It’s always nice to go to a French bistrot, even if the last time (if you don’t count Le Relais de Venise), an ill-fated trip to the fabulous Aux Crus de Bourgogne in Paris, ended in food poisoning, projectile vomiting, and me crawling down every avenue in Enghien-les-Bains in search of bananes.
Anyway, for the last few months, I have been trying and failing to get a table at Bouchon Racine in Farringdon, a cute little French eatery above a pub around the corner from the station. I am assuming it’s cute. The increasingly impatient old codger that I am, I consider my days of sacrificing my life to get a couple of seats at four in the afternoon on a Sunday at a hard-to-book restaurant are mostly behind me, so, in January, after failing to catch a table after months of trying, I resolutely told myself “Fuck ‘em” and began to look elsewhere. Bistro Freddie stepped up to the plate, offering all the trappings of a trendy night out on the tiles: Shoreditch, funny name, great wine list, and an acceptable amount of reservations nonsense (three weeks out is my new watershed).
Freddie opened last September, so it’s not brand new. It gained healthy traction by being born of HAM Restaurants (a portfolio founded by Dominic Hamdy, and anchored by Crispin), and was quickly lauded as the latest example-setter of the current London food trend of simple food cooked well, balanced with classic old-fashioned hospitality (think The Devonshire, also on my hit list, and inaccessible Bouchon Racine). For us, this was enough to get us excited, but also because we have not had a date night for some time, because ten days of restaurants in an all-inclusive resort in Mexico “…aren’t date nights”, according to The European.
In a ritual that’s worryingly emerging when it comes to eating in French restaurants, I fell ill with a stomach bug the day before we were due to visit. Thankfully, I had slept off the worst of it come the evening we were due to go, so we changed into our gladrags and headed off to Shoreditch, thankfully now only half an hour away thanks to the Lizzie Line.
Bistro Freddie is situated deep in the Dickensian backstreets of Shoreditch, on a dimly lit street corner. We sat in the window, and outside, the pink neon sign of neighbouring restaurant Leroy provided a ‘wrong side of the tracks’ vibe that was atmospheric to look out on.
Freddie is a lovely place to look in on as well as look out of. You can sit at the counter and watch Anna Søgaard and her tiny team of smiley chefs hammer out classic Northern French food in the open kitchen, or, like us, be nestled in a quiet corner, with a crisp linen tablecloth and a candle dripping its wax all over its wine bottle mount. Larger tables are situated in the middle of the room, but make no mistake, at forty-five covers, it’s not a large restaurant. The food menus are written in cursive freehand and can be hard to read, but it’s a nice touch.
We went lighter than normal. We ordered some provincial French ham, with capers and a celeriac remoulade, and some bread. We saved ourselves for the special of the evening, a côte de boeuf for two to share, with dressed salad, creamed spinach, and house chips with homemade mayonnaise. We shared a 100% biodynamic Grenache, from the Languedoc (Cru-Elles Engelvin). The wine list is incredible, you’ll find it all here.
We were smitten with our choices. The ham, served heaped on a plate and dressed with the remoulade, doesn’t look much, but, often, the best-tasting food doesn’t. The côte de boeuf was a roughly cut and slightly-too-fatty piece of meat, but it tasted deviously good and was a perfect size for two. It was cooked well but not as well as the chips. And don’t get me started on the mayonnaise. You will not find a better mayonnaise ever, I bet my cats on it.
Stomach bug on my mind, I said “Non” to dessert. The wine cost a pretty penny and we were out of time on our table, so we moved to a less desirable, unsold one by the host desk to lick our glasses clean. We lamented not being at the counter, but our original table was good enough, and wherever you sit, the cosiness plays second fiddle to the spectacle of great French cookery.
Waddling back to Liverpool Street, we both agreed Bistro Freddie was one of the better French meals we have enjoyed in London, and certainly good enough for me risking its richness on a delicate tummy, a gamble well played, as all it took was one Rennie to effortlessly survive the night.
Visited on 9th March 2024.
Starters, mains, and a good bottle of plonk came to a little over £two hundred, but the wine by itself was £seventy.
The food thing. 
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