Travel

When opening a new restaurant, the easiest way to keep start-up costs to a minimum is to take over an already established one. While no site is perfect, those that have already operated as restaurants tend to have the most costly essentials, the kitchens and the public spaces, in the right location. A complete reworking of the interior is a far less expensive option than building a new kitchen.

As I recalled four memorable meals in London restaurants during 2010, I realised that each had risen from the ashes of an establishment that had eventually proven less successful.

BISTROT BRUNO LOUBET
The Zetter, St John's Square, 86-88 Clerkenwell Road, EC1, 020 7324 4455, thezetter.com
This curved, corner site in Clerkenwell has always been a restaurant since the boutique Zetter hotel first opened in 2004, although it originally served Italian food. Then in March this year the highly regarded French chef Bruno Loubet returned to the UK, after ten years in Australia, to team up with the hotel's founders and establish a popular bistrot with a menu and ambience that would not look out of place in Paris. Yet all the seemingly traditional dishes come with a twist: noisettes of lamb with a smoked aubergine purée and fennel, a tagine of Provençal vegetables, braised beef with a mango and herb salad, and thin slices of fig with a lemon ice cream.

MENNULA
10 Charlotte Street, W1, 020 7636 2833, mennula.com
Here is a case of one Italian restaurant replacing another. Mennula means almond in Sicily, and both the chef Santino Busciglio and his backer Joe Martorana were born in the same small Sicilian village. While the black-and-white photos on the walls evoke Sicily of a bygone era, Busciglio's menu incorporates many indigenous ingredients but gives them a modern twist. Two pasta favourites are thin tubes of maccheroni with braised lamb and mint and bucatini with sardines, saffron and pine nuts. And while the kitchen handles both fish and meat expertly, it is with the desserts that it really comes into its own: a luscious tiramisu, tubes of sweet biscuit filled with ricotta and a chocolate cake with mascarpone ice cream and Amaretto.

CARAVAN
11-13 Exmouth Market, EC1, 020 7833 8115, caravanonexmouth.co.uk
The corner site on Exmouth Market, home to several good restaurants since Moro opened here a decade ago, was for many years the rather dingy Al's Café, until Chris Ammerman and his partner, New Zealand chef Miles Kirby, opened Caravan in the spring, which takes its name from Kirby's travels and the dishes he has enjoyed en route. A gypsy bun filled with spicy pork, almond cous cous with aubergines and a tomato ragout, a duck breast with goats' cheese, pear and walnut salad and an orange water blancmange with pistachios give a flavour of his eclectic but professional approach. Caravan also takes its coffee very seriously and has its own large coffee roaster in the basement from which the most enticing aromas emerge.

FOUR SEASONS
23 Wardour Street, W1, 020 7287 9995, fs-restaurants.co.uk
The third branch of the Four Seasons restaurant - the original is in Queensway, the second round the corner in Gerrard Street - has opened in Wardour Street on the site of another Chinese restaurant. This is great news for lovers of roast meat, as roast duck, pork, chicken and goose are specialities. The process starts in the kitchens on the top floor of this narrow building, where the chefs envelop the meat in a secret marinade before roasting. It is then transported to the open kitchen by the front door, where a chef with the sharpest possible knife transforms it into succulent, mouth-size portions. Service can be peremptory and the décor unmemorable, but the meat is terrific and the prices very reasonable.

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