Cuisine: French
Cost:
Rating:
Where?: 36-40, Queenstown Road, Battersea, London. SW8 3RY.
Closest station(s): Battersea Park, Queenstown Road.
Telephone: 0207 622 2618
Website: N/A
If you had asked me a year ago what I thought of the Pot Lyonnais I would have heaped praise on the place; it has now unfortunately started to slip. The restaurant is open from mid-morning for breakfast right through lunch and dinner and then seems to close when the last people have decided to leave.
The Pot Lyonnais offers a bar menu including a burger and steak sandwich and also an a la carte menu offering most French classics. The establishment is huge, offering two bar areas, a specific dining area and then outside seating. The restaurant part is never busy, most people choosing to eat at the tables in the bar area. In summer the outside area, though on the pavement of a busy road, has a great charm to it and I would certainly recommend it as somewhere to have a relaxed bottle of wine after work. The beer is horrible – I have no idea what they do to it but it has a bizarre taste; this judgement being made having tried it at least ten times on different occasions.
I have extremely mixed feelings about the food. The breakfast is a little hit and miss, the eggs benedict can at times be excellent but I have also had a couple of very poor experiences. The bar menu I would highly recommend, sitting outside in the sun recently eating the steak sandwich with frites along with a nice glass of Bordeaux is heavenly.
The main menu is again rather hit and miss. The charcuterie selection is impressively uninspiring, often containing a poor selection of not particularly good meats. The steak wasn’t great either – surprisingly poorly cooked for somewhere that ticks most other boxes for authentic French cooking. I would happily eat the confit de canard with pommes salardaise daily; it would however leave me requiring a triple heart bypass within a year but when furring of the arteries tastes that good then it may just be worth it.
The prices for the a la carte don’t usually appear too bad on the menu however for some reason each time I eat off it I am surprised at how the bill comes to generally spending more than I would want to pay for what I had received.
Overall I would recommend the Pot Lyonnais for a bottle of wine and a snack in the evening or a wonderfully relaxed lunch – I would not however go there for a three course evening meal, there are simply better looking restaurants, with better service and better food in the vicinity.