The best new restaurants

Set in the groovy surroundings of Ian Schrager's Sanderson hotel, Spoon+ is one of the cheekiest and priciest restaurants to open in London recently. 'A bit DIY' is perhaps the pithiest characterisation of the Spoon+ offer. Alain Ducasse is the most famous chef in the world and probably feels he can get away with creating a restaurant where you basically knit your own dinner. It works on a mix-and-match system: pick your salad, say iceberg, your dressing, say blue cheese, and your topping, say prawns. Apply this across an entire menu: for example, roasted chicken wings with, say, tandoori sauce and, say, wok-saut?ed vegetables, and that is Spoon+. It's the sort of thing that annoys serious foodies, and I love it.

Sanderson, 50 Berners Street, W1 (020 7300 1444)
Review

Monte's

Alain Ducasse may have moved into the Sanderson but he has moved out of Monte's, the slick Sloane Street dining club where he used to be a consultant chef. Instead, the kitchen here is now superintended by a chef from the other end of the gastro-spectrum: TV's Jamie 'Pukka' Oliver. Much to my surprise, I can seriously recommend lunch at Monte's. I was impressed by the grilled Scottish scallops, before which I ate a warm salad of charred squid with baked cannellini beans, served with fresh chilli, wild rocket and Puglian olive oil. The food is nice, gently robust, modern (but not aggressively so), eminently orderable and surprisingly honest.

164 Sloane Street, SW1 (020 7245 0896)
Review

Foliage

I will get the bad news out of the way first. Adam Tihany, an American decorator, has taken the wonderful dining-room at the Hyde Park Hotel and wrecked it: splitting it up to create a pair of restaurants and imbuing each with a tedious, expensive, identikit modernity. Foliage could be in any smart hotel anywhere in the world. Now the good news: Foliage is in Knightsbridge and it offers some of the best, smart, modern food in London, probably the world. I still remember my first dinner of poached Scottish lobster, vinaigrette of crab, confit tomatoes and caviar dressing; grilled fillets of red mullet, Proven?al vegetables, confit of ratte potatoes, new-season asparagus; and pineapple tarte Tatin with Tahitian vanilla-yoghurt sorbet. Exquisite. Even traditionally heavy dishes such as foie gras or saddle of lamb are rendered with a quite stunning lightness of touch.

Mandarin Oriental Hyde Park, 66 Knightsbridge, SW1 (020 7201 3723)
Review

Admiralty

Oliver Peyton is a nice man and an innovative restaurant operator. With Admiralty, it seems he endorses the maxim that heartiness is next to artiness. I first came here for a quiet dinner and left defeated by the sheer scale of the eating. The organic vegetables and selection of regional starters is in fact an epic procession of crudit?s: if you still have an appetite after such a monumental first course I would recommend something like a pot-roasted squab pigeon with garlic and fresh thyme and French-style peas, or a saut?ed black-leg chicken with a sauce of morels. Then you will want to tuck into the impressive tarte Tatin, a pudding so generously proportioned that it is only served for two. After which I suggest a nice lie-down.

Somerset House, The Strand, WC2 (020 7845 4646)
Review

High Holborn

For those who are not old enough to remember, David Cavalier was a London superchef before Jamie Oliver was in his teens. In his time, he scooped a Michelin star for his cooking at two restaurants. Front-of-house is superintended by Christophe, formerly of Morton's and the Mirabelle. They are a good team: Christophe talks up the food with an almost messianic fervour - he speaks of the flavours singing off the plate - and Cavalier delivers. Nage of seafood, helped along by a generous dollop of decent caviar, is certainly an enjoyable and harmonious chorus of tastes. And the sweetness of a dish of roast scallops chimed most tunefully with a meaty wild-mushroom ravioli. The basement bar is a great bonus: it is equipped with plump, vaguely Art Deco leather sofas and an extremely competent cocktail barman - a good place to obliterate the world's woes.

95-96 High Holborn, WC1 (020 7404 3338)
Review