Julie’s, London: ‘Its time has clearly come again’ – restaurant review
Julie’s, 135 Portland Road, London W11 4LW (020 7229 8331). Starters £6-£19, mains £12-£40, desserts £8-£10, wines from £30
It’s very tempting to discuss Julie’s in London’s Holland Park without ever mentioning the food. That would be a thing, wouldn’t it: a restaurant review that went big on the plump furnishings and the clientele, but didn’t mention a single dish? If ever there was a candidate for that treatment it’s Julie’s; a venerable neighbourhood bistro famous because Tina Turner once danced on a table, leaving her heel mark in the veneer, which they never repaired. Kate Moss had a birthday party here. Mick Jagger, Cat Stevens and Paul McCartney were once regulars.
Sure, these people went to be fed. Maybe not Kate Moss, who was doubtless still convinced back then that nothing tasted as good as skinny felt. But the rest of them. They went for dinner. But did they go to swoon over the cooking? I’ve checked the Good Food Guide for both 1975 and 1985. It wasn’t in either and, back then, the bar was pretty low. The 1975 guide includes an entry for Bloom’s in Whitechapel, which says much of the food was dire and the service awful. Yet they still couldn’t find room for Julie’s. Clearly, the regulars came for something else. There was a curtained snug in the basement nicknamed the G-spot. Maybe that was why they came.
Eating outside, under the new, tree-embraced awnings, is a friend of mine, a veteran of the music business. He tells me he had an office next door to the restaurant when it was first opened in 1969 by interior designer Julie Hodgess. “She used our Gestetner machine to print menus and she’d get us to try the wine and the food,” Carl says. What was the food? “Quiche. We didn’t know what quiche was.” Music business people are like locusts, he says. “We move as one.” It was the original restaurant as private members’ club only with no membership fee. The price of entry was fame, infamy and proximity to it.
In 1972, the original Julie sold to Tim and Cathy Herring, owners of the Portobello Hotel. After a couple of relaunches, they in turn called time on New Year’s Eve 2022. And now it’s been taken over by a young restaurateur called Tara MacBain, who ate here as a kid and trained at Le Cordon Bleu before running away from the kitchen to become a venture capitalist. She has clearly spent an awful lot of money on the place. It’s an orgy of padded floral fabrics and wildflower-printed wallpaper. Think Country Living for people who hate mud. Money has also gone on the team, which includes chef patron Owen Kenworthy from Brawn and the Pelican.
Booking isn’t easy. Weeks ahead, all the tables at civilised times are booked out. You can eat at 6pm or 10pm or not at all. Perhaps tables are being held back. Eventually, I bag a 7.30pm basement spot. We’re shown down into the gloom. Immediately, we’re offered something back up in the main dining room where, miraculously, they seem able to seat two of us on a table for four. Too right I take it. It’s Julie’s. I want to be up here with the beautiful tanned people; the ones with the perfectly shaped eyebrows and the long, glossy hair and the sunglasses worn as Alice bands. The women are shiny and glowing, too. There are small lap dogs. We are very much in Holland Park.
Kenworthy’s job is to feed these people whether they care about dinner or not, and he does it very well. The new Julie’s serves a brasserie menu of classy, unchallenging comfort food at prices which, given the neighbourhood and the clientele, really aren’t extortionate. There are oysters, a chopped salad, a couple of steaks and very good chips. Recently, I interviewed the marvellous Nigella Lawson in front of an audience and she said that in restaurants she often asks for the chips to be left in the fryer for a few extra minutes. She wouldn’t have to ask here. They are crisp and fractured and promisingly golden.
Nibbles include radishes with good tarama and the thinnest of toast cups seemingly formed in a canelé mould and filled with zippy lemon spider crab. We have a basket of their own dense sourdough with very good whipped leek and garlic butter. For starters we have thick, firm slices of pastrami-cured trout with pickles and furious English mustard. Eggs mollet, a fancy term for boiled eggs with runny yolks, come breaded and deep fried with a mustardy green salad and a proper shaving of truffle. It’s a little eggy something on a plate; one which has dressed up for the night.
That reliable classic sole meunière (almost certainly lemon sole given the reasonable £30 price tag) is the golden of all the good food, and swims its last in a lake of brown butter sauce. Pebbles of lemon flesh scattered across the top of the fish are an inspired idea. A big bowl of mussels in a brilliantly stinky Roquefort cream sauce, then heaped with matchstick fries, is an awful lot of dinner for £15. Once you have sucked the meat from the shells, you are left with a thick mess of cheesy sauce and fried potatoes. When Moss said that guff about skinny feeling better than anything tastes, she clearly hadn’t tasted something like these mussels.
Desserts are fine. A crème caramel is well made. An almond and cherry tart would have been better if it hadn’t been piled high with under-sweetened fresh cherries which simply die against the sugar-boosted frangipane. Though looking at the slender customers at the other tables I doubt the dessert list sees as much action as, say, the drinks offering. That includes an old-school wine list ordered by region, with a few bottles priced for when Mick Jagger stops by, just for old time’s sake.
One warning: don’t come for a quick supper, because it probably won’t be. That isn’t helped by a service system involving three industrious lads tasked with bringing trays of food up from the basement, who then have to wait for more senior waiters to deliver them. Twice, we stared at our order being held a few feet from our table. Then again, by turning up at Julie’s to judge the cooking, maybe we’d made a category error. I sense the food is still not quite the point of the place, however good it happens to be, but that’s OK. Julie’s has come and gone over the years. Looking at the bustle and clamour, its time has clearly come again.
News bites
A new restaurant and music venue, headed up by saxophonist and broadcaster Yolanda Brown, is to open at the Gantry Hotel in Stratford, east London, after crowdfunding nearly £250,000, the largest sum ever raised for a hospitality business on Kickstarter. Soul Mama, which launches in September, will have a programme of jazz, soul, gospel and more alongside a menu fusing the flavours of the Caribbean, South America and Africa by exec chef Aleandro Brown. Dishes will include chicken curry with rice and peas and mango jerk cauliflower (soulmama.co.uk).
A quick roundup: the six-strong seafood and grill restaurant group Lussmanns, which originally launched in North Kensington in 2002 before moving out to Hertfordshire, is to return to the capital with a new branch in Highgate. Tyddyn Llan restaurant with rooms in Llandrillo, which was recently put up for sale by chef patron Bryan Webb and his wife Susan after 22 years, is being taken over by chef Gareth Stevenson, formerly of the Palé Hall restaurant near Llandderfel. And the craft beer and vegan Indian street food chain Bundobust has closed its Birmingham site a year after launch, citing a lack of “consistent trade”.
Finally, in nominative determinism news it’s a big hello and congratulations to the new chief restaurant officer for McDonald’s in the UK and Ireland: Zoe Hamburger.
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or follow him on X @jayrayner1
