with even the truffles appearing to hide somewhere in the mix. Again, it was up to the wine - a Crozes Hermitage for £6.50 - to provide noticeable flavours.

The final course lifted things briefly, with a thoroughly decent Crispin apple and pear crumble with clotted cream (£7) and Devils on horseback (£6) for my companion. Good coffee too, although the strength of the finish just made you rue the wasted opportunity that had gone before.


Food: 2/5
Service: 4/5
Atmosphere: 4/5
Value for money: 2/5

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