Casual Italian may have been the big story on the capital’s restaurant scene in the past 12 months, but Londoners’ appetite for the sort of French bistro that wouldn’t disgrace the set of ’Allo ’Allo! shows no sign of waning – so much so that we’re now having to import them.
Buvette comes courtesy of New York-based restaurateur Jody Williams, whose West Village original, opened in 2011, is one of five Manhattan hotspots she co-owns with wife Rita Sodi. This is the US400 couple’s second bite at a London Buvette, after a Notting Hill outpost opened in 2020 and closed three years later.
Covent Garden, however, already feels like a better fit: squint from a pavement table under the red awning in Neal’s Yard and you could be in a French square straight out of Emily in Paris – or, perhaps, an especially photogenic enclave of Greenwich Village.
Wallpaper* dines at Buvette, London
The mood: Flea market chic
A buvette is the French word for a small bar, though Williams prefers to describe this place as a gastrothèque, her own word for a mash-up of café, bar and restaurant where one is as likely to drop in for a breakfast croissant and café au lait as a supper of cassoulet and Beaujolais.
Williams says that the New York Buvette was inspired by visits to flea markets and antique fairs, though here in London she’s been equally influenced by the building’s 400-year history and that of Neal’s Yard itself, where the British whole-food scene was kickstarted in the 1970s with the likes of Monmouth Coffee and Neal’s Yard Dairy.
Inside are exposed brick walls, warm wood finishes, a tin ceiling embossed with metallic garlands and close-set tables for two. If the dimensions feel more cramped than cosy, the best way to approach Buvette might be as an hour spent en route to somewhere else: a breakfast meeting before the office or pre-theatre ahead of the Donmar. Or pull up a solo stool at the marble counter.
The food: Small plates of bistro cooking
Williams might have a James Beard Award to her name for New York City’s Best Chef, but she taught herself to cook and spent five years in Italy and Japan before opening Buvette. All of which is to say that she is not bound by tradition. So while the menu is a love letter to traditional bourgeois cuisine – coq au vin and charcuterie, steak tartare and tarte Tatin – the presentation of the food as small plates feels bang up to date.
Not that you’ll want to split everything: a croque-monsieur, bubbled with golden-brown blisters of gooey Gruyère, is far too good to share. Carb-loading is the way to go: garlicky escargots come with slices of sourdough toast for dunking, while a tartine is spread with an artery-clogging amount of butter and draped with a salty sliver of anchovy and a tangy caper.
Not everything works quite so well when presented in miniature. A pot of moules topped with a pile of French fries makes excavating the mussels from their shells awkward, though it’s worth persevering, as the curry sauce beneath makes an excellent dipping sauce.
Even if you just stick to tap water, do take time to admire the design of the drinks list, which is beautifully illustrated as a homage to the Belle Époque and is as lovely to look at as everything else here.
Buvette is located at 2 Neal’s Yard, London WC2H 9DP, UK