The Glasshouse

In a parade of shops leading away from Kew Gardens tube station, the Glasshouse has been a thriving neighbourhood restaurant for what feels like a generation. Its popularity has been reliably buoyant through those years, and with Bruce Poole and Nigel Platts-Martin at the helm, it trades in exactly the kind of food that Londoners want to eat. The ambience is light and laid-back, any slight feeling of crowding from the table spacing offset by the floor-to-ceiling windows that give the place its name. The foundation of the menus is classical French cuisine, but of the bourgeoise type rather than the haute, inflected by shades of the Mediterranean and east Asia. An accomplished starter dish is typical of the style: a little cocotte of fried lamb's sweetbreads and tongue, beautifully timed, served with a light, frothy mustard sauce, the textures enhanced with some root vegetables and a side-serving of trompette mushrooms on toast. Formidable technical aptitude also sings out in a main course of halibut topped with shredded celery and bedded on samphire, accompanied by a cannelloni roll of basil-scented fish, the whole dressed in an old-school thick lobster sauce. And then at dessert, pastry skills come into play for a lightly glazed lemon tart in a thin, crisp casing, accompanied by custard ice cream.