Restaurant Experiences That Altered our Brain Chemistry [Part 1]: Brasserie Zédel, London

Through dishes, flavours, service and setting, we're beginning a series on restaurant experiences which had a formative and fundamental impact on us

The internet is awash with listicles, round-ups and ‘best of’s where restaurants are concerned. Whether it’s end of year round-ups, annual speculations around Michelin awards or those frankly inescapable side street interviews with tiny mics on social media, everyone has an opinion or two on what’s good and where to find it. This type of content is often perilously underpinned by hype and influence, which, as we should remind ourselves, rarely delivers long-term dividends -– today’s news is tomorrow’s chip paper and all that.

So it makes much more sense to consider those long-standing dining experiences, situational memories which fundamentally shifted our thinking, had a long-lasting impression and, essentially, altered our brain chemistry.

We’ve always believed it’s not so much what’s on the plate that is formative, but the combination of plate, service and setting. The best restaurant experience is not solely dictated by perfected dishes of dazzling flavours, it’s the service and the setting, atmosphere and ambience (not sure whether those are actually the same thing with different names?) and that’s really what we look for as critics –– a holistic dining experience. The interplay between food, service and setting, and we’ve eaten out A LOT at home and abroad this last 18 months in particular.

Yet, long before being critics in a national newspaper we were just people eating out like anyone else. There are some meals, pre-critic life, that profoundly changed us - for myriad reasons - so we would love to share them with you. Here is the first in that series.

Brasserie Zédel, London

After a near-fatal first false start, this impossibly French subterranean dining room - beneath Piccadilly Circus of all places - became a cherished haunt of ours when we lived in London. Brasserie Zédel is now somewhat a tradition, a fitting final stop before hightailing it to Heathrow on our trips back to the capital since we departed as residents in 2017.

That false start and first experience in 2013 was obscenely bad: rude, inept service, mismanaged table timings, wrong dishes arriving and trout boasting more bones than actual edible flesh. It happened during a snappy trip to the city about three months before we were due to move there permanently and was one of a handful’s sprinkle of seeds of doubt planted in our minds as our imminent arrival loomed. However silly that sounds that a single restaurant experience could make you question a monumental life and location change it certainly dashed our doe-eyed naïvety and inflated our anxiety, in small ways. It was the first in a successive series of London showing its real self and slapping the rose-tinted glasses off our faces.