Dining Out 058: The French House
Dinner in Soho.
I have lived in London for almost ten years now (Jesus fucking Christ) and in that time I have actually been pretty shit at going to the places you’re ‘supposed’ to go to – I’ve never been on a candlelit date at Andrew Edmunds, never had a quick lunch at Roti King, or a fry up at E. Pellicci. And until last week, I’d also never eaten at The French House.
The French House – that is, the ‘iconic’ pub in Soho where lager only comes by the half and standing in the smoking area feels like being pleasantly kettled – is a well-known London institution. The upstairs dining room is compact, and serves a menu that falls somewhere between French standards and pub food – scallops, paté, fish, chips and so on. On Thursdays it is, informally, steak night*, so after booking a month or so ahead, I ended up visiting on the hottest day of the year so far for steak frites, madeleines and a lot of wine.
It won’t surprise you to hear that the food was great to the point of being pretty much perfect. For three people, we ordered two scallops and an asparagus dish, which were great, but it was the mains and dessert which were the most special. We ordered steak frites three times – three 8oz rump steaks, with green salad and, of course, fries.
I ordered my steak medium rare, and that is exactly how it arrived – cross hatched from the grill on the outside, and just bloody enough inside. The meat was tender and buttery in a way that you always want from a steak, but that doesn’t always come off because it takes such an expert touch. The salad was sharp, with a few rings of shallot, and the frites came as frites always should: all three portions we’d ordered in one massive bowl that you could take fistfuls out of if you wanted to (I did want to). Each chip was uniformly golden, uniformly crunchy, in a way that reminded me that potato can be an art form if you treat it good enough.
Dessert was a half dozen madeleines – which always make me bark like an absolute dog whenever they’re on a menu; these ones were big, warm, and had crisp, lacy edges – with lemon curd, and a chocolate mousse that gracefully toed the tightrope between airy and rich (of course because I am nothing if not a pervert, the madeleines quickly got used to mop up the mousse. Pleasure is important).
It was all genuinely wonderful, the type of meal that most of us eat very rarely, just brilliantly done with total enjoyment clearly at the very front of the chefs’ minds. But I don’t think when you opened this review you really wanted or needed me to tell you that the food at The French House is incredibly good – everyone knows that, even the people who have never eaten there. What makes it a truly special place to spend some time, however – on top of that blinding steak – is the hospitality.
The dining room is covered in photo frames, and there are little nicknacks everywhere (in this way it reminded me of my Italian grandmother’s living room, only The French House is not decked out with images of Pope John Paul II and Padre Pio). From the minute we walked in, this homely feel was reflected in the way we were welcomed in.
We were shown our table and told the specials conversationally rather than formally, which I liked, because we felt put at ease right away – when we were ordering dessert, our waiter even sat down with us for a bit for a chat. There were so many little touches with the food and drink, too, that just brought the whole thing up from “good” to “inexplicably lovely” – the wine recommendation was knowledgeable but not wanker-y in the slightest, and because the starters both came with loads of sauce, once the first round of bread had been used for mopping, a second arrived wordlessly, right on cue. It was kind of like the staff had been keeping an eye on us and anticipating our needs, as if they were playing The Sims really nicely.
The fries were served with whatever condiments you wanted (ketchup, eggy mayo, Dijon mustard that got me right by the throat, like Phil Mitchell collaring someone up a wall on Eastenders), and despite the fact that I was eating food that was, clearly, technically brilliant, I didn’t feel once like I needed to sit up straight or lower my voice, as many more self-serious places seem to require.
Institutions get names for themselves for a reason, of course, largely because there’s at least one thing about them that absolutely can’t be replicated. The food at The French House is brilliant – I’ve truly never had chips like it – but the atmosphere is even better: if you could bottle it and spray it about like a Glade aerosol, you’d be a very rich person indeed.
* I wanted to make a joke here about how it’s the same at Wetherspoons, but Thursdays there, of course, is Curry Club.
Dining Out is written by Lauren O’Neill and illustrated by Lucy Letherland. Weekly reviews are free to read every Thursday, and you can follow us on Instagram here, but if you’d like to see more, you can subscribe for £5 a month or £50 a year, to get extra content every second Sunday.
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