The Social

The Social - restaurant and bar in Willesden Green, serving great tapas and cocktails

Bar, tapas and cocktails in the heart of Willesden Green

http://www.thesocialnw2.com

Brigade Bistro

Pollen Street Social - Wikipedia

Pollen Street Social is a restaurant in London, England, run by chef Jason Atherton.

It was Atherton's first UK solo restaurant, and in 2011 was named the best new UK restaurant by the Good Food Guide, and the best new fine-dining restaurant in London by Time Out.

[1] The name came from the location of the restaurant, and Atherton described the "social" name saying, "I spend quite a lot of time in New York, and places like Stanton Social are popping up; and it's based around people being able to use a fine-dining restaurant for anything they want, not just for the food, but for the atmosphere, for the Champagne, for the private areas, for the bar.

[4] Elements from Pollen Street Social have been introduced to other restaurants run by Atherton.

These include the dessert bar, which has been replicated in Atherton's Singapore based Pollen restaurant.

Social Wine & Tapas, restaurant review: 'The best tapas joint I've ...

I've been to dozens of tapas bars and seen the concept debased to mean a restaurant serving lots of dishes on small plates, to be eaten with knife and fork – the equivalent of having five or six starters and paying large bills for doing so.

Social Wine & Tapas is the best tapas joint I've ever encountered outside Spain, because it gets the emphases right: this is, basically, a very fancy wine bar with a long menu of small dishes to share while trying umpteen wines in small 125ml servings.

Mme Patry is responsible for odd little touches, like the tape-loop voice giving a lecture on wine maintenance that greets you in the lavatory, and the generic funk on the PA system.

My gourmet friend Chris Hirst and I were told to try one shared dish from each of six courses – Hams, Cheese, Eggs, Vegetables, Fish and Seafood, and Meat.

We began with an orgy of piggery jiggery-pokery: Basque-region ham croquettes resembling arancini balls, a jamon-manchega toastie with quail's eggs (basically a croque monsieur with a touch of Brideshead), Cecina salami and fat slices of Iberico bellota derived from acorn-fed porkers in the mountains around Seville.

Social Wine & Tapas restaurant review: Jason Atherton's best yet ...

Yet at the top end it almost reaches the sophistications of Marylebone, Wigmore Hall and Daunts bookshop, and it’s here that Jason Atherton has launched his most pleasing concept yet — a perfection of the wine bar of old, serving tapas-style food, managed by his chief sommelier Laure Patry, with Frankie van Loo, formerly producing such enjoyable food at Social Eating House, as head chef.

Likewise, salt-baked beetroots (£5.50), of pleasingly different hues, in a red wine and pine nut dressing, enhanced by some sweet, reduced almost to jam, beetroot mush, came with chunks of yummy “sairass” — which is to say, a light sheep’s milk ricotta, or “you” cheese, as our handsome waiter (the guys wear funky leather-trimmed aprons) tried hard to explain to us.

The starter red, Corbières, Petit Fantet d’Hyppolite, Ollieux-Romanis 2013, is a really vibrant Languedoc at £4.50 a glass — and the Pollen Street Social house wines, Clos de L’Elu, Anjou, at £6.50 a glass both red and white, have always been good value.

Atherton — also opening a Japanese place at the former Turnmills on Clerkenwell Road soon — has long seemed to me to excel his mentor Gordon Ramsay, in professionalism and perfectionism, yet I’ve always preferred his relatively informal restaurants (Little Social in Poland Street) to his grander establishments (I admired, rather than enjoyed, his fine dining flagship City Social in Richard Seifert’s horror Tower 42 in Old Broad Street).

Social Wine & Tapas is, to me, his most enjoyable creation yet: the wine bar in excelsis.

Restaurant: Social Eating House, London W1 | Life and style | The ...

And (a lonely voice, this) I don't love Ramsay alumnus Jason Atherton's Pollen Street Social.

Because the food, from Paul Hood, previously Atherton's head chef at Pollen Street and now a partner, is great.

Even bar snacks can't raise a sneer: perfectly crisp, fried chipirones with slivers of green chilli; and pork sliders – cushiony buns, pork with Chinese spicing, fine coleslaw.

It's a punchbowl of different ingredients that manages to end up being quintessentially Soho, with warm, assured service and wonderful food.

• Social Eating House 58 Poland Street, London W1, 020-7993 3251.

Social Eating House, London: restaurant review | Life and style | The ...

Atherton's first solo venture in Mayfair, Pollen Street Social, gathered a devoted fan base and now, a few years later, come two more: a bistro called Little Social, which opened in March opposite the mother ship, and the more recent Social Eating House in Soho.

A salad of crab, lettuce and tomato – a little cringingly called a CLT – displayed that most virtuous of cheffy skills: the ability to make ingredients taste intensely of themselves, in this case the tomatoes.

Both the mains were grand notions – a tranche of hake with an Indian-spiced crust alongside roasted cauliflower; a piece of lamb's neck with potatoes whipped to within an inch of their lives, and spun through with ricotta alongside lots of garlic and parsley.

Desserts were mostly whipped things: a take on a brandy Alexander, with crisp bits of this and that beaten into the boozy cream and sugar; a chocolate mousse with a tidy little chocolate éclair filled with salted-caramel ice cream.

But the Social Eating House needs more than a little tuning to become the brilliant showcase it could be for a great cook's food.