Exceptional Value

Does this very unassuming restaurant frontage in Soho’s Lexington Street house England’s best-value wine list?

Almost certainly!

I had not been to Andrew Edmunds since pre-Covid, and after a quick sharpener in The French House it was with three mates - who had not been to this restaurant before - that we sat down in this small and buzzy environment last week.

It was in the late 80s, when working a few hundred yards away, that I had used it a fair amount over two decades. It had simply gone off my radar until a chance walk took me past it last month.

The setting is old school wine bar circa 1980s, but that is an intrinsic part of the charm. There is an honesty and pedigree about the close tables with the ground floor sitting around twenty, a few less downstairs, and their church pew benches or simple wooden chairs that are miles away from any new West End restaurant incarnation.

The menu is hand-written on the day and photocopied - see below. Some of the dishes verge on quirky - smoked ox tongue - but the food is precise, well-crafted and delivers straightforward, delicious results without fuss and ceremony.

The wine list is also very low-key in presentation but contains many exceptional value items. For example, Domaine du Vieux Télégraphe’s Châteauneuf-du-Pape 2013 on the wine list at £77.00, at the Wine Society for £45.00. Château Phélan Segur 2016 on at £65.00, and at Justerinis for £45.18 (fyi, the Phélan receives 92 from Parker and 18 from Jancis: they are not often on the same page, and really good ratings for a Cru Bourgeois).

You get the picture.

There is also a blackboard with a small number of specials / bin-ends and that is where we started lunch selecting Qupé’s 2019 Marsanne from California, and then, from the main list, a Patagonian Malbec: Bodega Noemia 2018.

Both delicious.

This is a venue to settle and put the world to rights. To know that your food will be simple, but superbly constructed, and that you are with a few like-minded souls who have the time to indulge, discuss and simply enjoy drinking superlative wines that may not feature in your repertoire during a year.

Deciding what to drink would be the tricky equation as there are so many options. A few suggestions. For the relatively short lunch, some half-bottle recommendations: