Bistro Union
has been on our “oughta visit” list for five years. It’s in that weird zone: 25 minutes walk away, making it feel like a neighbourhood restaurant and thus not worthy of a special trip, yet too far to walk if we just want to pop out for a bite to eat near home. And yet I really do love a good bistro, so I was glad when an excuse finally arose.
From the outside and inside it really is the very type of an early 21st century urban British bistro: muted colours, plain black wooden furnishings, long and narrow dining room. And the menu is a proper call-out of all the bistro classics, from French onion soup through beef bourguignon to crème brulee.
Turbot
We snacked on some decent, though hardly decadent, cheese gougères while picking our dishes. I started with chicken liver parfait enriched with foie gras. The foie gras didn’t seem to add much to what was a good chicken liver parfait, nice bit of sticky chutney on the side. Maureen’s French onion soup was thick and satisfying, deep brown and topped with quite an amount of gruyere. For main course I made a beeline for the turbot, a really good sized chunk of snowy purity, cooked just nicely solid, draped in plenty of good hollandaise with simple beans and potato gratin to help sop it all up. This was a pretty blissful bistro dish. Maureen’s beef tartare was merely fine, pepped up with black garlic ketchup, the beef a little soft and unflavourful. Not bad, just not great.
We managed to share a crème brulee flavoured with spruce to finish, a neat touch with the fragrant pine-y scent coming through the cream and burnt sugar nicely. Three courses would be around £55 here and I do think that’s on the high side for the cooking, which was classic and decent but hardly memorable. At a 25 minute walk across the Common, I’m not expecting to be back at Bistro Union any time soon.
Beef tartare
