Sitting at Number 16 on Timeout’s 2008 London’s Top 50 Restaurants and being the ONLY michelin-starred Thai restaurant in Europe I was expecting something special from Nahm – the Thai restaurant located in The Halkin (hotel) in Belgravia. Apparently it features the best Thai chef in the world (and coincidentaly he comes from my part of the universe – Australia!) and though he lives mostly in Bangkok Timeout reckons he does visit London enough to keep the standards high at Nahm.

Being a Monday I wouldn’t have expected the restaurant to be extremely busy however when I walked in at just after 7.30pm I was surprised to see that Pat and Claire and I were the only diners! I think we were joined not too long after that by one other table but even by the time we left there were only two or three other tables filled so from that perspective I’d have to say that the atmosphere was a little lacking. On the flip side, maybe because of the lack of other diners, the service we received was impeccable from the time the door was opened for me to enter the restaurant to the explanation of the menu to the service we received thereafter during the meal. They explained to us several times that the whole concept behind Nahm was the experience of sharing the food and therefore the menu was split into several regions and, if you were of the mind, you could select dishes from all regions to share.

We ended up sharing four dishes an orange chilli and lemongrass squid dish, a roast duck salad, a sea bass green thai curry, and a sort of chilli pork with cashews. In terms of food and presentation I would actually rank the dishes in that order of preference. I liked the squid (though there was nothing extra-ordinary about it) and the duck salad was delicious but I was extremely disappointed with the sea bass green thai curry and the chilli pork. Both dishes were overly salted and I don’t know what was happening with the green thai curry but what was presented to us was just like a big puddle of soupy like curry sauce covering who knows what. Now I know when you get a thai curry it normally does swim in sauce but I did expect here at Nahm that the sea bass would be highlighted as feature in the dish and not hidden at the bottom beneath random ingredients that required us to dig around until we’d found the sea bass. In fact I’m fairly sure when both Claire and Pat first dug into the dish they didn’t come up with any sea bass at all! As for the chilli pork – it was surprisingly dry and tough.

Now where Nahm separates itself from its counterparts is in the selection of dishes on the menu. It is unlike any Thai restaurant you’ve been to so expect to experience something a bit different here. In particular the desserts are something out there. We all three went for different things on the menu – Claire went for glutinous rice and peanut balls in a warmed coconut soup with a side of shredded coconut, banana and corn, Pat went for pomegranites in some sort of coconut soup/syrup with a side of water chestnut, young coconuts and peanut sweet and I had jackfruit in a super sweet jasmine syrup with a side of shredded coconut, peanut and smoked or blackened coconut thingy (that’s right – quite technical – the pitcure speaks better than I can!)

Overall I’m not sure I would come back here. Granted its a michelin-starred restaurant and I think perhaps we didn’t get the full effect of the food as we didn’t really venture into all regions of the food and if we had perhaps the contrast effect of moving between soups, salads, curries, stir-fries and relishes would have given us a more rounded Thai meal. Further I think the prices are ridiculously high for Thai food (however high quality it purports to be) so from a value for money perspective I don’t think I could recommend it. There are a plus or two however – mainly in the very different selection of Thai dishes you’ll find here and also in the unique ingredients used in the dishes themselves.

The Financial Times have been running a promotion for the last two weeks which allowed you to dine at a fine dining restaurant for a maximum of £20.08. One of options was for a 2-course lunch at The River Cafe which is a one-star Michelin restaurant on the banks of the Thames and a restaurant we’ve had our eye on for a while. I’m not a Financial Times reader ordinarily but Jenny saw the deal on a website and of course we couldn’t overlook such an offer so for today we were Financial Times readers. Considering that dishes at The River Cafe average about £11-£12 for antipasti and primi meals and £27-£30 for secondi meals and even factoring in that we were likely to get a reduced fixed set meal the offer was a very good bargain.

We actually only found out about the deal a couple of days ago and were lucky to get a booking (even if it was for a late 2.15pm lunch which kind of worked out anyway …) Finding The River Cafe proved harder than we thought without an address and only an arrow on a streetmap.co.uk print out to guide the way (which pointed us in the wrong direction by the way!)

We did indeed receive a reduced menu for the FT Lunch though the Antipasti and Primi selections were mainly intact, it was only the Secondi options which was completely different from today’s A La Carte menu. The disadvantage to our late lunch was that the options that we really wanted such as the Vitello Tonnato (a poached veal covered with mayonnaise, tuna, anchovies, capers & parsley), Ravioli di Baccala (pasta stuffed with creamed stockfish with chilli, parsley & lemon) and Maiale ai Tegame (pork leg fillet, wrapped in coppa di Parma slow roast in Valpolicella with roast celeriac, potatoes and fennel) were sold out.

The menu, as you can see from the above descriptions, is pretty good at describing the dishes on offer almost to the point where it seems that they are trying to oversell the dishes or over-emphasise the particular ingredients they’ve used. For my selections I ended up going with Prosciutto di Parma con Polenta e Fegatini (grilled polenta with chicken livers cooked in Vecchia Romana with Prosciutto di Parma) as my starter and Coda di Rospo con Vongole (wood baked monkfish with claims, marjoram, trevise, potatoes & Vermentino.) Both complicated sounding dishes with some, to me anyway, unrecognisable ingredients. As expected the dishes came out presented impeccably. If only the taste lived up to the promise. I’m not saying the food was awful nor the ingredients of high quality – I just expected the package (flavour, texture etc.) to be a bit more challenging. Though the manner of the menu implied complexity the actual flavours were more simple than expected. For this reason only I was a little disappointed in my experience as mouth-watering it was not.

As for the other factors – I couldn’t complain at all about the service we received at The River Cafe – it was impeccable from start to finish. They have more than enough staff to cover staff who are otherwise occupied – from what seemed like more than ten chefs and assorted helpers in the kitchen, to the multitude of waiters in the restaurant to the multiple staff at the front desks so no diner was ever left out on a limb. The attention we received at lunch was perfect. The restaurant ambience was very buzzy – the high roof top meant that it was very noisy from the chatter in the restaurant and therefore surrounded us with a pulsing atmosphere. The restaurant is long with the kitchen/bar running down one side which allows the diners to have some sort of involvement in their meal.

In all honesty this is exactly the type of restaurant that food critics live for – simple food with complicated descriptions and sky-high prices. Almost the opposite of what I prefer.

19th on this year’s 50 Best Restaurants in the world and beaten only by The Fat Duck and Nobu in the UK, Hakkasan is a Chinese restaurant that exudes style and class by the oodles. A birthday, my brother’s, seemed like the perfect opportunity to test it out.

At first I thought that we weren’t going to be able to make our booking because a film crew had taken up residence on Hanway Place and the policeman who was “guarding” the entrance wasn’t letting anyone through. Luckily for us one of the crew realised that they were blocking access to the restaurant and quickly arranged for the blockade to move up slightly. I still don’t know what they were filming there, as Pat quickly dragged us away (clearly being stalkarazzi is not in the blood – ha ha), but it looked fairly intense and they were still at it when we left a few hours later.

But on to the restaurant.

At the entrance of Hakkasan you are met with two bouncer-esque characters who check your name on the reservation list. I’m not sure what their purpose is because there is a bar down stairs where you can wait for a table to become free when you don’t have a reservation and also, when you reach the bottom of the stairs, you are once again asked for your reservation details anyway. I guess it all adds to the experience.

The impact of Hakkasan is immediate – it is dark, yet shiny, with spot lighting on each of the tables and otherwise “night-club” lighting. The otherwise cavernous room is split into more intimate areas by large wooden poles which may or may not have been bamboo poles painted black. Its supposed to be a very modern take on the Chinese motiff. Unfortunately no photos allowed!

We were quickly seated at our table and the waiter immediately descended to ask if we wanted any drinks. At least he gave us a menu at the same time but please people – let us have a chance to check out the menu! The Hakkasan drinks menu was very impressive and contained a good balance of non-alcoholic and alcoholic cocktails not to mention a staggering wine list. When you check out some of the offerings its no wonder that people can easily spend hundreds, or even thousands, on one dinner here!

The food menu was also fairly impressive, with diverse and sometimes unique offerings, but surprisingly nothing shouted EAT ME which is terribly unusual for me not to mention the fact that the prices were outrageous if not unexpected.

As this was supposed to be a celebration we decided to go just a little bit crazy. We started with Jasmine Tea Smoked Organic Pork Ribs and Roast Mango Duck – both priced at just under £10. The Smoked Ribs were DIVINE. The sauce was perfect and the meat literally fell off the bone – making it very easy to eat even with chopsticks! The Duck was, honestly, a rip-off. No doubt it looked great but what we got in essence were thin slivers of duck (not the greatest tasting) and mango with quite a tart sauce which I think, rather than balance the dish, overpowered the flavour of the duck. So, going into the mains were were 1 for 2.

We had some difficult deciding on our dishes for our mains and ended up with Peking Style Duck, Roasted Sea Bass in Chinese Honey (at £38 our most expensive dish of the night) and Stir Fried Black Bean Vegetarian Prawns. The Sea Bass for me was the star of the mains which maintained the beautiful sea bass flavour coloured by a most delicious almost smokey honey flavour. The other two dishes were fairly average though I was quite entertained by the vegetarian prawn making a fairly good imitation of the actual thing. I still don’t know what it was made from though! This is not to say that the dishes weren’t good in their own way but nothing extraordinary which, at the prices being charged, I was expecting.

To my surprise there was nothing on the dessert menu that we were interested in, even if we could fit more food into our very full bellies. Instead we opted for a second round of non-alcholic cocktails – very yummy.

Shockingly Hakkasan imposes a 13% (!) service charge on the bill which took our dinner to just over £120 for the two of us. Considering we didn’t have any alcohol this was pricey indeed, though also very much expected. I guess they needed that much service to cover all the waiters and waitresses that seemed to be all over the place and maybe to cover the cost of the girl whose sole job appeared to be to open the door to the restrooms (!) because we certainly didn’t receive service that was fantastic. It was just okay.

Overall Hakkasan is definitely a place to be experienced at least once but my recommendation would be to save it for a special occasion though if you’re minted, well, I guess you could make it an everyday experience!