Toast the City: Is Bob Bob Ricard’s pie the best dish in London?
City PM’s inaugural Toast the City Awards , from the coffee shop you always stop at to the gym class you never skip. Among the categories is the Best Meal, which will celebrate the single dish that stands out as the finest the City has to offer. This week our Life&Style editor Steve Dinneen picks his favourite dish: Bob Bob Ricard’s chicken and champagne pie.
What is it? Bob Bob Ricard has become an institution since it opened its first outpost in Soho, where its “press for Champagne” button became a social media sensation. It went on to open perhaps the best restaurant in the Square Mile, taking the same concept of old-world glamour and injecting a little Square Mile joie de vivre.
The resulting restaurant in the Cheesegrater is like passing through a hall of mirrors into a giant pinball machine. It gives you the feeling that if it were tipped on its side or upside-down, Inception-style, it would look exactly the same. It’s like looking at an optical illusion: one minute it’s a pastiche of a 1950s diner, the next it’s the cabin of a private jet, then a latter-day Damien Hirst installation. It’s brilliant and bonkers and we at City PM are huge fans.
The menu is British-French with a generous side serving of Russian, leading to a wonderful situation where you can order a round of caviar and vodka shots, followed by French onion soup and rounded off with a cottage pie. But the real star of the show is the chicken and champagne pie, a wonderful creation that is – and I don’t say this lightly – the best pie in all of London.
It’s something to behold: golden puff pastry with the Bob Bob logo singed onto the lid. Break that impossibly glazed, buttery barrier and your fork finds itself in a creamy world of chicken chunks and chestnut mushrooms in a rich champagne sauce. It’s close to perfect, the Platonic ideal of pies, a minor miracle that keeps you coming back time and time again. If you read the menu, apparently Bollinger champagne is used in the recipe, which goes some way to explaining the £26 price tag.
But it’s worth it. And that’s why the Bob Bob Ricard chicken and champagne pie is nominated for a Toast the City Award for the best meal. It’s going to be a tough one to beat (have a better suggestion? Then ).
What else? Bob Bob has one of the best cellars in the City and sells its bottles with a far smaller markdown than most of its competitors. If you’re out drinking (as well as eating) Bollinger, this is the place to do it.