L’Art du Fromage is one of a new wave of restaurants specialising in cheese. Jenny and I were taking advantage of a groupon offer of £15 for £40 worth of food. The deal sounded like it was too good to be true – and it was! I don’t think groupon agreed the conditions of the deal properly with the restaurant as it ended up being that we could only use one voucher between two people, and then actually, only one diner could use the voucher. I could understand where the restaurant was coming from – they would lost a lot of money which a newly opening business could ill-afford.

Firstly starting with the negatives. They don’t do soft drinks! Jenny wanted a Coke and they didn’t have that on the menu. Instead the only non-wine drink was juice … priced at £5! Yikes.

But that was only really the only negative if I’m honest. Even with the deal we ended up being able to share our food anyway – provided one of us paid for a course (or two). We chose a starter of Brie de Meaux pane being Brie de Meaux cheese coated with breadcrumbs, served on a red fruit coulis, with lamb’s lettuce, confit shallots and pine nuts salad This dish was really lovely quite a good combination and the amount of brie we got was rather generous.

For mains we opted for Tartes flambées with sliced ham and cep mushrooms and obviously we had to go for a cheese dish. The raclette cheese with baby potates, dry meat/charcuterie and pickles won over the fondue – just because the fondue sounded like it would be too much cheese …. The Tartes flambees (basically a pizza but a “sauce” of crème fraiche rather than tomato sauce) was amazing. I could have eaten it all night – the caramelised onions went amazingly with the ham and mushrooms. Gorgeous. The raclette was yummy too but Jenny and I felt way overdosed on cheese just halfway through it.

Despite being over-cheesed out we had to have some dessert .. if only to balance out the cheese. Heh heh.

The restaurant is very intimate and small. Service was good without being overbearing – the manager is very friendly. It’s a shame the restaurant is in a bit of an awkward location – not really closely located to any tube station it requires reliance on bus transportation … which tonight did not go our way as with traffic we were nearly 45 minutes late … but other than that I would definitely recommend dining here. Especially for the Tartes flambees!