Tracey MacLeod reviews

Saturday, October 25, 2008 - Vanilla Black is without doubt the best vegetarian restaurant I've been to in this country. It's certainly the poshest...And here's the amazing thing: not only does the stylish interior offer no hint of scrubbed pine, but the chef really knows what he's doing. The cooking is refined, adventurous and presented with an artist's eye for shape and colour. Heritage vegetables and artisan British cheeses are lovingly incorporated into dishes which – oh happy day – are hardly brown at all, and completely sludge free.

Saturday, September 27, 2008 - The long and flexible menu couldn't be more defiantly British if it painted its face blue and jumped out at you with a stick. The normal brasserie offerings – oysters, shellfish, salads and grills – are joined by a variety of potted seafood and cold meats, including ox tongue and jellied ham with piccalilli. Old cookbooks have been dusted off to find interesting dishes such as braised beef ribs with 17th-century spices and Country Captain, a fruity Anglo-Indian chicken curry, and there are simple gastropub staples, including fish pie, sausage and mash and fish and chips.

Saturday, September 13, 2008 - The Modern Pantry is a clever name; the "modern" promising freshness and originality, while the "pantry", with its whiff of stored spices and dry goods, carries the reassurance of old-fashioned values. That duality is reflected in the design; the downstairs café has good Georgian bone structure, emphasised by a trad grey paint job, candles guttering in tall windows and down-lights modelled on fluted copper moulds...

Saturday, August 02, 2008 - Of course this is a special-occasion kind of place – I can't imagine business diners tolerating this level of interference – but we left feeling that the food, although good, doesn't quite live up to all the worshipful rigmarole that surrounds it. Over-seasoned, over-attentive and over here, was my facile summary. Karen's was more tactful: "It was lovely, but I don't think we'll be coming back soon."

Saturday, December 01, 2007 - As at Pied à Terre, behind the relatively straightforward descriptions lies modern French cooking of some complexity and technical mastery. The setting here may be more informal but the food at this Pied is as manicured and polished as the original. Foams, emulsions, pures and beignets adorn the dishes, and mystery ingredients abound, inspiring mild panic in Kevin, who kept chasing unknown herbs around his plate yelping, "It's tarragon! Or is it lemon thyme?"