Every now and again you discover a hidden gem of a restaurant that has you rushing to your keyboard to tell the world about how great it is. Bumbles on Buckingham Palace Road is a true original, a friendly fine dining experience at chain restaurant prices with friendly staff and an accessible central location. I booked a table for my girlfriend and I and a visiting sibling yesterday evening and haven’t stop smiling since.
Buckingham Palace Road (unsurprisingly enough), runs along the boundary of the grounds of Buckingham Palace. It’s an easy to reach destination in Westminster, but is fairly uninspiring for its own sake. Certainly a prestigious postcode, but perhaps not the sort of street you expect to have good restaurants on it. Nearby tube stations include Victoria and St James’ Park and it’s also ideally situated for diners travelling into Victoria, the coach station, or a variety of London bus routes.
*Booking*
Reservations can be made by calling or e-mailing (details at the bottom of the review) and I strongly suggest doing so. The restaurant was very busy and several groups of diners were turned away or asked to come back later. It’s a small venue, with perhaps 30 covers upstairs. There is a larger downstairs dining room, but I wasn’t entirely sure whether or not this was used for diners. It was being used for a large work function when we visited and I suspect that it’s principally used for functions. I e-mailed our booking a couple of weeks in advance and the reply was warm and polite, an unusual combination these days.
*Décor and ambience*
Bumbles is squeezed into a narrow frontage and it’s decidedly on the cozy side of things. I felt overly warm when we were first seated, but the air conditioning kicked in shortly afterwards. The main dining room is a squat space, with gentle lighting, plain but attractive table arrangements and soft furnishings and an inviting ‘cave’ feel to it.
Space is obviously at a premium and as a reasonably tall man I did find myself sucking myself in when taking my seat or moving around. I’m not too sure how enjoyable a dining experience it would be for either wheelchair users or those with restricted mobility, but I’m sure that the helpful staff would come up with a workable solution.
While fabrics used are fairly neutral, there are a few nice little touches that give the restaurant a fairly characteristic charm. The side plates are attractively grained
wooden blocks, bread is brought to the table in odd ‘pots’ that seemed to be crafted from empty coconut shells and the butter for the table arrived sitting on a pretty slice of purple agate.
*Gourmet food, fast food prices*
There are a range of affordable options for diners, including three courses for £10, three courses for £20 and an a la carte menu for those who can’t handle three courses (the three for £20 dishes are taken from this). All menus are seasonal and subject to change and an indicative sample can be seen at the link at the bottom of my review.
The Bumbles menu (three courses for £10):
The Bumbles menu is a tasty but economical option of bistro/gastropub style fare. My brother dined from this menu and enjoyed a salad of tea smoked chicken, a perfectly cooked pork dish with crispy crackling, a rich sauce and creamy shredded vegetables and ice cream with a tasty looking selection of seasonal berries. There were roughly 3-4 choices of starter and dessert, with maybe 5-6 main courses. Considering that a railway station burger meal now costs close to £7, you can’t really go wrong with this menu!
Chef’s seasonal menu (three courses for £20):
The main event! The chef’s menu is simply the a la carte menu at a fixed price of three courses for £20, which represents phenomenally good value for gourmet food in this part of London. This menu is understandably more adventurous than the £10 menu and it’s a great treat to be able to pick the fancier items without feeling like you’re blowing the budget.
The menu has a wide range of meals for omnivores, piscatarians and vegetarians and I really don’t think you’d struggle to find a dish that you’d love. It featured maybe 10 starters and desserts and considerably more mains. Some of the choices come across as a little ‘wordy’ and you may feel like you’re reading the Guardian food section.
Both my girlfriend and I went for the ‘sunny side up’ ravioli – an interesting concoction which featured a generously sized single ravioli which featured a whole runny egg yolk along with the lightly spiced ravioli filling. This was served on a bed of wild mushrooms and was topped off with a pea foam. A pair of unimaginably crispy slices of pancetta sat at the side of the bowl and provided a fabulous savoury counterpart to the ravioli.
A delicious choice, although it was maybe served just a little too slowly as the foam was more of a liquid than you’d expect, which led to the colour from the mushrooms bleeding into the mix. Very tasty though and well worth a try.
We were brought a narrow shot glass of leek and potato soup between our courses, which was tasty although bizarre. Not quite an amuse-bouche, not quite a pallet cleanser, creamy and delicious regardless. That said, it did take us a couple of minutes to drink it as we had a sneaking suspicion that we were going to have a restaurant faux pas and half expected the waiters to burst out laughing.
My main was line caught grey mullet with pickled cockle popcorn (really), which was served in a tasty orange sauce which I fail to remember the ingredients of. The two small fillets of mullet were delicious, tender and delicate and had been cooked just right (introduced to a pan from across the kitchen). The pickled cockle popcorn was tasty and not nearly as exotic as it sounds (the best comparison that I can think of are the deep fried clams served at Coney Island) and the sauce was delicately seasoned with flavours of harissa and tomato.
Artistic as my dish was (with splashes of colour, neatly perched mullet and the cockle popcorn dotting the plate), it was very minimal and I was left feeling hungry.
**Aside** My girlfriend has ordered me to point out at this juncture that she is an adventurous soul when it comes to ordering, as she feels I paint her as a food wuss **/Aside**
My girlfriend ended up with what was easily the main of the night, with a delicious stack of finger thick cuts of pink, fragrant woodpigeon breast, interlaced with olives, green lentils and crispy filaments of bacon; all coated with a fragrant sauce. The waitress advised that the meat might be ‘a little rough’ when ordering as it was game, but all the pieces I saw were beautifully cut and prepared. The woodpigeon had a complex gamey flavour and the best simile I could come up with was ‘as if chicken and bacon had a baby’…
This was a far more generous dish and I have to confess that I was a little jealous. Needless to say my lovely girlfriend did let me try a few mouthfuls.
For dessert I opted for the cheeseboard, which came with five tasty morsels of cheese. There were a couple of blue cheeses (a Cornish one and a deep orange variety not dissimilar to Blacksticks Blue), a deliciously creamy camembert and a further pair of tasty choices. Sorry I can’t be more specific, but all the menu stated is that they were British.
While the cheeses were tasty, the portion sizes were on the stingey side and the biscuits served just looked like basic Jacob’s crackers. I can’t complain too much, however, as I wasn’t paying a lot for the privilege. I suspect that portion control is key in running an operation this reasonably priced.
My girlfriend also lucked out on the pudding front after she opted for the banana flambé surprise. This consisted of a lightly charred caramelised banana served with the surprise (a perfect sphere of ice cream coat with a chocolate shell). The waiter who brought this to the table followed it up with a small jug of boiling hot caramel sauce which was drizzled over the surprise. This led to it opening up like a flower as the chocolate melted, leaving my girlfriend with ice cream; a pungent pool of melted chocolate, caramel and rosemary scent and a comic book grin.
She did managed to finish the dessert, although comments about diabetic comas were being bandied around and I felt a nap was needed on the train home ;-)
*Winelist*
Bumbles doesn’t have the most extensive winelist I’ve seen in a restaurant, but the choices that they do have seem to be well balanced and representative of a good range of classic restaurant choices. Their house wine is the cheapest I’ve seen in London (£11.95), they offer champagne at less than £30 and even inveterate wine snobs should be able to find a treat for £20 or less. We opted for a delicious Chapel Down white (made in England). It was crisp, tart and morish and went really well with our choices.
*Three cheers for the service*
I can’t fault the service at Bumbles – fantastic staff. Everyone we saw had a smile on their face, was polite and answered questions knowledgeably. The main element of good restaurant service for me is being made to feel welcome and they pulled it off perfectly. I could have fallen asleep I was so relaxed…
*Tip, don’t pay the service charge!*
The bills at Bumbles come with an optional service charge, which shouldn’t be equated directly with a tip (I suspect that some of the money disappears thanks to the wonders of accounting). I recommend asking your server to bring you a bill without the service charge, as I’m reliably informed that the servers see more of the money if you pay a cash tip. This information was provided discretely after I specifically asked for it and I don’t mean to imply that the staff were pressuring diners for tips.
Our bill came to £74.50/£85 with a well deserved tip.
I'm so not keen on restaurants adding a service charge on the bill - I usually don't have the guts to ask them to remove it and end up not leaving a tip for the waiting staff but generally don't visit places again if they do add a "discretionary" service charge. Too American for my liking for places to expect a tip to be paid even when the service isn't up to much, not that I'm implying Bumbles' staff don't deserve a tip but it's the principle of it that annoys me. Kind of throws everything else about the place out of the window for me about a dining experience... :)
exceptional by (13%):
very helpful by (87%):
