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Casa Cruz restaurant Notting Hill review & Prince Harry, David ...
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Foodies arriving at the Casa Cruz in Notting Hill may not realise it, but they're walking into a 20-year chunk of London's gastronomic history.
It provided the bons vivants of increasingly trendy W11 with seared meat until the recession hit like a crashing private jet and, in 2009, Worrall Thompson had to close it for financial reasons.
Now look at the place: it's the first London eating-house of Juan Santa Cruz, a Chilean-born, Boston-educated, former investment banker who has three Ritzy restaurants in Buenos Aires: Aldo's, Isabel and the original Casa Cruz.
The menus are clamped on to orange leather the precise shade of Hermes packaging, and offer dishes which are pleasingly simple: the charming, Old Etonian, French-Irish manager, Francois O'Neill, told us they use no butter or oil, the meat comes from Argentina via Belgium, and the main secret of the cooking is a Josper Grill.
From three fish and three meat main courses, I had blackened chichen, dished up in hefty slices, the breast taut and lacerated with Cajun peppers and paprika, with a side-sauce of chicken stock, cream and what the waiter grudgingly called "mixed spices."
Fay Maschler reviews Casa Cruz | London Evening Standard
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Sitting in the flattering glow from backlit horizontal copper panels in the ground-floor dining area adjacent to a copper bar and discussing the “copper” on the door, it dawns on us that all the assemblies in the first course are either raw or cold.
To accompany pre-dinner drinks — cocktails are a thing here, with a cool barman grooving and shaking at the copper bar — we order from the sheet entitled Para Picar (loosely translates as snacks or nibbles) six soft-boiled quails’ eggs with salts [sic], crudités with a horseradish dip and a circular tower of brioche strafed with caramelised onion and topped with a lump of melting butter.
Straightforward: tomatoes in salt, pepper and a drizzle of oil at Casa Cruz I use the time to rule out certain choices.
“It’s ceviche for the girls, steak for the guys,” says one of my chums, crisply summing up both the ethos and the list, and he is vindicated by orders of raw wild bass + cucumber + lime + rapeseed oil; raw tuna + avocado + wasabi + spiced crunch; steak tartare + seeds + melba toast and — for a renegade chap — globe artichoke + mustard vinaigrette.
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