Cafe Monico

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Inspired by the original Cafe Monico, established nearby in 1877, we offer shellfish, pastas, salumi, grilled meats and fish in a traditional brasserie setting.

Our drinks menu features classic cocktails, traditional aperitifs and a large selection of vermouth's.

Please see our menu for this season's selection.

http://www.cafemonico.com

Restaurant Review: Café Monico on Shaftesbury Avenue

The Soho House group brings art deco French glamour to Piccadilly in collaboration with culinary veteran Rowley Leigh Café Monico only opened in April but already feels like a classic.

The latest membership-free venture from the Soho House group, Café Monico offers festivity without exclusivity, with a Mediterranean menu dishing up French and Italian favourites.

Café Monico executes Leigh’s smart comfort cooking with delicious precision.

Leigh has resurrected his signature Parmesan custard with anchovy toast, an iconic dish from Le Café Anglais, which is gloriously rich, wobbly and thoroughly British.

“Not another Soho House,” cried some critics when Café Monico opened, but why fix what isn’t broken?

Cafe Monico restaurant review

The buzzCafe Monico is the latest outpost from the Soho House group, newly opened this month on Shaftesbury Avenue.

Eventually sold off, the Soho House group decided to revert the property to its original name in tribute to the brothers that first made it so successful.

Unlike the group's flagship houses, you don't require a membership to book a table (much like their other restaurants Cecconi's, Chicken Shop and Hoxton Grill).

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below Menu highlightsChef Rowley Leigh took inspiration from Provence through to Northern Italy when devising a menu that paid tribute to the restaurant's European heritage.

The venue boasts one of the most extensive selections of vermouth you've ever seen (and the knowledgable staff will happily give recommendations), while the cocktail list - complete with Soho House classics alongside French and Italian specialties - is worth the visit alone.Perfect for... Work breakfasts or lunch meetings by day, and a good quality catch up with friends come evening.Book it Cafe Monico, 39-45 Shaftesbury Avenue, London, W1D 6LA; cafemonico.com***MORE LIKE THIS

Café Monico: Rowley Leigh joins forces with Soho House to create ...

1987, the year Marco Pierre White’s Harveys, Simon Hopkinson’s Bibendum, Ruth Rogers’s and Rose Gray’s River Café and Rowley Leigh’s Kensington Place all opened.”

A man I admire and shyly love, who also came of age in 1971, is collaborating with Soho House in the creation of Café Monico in Shaftesbury Avenue, not far from the original restaurant of that name on Piccadilly Circus owned by Giacamo and Battista Monico.

The all-day brasserie menu at Café Monico is a beau ideal of an Italo-French list, with wide appeal, luxury as birthright, enough reassurance but also a dash of daring.

We get a kick out of intrepidly spiced pineapple topped with vanilla ice cream plus batons of pain perdu (eggy bread) in custard and the Coupe Pavlova with meringue, crème Chantilly, strawberry sauce and passion fruit could have been created deliberately to exemplify indulgence.

Indeed, the women in black dresses with little white pinnies, their hair in high swishing ponytails, could effectively furnish a Victorian fantasy about the appeal of dressage.

Cafe Monico, London, W1, review

Rowley Leigh’s Kensington Place was, arguably (and do, please, come and have a go if you think you’re hard enough), the most egalitarian fayn-dayner of the late Eighties/early Nineties.

On any given lunchtime, back in the day, one might bump into me, my pa and Princess Diana; never necessarily – or indeed ever – together, but nonetheless gathered in neighbourly simultaneity behind Kensington Church Street’s plate glass, somehow not minding that west London’s (alf)alpha lunch venue had the worst acoustics in the capital.

My father still recalls The Alleged Day Diana Winked at him, while she was dining with girlfriends.

Exiled from London in the mid-Noughties, I only tipped up a couple of times at Leigh’s subsequent Café Anglais, which opened in 2007, just ahead of the recession.

The charmless Bayswater mall, Whiteleys, was and is not the venue for big, shiny, buzzily-glam multi-cover brasserie-cum-event he was clearly aiming to create.

Cafe Monico, London W1: 'A celebration of safe' – restaurant review ...

On board as consultant chef is Rowley Leigh, that rarest of creatures, the chefs’ chef: his Kensington Place was at the forefront of the capital’s 80s culinary renaissance, wowing pie-crust-bloused princesses with foie gras and sweetcorn pancakes.

(There are shades of his later gig, Le Cafe Anglais, on Cafe Monico’s modern brasserie menu, notably parmesan custard with anchovy toast.)

French onion soup has admirable quantities of stretchy, melted gruyère, but the stock is underpowered and the crouton too fresh, so it disintegrates into a kind of oniony bread sauce.

Blades of perky endive are laden with roquefort butter, a nice, Fanny Cradock-esque conceit, but – and I can’t believe I’m saying this – there’s waaay too much butter, piped on to the leaves in a Rabelaisian, gullet-clogging way.

And manager Mariano Camerlingo (ex of the same group’s Dean Street Townhouse), a charming, old school Neapolitan schmoozer.