Quo Vadis – Soho, Sunday 25th April, 2010

Sunday night dinner often has the potential to be a grandiose affair. Reminiscent of traditional memories of a late-evening Sunday roast with the family, I often feel like a good splurge on a Sunday night, despite how much more difficult it makes Monday morning as I get older. Quo Vadis were running a half price menu on Sundays, so the other half and I popped along for a spot of dinner.

The first thing that struck me about the place was the menu: it was enormous. Huge choices, wide selections and much to take in. A natural fear I have of big menus is that the food quality isn’t going to be up to much. If somewhere is offering loads of choice, they can’t be doing all the dishes particularly well. From the cross-section of the menu that we sampled, this is not the case at Quo Vadis.

The Dublin Bay prawns we ate to start were almost the size of lobsters (left). The other half being a bit of a seafood connoisseur, I was eager to hear what the verdict was. Given that I still hear about these to the day, I can assume they were up to scratch. (And I liked them too: fresh, firm, sweet and vibrant.)

I went for the decidedly more opulent choice of scallop with black pudding, pancetta and ox cheek. Whilst all the elements seemed in place, I wanted to try this just to see if they could pull off such bold flavours on one plate. They could. A glorious combination they made to look effortless, and in fact almost undersold. Still, very delicate and rich as I’d hoped, and nothing to complain about.

Main courses were fairly thrilling. A piece of pork shoulder that had more minute variations in taste, texture and appearance than I thought possible was smothered in gravy and served with apple sauce. (I told you I like overdoing it on a Sunday.) This, however, was trumped by the outright excellent steak and chips with béarnaise we also tried (right).

We’re talking thick, rare, exceptionally cooked steak. Steak that is moderately chewy outside, but soft as anything inside. A beautiful, dark chocolate brown with a deep red centre. I’m getting carried away, but that was the quality of the meat. The sauce was spot on and the chips were outstanding: fluffy, crisp and chunky.

Once main courses were out of the way and my emotions had stabilised, we ate some dessert. Predictably the other half went for a chocolate fondant which was predictably good. I decided to test the menu a little further with the apple millefeuille and caramel parfait. It was almost as good as it sounds: fatty, syrupy richness and flaky, buttery pastry. You can’t fail when you get an apple dessert right.

Given that we were eating a heavily discounted menu on Sunday night, we did go a bit crazy, but it was well worth the indigestion on Monday morning. I enjoyed all the dishes we tried, and some of them were downright exceptional. Offer or no offer, it’s certainly a restaurant worth going to. After all, where else in the sleazy, glorious Eurotrash of Soho can you find decent English food?

Quo Vadis