Framed Family Photos Hang Around the Room, Along With Pieces From Her House, Though Diners Keep Pocketing Them

Chez Rose brings timeless French bistro hospitality to Mayfair Chez Rose, on Pollen Street in Mayfair, looks as though it has been welcoming diners since 1974. It hasn’t: until recently the room was Jason Atherton’s Little Social. Now, with terrace tables, vintage mirrors, doilies and bread baskets, Spencer Metzger has created France as the British imagination wants it — not the full ‘Allo ‘Allo effect, but an elegant, sexy pastiche of everyday Gallic dining. If you can’t get into Bouchon Racine in Farringdon, come here.

Metzger’s CV already sparkles — the Ritz and Row on 5 were his training ground — but Chez Rose is personal: he has modelled the restaurant on his late grandmother Rosemary. Framed family photos hang around the room, along with pieces from her house, though diners keep pocketing them. Rosemary wasn’t French, and neither is Metzger, but one mouthful of the red prawn and tomato crostini, zinging with lemon, silences any quibbling.

As the review puts it: if his non-Frenchness upsets you, it just leaves more 70% chocolate soufflé with vanilla ice-cream for the rest of us. Day-to-day cooking is in the hands of head chef Mark Catchpole, whose CV takes in Roganic, Attica and the Fat Duck. The single-sheet menu lists wild mushroom persillade with preserved truffle, Orkney scallop with Café de Paris butter, Cornish cod with mussel sauce and samphire, Aylesbury duck breast with black figs, and a T-bone steak for two at £145. A few weeks after opening, on a Friday lunchtime, the room is lively.

From the snack list, Cantabrian anchovies on a bed of young curd are fat, glossy, smooth and salty — a world away from weary tinned versions. A plate of Vesuvius tomatoes, ordered by a long-suffering French companion, arrives with ripe peach and cool stracciatella: the sweetest, ripest tomatoes of the summer. A stuffed courgette flower, crisp and rich with ricotta and puddles of sauce vierge, is utterly marvellous, a rebuke to the soggy efforts served along the southern French coast.

Glasses of Domaine de la Bégude Bandol rosé 2024 arrive in little single-glass jugs, and the wine list is weighty enough to reward reading. An entire John Dory comes on the bone, with pommes purée that is half butter, half potato. It is less a vegetable and more a bowl of love and future coronary problems — but with the planet’s future uncertain, this reviewer devoured it in its entirety. Chez Rose is one of the dining highlights of 2026. "Aren’t tomatoes amazing?"