Restaurant reviews, including Michelin Guide and Good Food Guide, Hardens Restaurant Guide

If you're yet to enjoy the Pied à Terre experience, it's always useful to read recent restaurant reviews before making a reservation with us.

2007 Awards

2008 Awards

2009 Awards

International Accolades

2010 Restaurant Awards

2010 Restaurant Reviews from professional reviewers and diners

Bloomberg
Osborn, 38, took over as head chef at Pied à Terre in December 1999 and won a Michelin star in 2003. He was the first Australian to gain Michelin status. The second star followed a year later for Osborn's modern European fare, including dishes such as best end of salt-marsh lamb with roasted peppers, braised lamb-shank sandwich, aubergine caviar and rosemary sauce. The Australian chef attributes his love of food to his mother's simple home cooking and to the French-influenced cuisine he came across in Perth in the late 1980s. His cooking is pure, though far from simple. He uses fine ingredients and brings to them intelligence and creativity while eschewing the extremes of fusion and the schlock of the new.

Intimate Class
In terms of comparisons, the architect Norman Foster comes to mind as much as chefs such as Gordon Ramsay, for whom Osborn has worked. Osborn's dishes are beautifully engineered.

The restaurant itself is low key, almost anonymous. It nestles on Charlotte Street, and is easily missed. Pied à Terre is housed in a narrow building, with two dining rooms on the ground floor, a bar upstairs and a private dining room above.

The tables are well spaced. It's intimate without feeling crowded. There are lovely large banquettes in the back dining room, though the design is generally underwhelming and it's only the menu that sets the pulse racing. The front of the house is run by David Moore, co-owner of the restaurant with Osborn.

There's an eight-course tasting menu, or À la carte. There are seven starters and seven main courses. Various amuse-gueules take the tasting menu into double figures in terms of courses. Over two nights, my guests and I managed to try most of the dishes on offer.

Osborn's first cookbook, focuses on starters and snacks and the canapés served at Pied à Terre are superb. There's a deep-fried snail in the lightest of batters; a pumpkin profiterole so fine, the contents spurted across my guest's shirt at first bite; smoked salmon with horseradish mousse and foie gras parfait with poppy-seed crisps.

Caramel Sweetbread
Among the starters, caramelized veal sweetbread with honey-braised turnip and almond sauce tasted as intense as it sounds. Curry-poached Falmouth oysters with potato blinis, iceberg lettuce and cauliflower cream triumphed through subtlety.

Scallops "ceviche" with avocado and creme fraiche puree, sesame filo pastry and olive oil was an erotic gherkin of a dish, a miniature tower bulging with flavors, textures and colors.A standout among the main courses we tried was roasted saddle of rabbit with Pommery mustard sauce, ravioli of confit leg and foie gras. The rabbit had been steamed to melting point, wrapped in the finest sliver of carrot and briefly pan-fried. If I were a rabbit, I might feel honored to be part of such a work of culinary art.

A dish of poached lobster with potato and Parmesan gnocchi,green olive and vanilla justified its 10-pound supplement with a generous portion and harmonious flavors. Like all the dishes,enormous care had been taken in presentation. It was a melt-in-the-mouth dish my guest was talking about two days later.

Beyond Chocolate
On the night we dined À la carte, there was a lengthy wait, perhaps 30 to 40 minutes, for the desserts. These included one of Osborn's signature dishes, bittersweet chocolate tart, macadamia-nut mousse and stout ice cream.

One of my guests ran out of superlatives to describe the intensity of the chocolate experience. He finally said it was beyond chocolate. The sommelier paired it with Pedro Ximenez, a sherry so rich, it tastes like Christmas pudding. The French sommelier, Mathieu Germond, offered adventurous choices that worked well without breaking the bank. There was a light Austrian red, Pittnauer 2003, made with the blaufrankisch grape, that was excellent value at £25.00. And a 1997 Beaujolais, Lapierre, with a complexity and depth far removed from the cherry-cola variety.

The tasting menu comes with the option of eight accompanying wines. With the scallops, Germond matched Chapel Down 2002 Schonburger, a U.K. white wine. As someone British, I felt a surge of modern European pride that we now have some decent wines and superb restaurants.

Good Food Guide
2009 awarded 'notable wine cellar in London'

Easy enough to miss amid the wealth of eating options on Charlotte St, Pied à Terre is nonetheless a destination address. The dimensions are on the bijou side, yet the narrow main room with its skylight, as well as a smaller front area where 4 tables are shielded from pavement view, are comfortable. Table settings scream quality and the staff are reassuringly civil, without any of the hauteur that can come with a place of this reputation. Shane Osborn has skill to spare, both in the imagination of his dishes and his sheer technique. Menu descriptions are long, but what arrives at the table fully lives up to its billing. How about a starter of seared scallops and poached oysters in champagne and cucumber nage, with samphire, wood sorrel and trout roe? Or a main courses that sees Gressingham duck breast teamed with morteau sausage, kohlrabi, baby turnips and almonds, with a muscular port sauce. The fixed-price lunch deal is exemplary value – a spring outing delivered a wood pigeon and foie gras boudin in a slew of puy lentils and diced ventreche, followed by roast sea bream with carrot and runner bean threads and Day-Glo sauce of orange and caraway. With classy canapés, an amuse and pre-dessert, you might be forgiven for passing up an actual dessert, in which case you will be missing the likes of chestnut mousse wrapped in a chocolate pancake with chocolate sabayon, Tonka bean and butterscotch ice cream with pearls of Pedro Ximenez jelly. Too rich? Then consider a straight forward white chocolate mousse with strawberry ice cream and coulis , accompanied by diced nectarine, pear and strawberry. Almost as great as the wine collection itself is the manner of its service. The wines that come with the tasting menu are served blind with the dishes, then informatively unmasked. Separate volumes for different colours come in a slipcase, which all sounds rather daunting, until you look at the quality, with wines by glass from £5 and bottles from £22, the sky's the limit thereafter, but there is a true feeling that every bottle has earned its place on the list.

Hardens
David Moore's "beacon of excellence", in a Fitzrovia townhouse, continues to put in an "exemplary" performance, thanks to Shane Osborn's "truly original" cuisine, the "biblical" wine list and "exceptionally professional" service.

Timeout
Chef Shane Osborn's dazzling dishes capture classic flavours in a stylish, modern way. This innovative approach to fresh British ingredients makes for a winning combination at Pied à Terre, long loved by and celebrated by critics. An arty shattered glass wall forms the back drop to the front dining room. A gorgeous charger showcasing a single large purple gerbera daisy set on a square platinum edged plate offers a prelude to the simple yet stunning creations to come. The name degustation and thoughtful international wine pairings (including a Brazilian vintage) piqued our palate and curiosity. A flight of amuse bouche bites began with bright beetroot gnocchi, balanced with creamy ricotta cheese and the sweet texture of candied walnut. A swig of gazpacho foam followed, hiding treasured morsels of mozzarella and olives beneath its frothy bubbles. Our Asian-Australian sommelier was extremely educated and effortlessly guided us through the eight course adventure that followed. Seared foie gras was elevated by the delectable marriage of an orange and cardamom reduction. Jaw droppingly good best end of lamb was buttery smooth, slow cooked by the sous vide technique. For dessert, sophisticated stout ice-cream schmoozed smoothly with the luxuriously rich warm chocolate tart. Just when we couldn't possibly eat any more, a show-stopping tiered rack of architecturally arranged petit fours arrived. Chewy walnut fudge, delicate crisp tuilles, dark chocolates and flavoured apple pates de fruits demanded to be devoured and greedily was. In food-coma bliss we gazed at our bill and deemed our Pied à Terre indeed was worthy of its down payment.

Zagat (28 out of 30)
Yes, the seating's somewhat "cheek by jowl", but that's the sole complaint against this "lovely New French haven for foodies" in Fitzrovia; chef Shane Osborn's cuisine is "creative and complex" and "to match the wonderful food they have unusual wines by the glass", plus a "comprehensive list" with bargains "if you look hard"; there's "not a foot put wrong" by the "non-presumtuous" staff and though the bill is "a big-time hit", regulars recommend splurging out on the tasting menu – "if you go, it's worth going for the best."

AA 2010 Awards & Accolades
The understated confidence of the exterior seems to sum up Pied à Terre in some way; it would be easy to walk past, imagining it to be a design studio or a gallery (not inconceivable on Charlotte Street), but that would be a mistake. This is not a restaurant that shouts its achievements from the rooftops; chef and co-owner Shane Osborn has published a cookbook or two, and front-of-house guru (and founding owner) David Moore does his stint on Raymond Blanc's TV show, The Restaurant, but still the restaurant remains their focus, their passion. Natural tones and colours, architectural glass, suede and rosewood furniture dominate over the three floors, which consist of two downstairs dining areas, a bar on the first floor and private dining room up top. It is a series of modern spaces, neither over-blown nor unmemorable. The service is as impeccable as everything else, well organised and pretty much seamless from the customers' perspective. Australian-born Shane's modern French cooking is both refined and classical, eschewing the extremes of radical experimentalism, while never standing still. The lunchtime Du Jour Menu is a bit of a steal at £24.50 (fantastic value, really), plus there's a theatre menu, a carte and the de rigeur tasting menu. Foie gras parfait with poppy seed crisps is an amuse-bouche displaying significant technical flair in the making and as for the scallops in a first-course with trompette de la mort, lemon oil, lemon thyme, Jerusalem artichokes and parmesan tuiles, they are as good as they get. Main-course saddle of rabbit is wrapped in winter truffle and parsnip and served with a boudin of confit leg, a smoked celery emulsion and roasted parsnips, and a star turn at dessert is bitter sweet chocolate tart - stunning pastry - with stout ice cream and macadamia nut cream. The wine list, too, will blow your socks off.

Food Bloggers

We listen to our food bloggers. They are not usually paid or professional food critiques but members of the public who love food. They are usually "mystery diners", so we don't know who they are.