Six Portland Road
Holland Park, London
Neighbourhood restaurants are all the more valuable in the districts of a sprawling city, binding the immediate community together, but also exercising a magnetic pull to a wider field. Holland Park's Six Portland Road is a classic of the genre, just off the opulent Avenue in a residential street. It's a small space that quickly feels full, but with no undue sense of being cramped; it also exudes warm bonhomie as soon as you step through the heavy drape and hang your coat on the hook. Open every day, it covers all bases with a prix-fixe lunch menu during the week, and diner-friendly Sundays of roasts and crumbles. Charcuterie from Islington's Cobble Lane makes a good appetiser, perhaps fennel salami with cornichons, alongside some buttered soda bread. Brixham crab royale is kitted out with keta caviar, lemon and dill, and served with blackened charcoal crackers – or there might be a warming, mustardy cauliflower soup. Darne of brill is carefully cut, its skin crisped, the flesh flawlessly timed, and the accompaniments a distant relative of cassoulet (including butter beans and fatty breadcrumbs). Teamed with some expertly tempura-style samphire, it's hard to imagine how it could be improved on. From the set lunch comes a plate of morteau sausage with cabbage and beetroot slaw, but also an unexpectedly starry main course of dry-aged shorthorn sirloin, its fat layer virtually crackled, with skinny chips and a pot of mildly herby béarnaise. To finish, there could be carrot cake, invitingly dressed with cream cheese and cracked cardamom, or a rhubarb and almond tarte fine with good vanilla ice cream. A decent wine selection by the glass has some obvious highlights – don't miss the flinty Raimbault Sancerre – but they already had us at aperitif stage when the house Champagne, a Blanc de Noirs from Amyot in the Aube, arrived in rule-busting, old-school saucers.
