New in town: Chabrot Bistrot dAmis/QV Bar

With the new year comes new openings – not that London ever needs an excuse to roll a new restaurant/bar/club out. The pace of change in the capital's culinary scene at the moment is exhilarating. So many bars, so little time... I did manage to find the time recently to visit two newbies: Chabrot Bistrot d'Amis and the QV Bar at Quo Vadis in Soho. The former is the brainchild of Yann Chevris, former general manager of L'Atelier de Joel Robuchon.

Chevris has teamed up with Michelin-starred chef Thierry Laborde, formerly of L’Oranger, Le Gavroche and Le Louis XV with Alain Ducasse, and sommelier Philippe Messy – the youngest ever sommelier at a three Michelin-starred restaurant when he worked with Marco Pierre White at the Hyde Park Hotel.

Messy co-founded Sarment – a private sommelier service offered to seventy-five members globally each year, with Gearoid Devany in 2009. The company takes sommeliers from the world’s top restaurants and makes them available to their members. Each member has a dedicated personal sommelier to advice them on all aspects of wine buying, tasting, storage and investment. The joys of owning a platinum Amex...

Back to Chabrot: the 65-cover restaurant is named after a Dordogne ritual popularised during the food shortages of the second world war whereby red wine was poured into a soup bowl after the meal to ensure you got all the nutrients from the soup. The walls are lined with mawkish monochrome scenes of rural France and peasants breaking bread. It has a cosy feel, as if you've been before. And you probably have – Chabrot bares a striking resemblance to an upmarket Café Rouge, from the red walls to the wooden chairs – it's all reassuringly familiar.

The Southern French menu features bone marrow, duck liver pâté with Comté cheese popovers, homemade pasta with Périgord truffles, roasted foie gras with raisins, and Laborde’s signature dish: chicken stuffed with foie gras. On the launch night platters of warm, crunchy calamari kept the crowd pleased, along with charcuterie and cornichons, and mini macaroons. Befitting of a bistro, the wine list is predominantly French, starting at £19.50 a bottle, and includes top names such as Taittinger, Domaine Dujac and Château Montrose. Topping the list is Château Cheval Blanc 1998, at an eye-watering £900 a bottle.

Another new kid on the block is the QV Bar at popular Soho haunt Quo Vadis. Owners Sam and Eddie Hart decided the 'dead space' in the restaurant would be better suited as a bar, so converted the restaurant's entrance area into a laid-back bar serving up seriously good cocktails. On my visit, mixologist Paul Mant fixed me up a a pre-Prohibition era, cotton candy pink, Clover Club – named after a Philadelphia gentleman's club – made with gin, lemon juice and raspberry syrup.

A number of snacks reside on the bar menu, from cod fritters and QV burgers, through deliciously decadent pork scratchings pimped with oodles of apple sauce, to the culinary wonder that is their scotch eggs. Served sliced in half, bright orange gooey yolks to the sky, the breadcrumbs were golden, the meat most, and, for the final flourish, it was finished off with Frazzle-shaped slithers of crispy bacon. I had to wolf mine down, as I was running late for a reading of Allen Ginsberg's Howl at the Southbank Centre in honour of the forthcoming film starring actor/writer/model/Columbia student James Franco as the Beat poet. Rushing to make the reading, I ended up leaving my camera behind at the bar. It was worth it.

Tatler Restaurant Awards 2010

My week started in a very civilized manner with the Tatler Restaurant Awards at The Langham hotel in Portland Place. The event has become a staple in my calendar – it's always fun to see the restaurant glitterati out of their chef whites.

The monochrome lobby of The Langham is incredibly grand, and exudes the sweet smell of success. My friend and I shimmied into the ballroom and relieved the waiter of two glasses of Laurent-Perrier Rosé, served in pretty floral goblets.

The room was relatively empty, but soon filled into the customary chattering throng. Sam and Eddie Hart, decked out in boyish blazers, nattered to our left, while angel-faced Chez Bruce sommelier Terry Threlfall worked the room.

A hush fell upon the crowd as Tatler's restaurant editor Jeremy Wayne stepped up to the mic to announce the winners. Floppy haired, bespectacled and immaculately turned out, Wayne could have played Colin Firth's character in A Single Man. His restaurant and hotel review website runs with the tag line 'eat and sleep with me'.

The awards ceremony was wonderfully quick – almost too quick for me to jot the winners down. Nicolas Clerc of Le Pont de la Tour saw off competition from Neleen Strauss of High Timber and Ivo Stoysnov of L'Atelier de Joel Robuchon to be crowned Best Sommelier, while Marcus Wareing at the Berkeley beat Roka and Terroirs to the Best Kitchen award, with Wayne boldy proclaiming that he hadn't had a better meal in the UK in the last 12 months than chez Marcus.

Super seasonal Kitchen W8 in Kensington won Best Newcomer for its modern European menu, and Maggie Thatcher's fave The Restaurant at The Goring bagged the Most Consistently Excellent award. The Taste of London Rising Star Award deservedly went to Stephen Williams for his fabulous food at newly Michelin-starred Fulham gastropub The Hardwood Arms, while the Restaurant of the Year went to Galvin La Chapelle. The Galvin brothers are the Midas's of the restaurant world – every restaurant they touch lines their pockets with gold.

Before we could get back to the serious business of Laurent-Perrier drinking, there was one last award to dish out. Veteran restaurateur Sir Terence Conran was honoured with a Lifetime Achievement Award for his work in founding some of London's most iconic restaurants, including Quaglino's, Le Pont de la Tour and The Bluebird.

'A lifetime achievement award makes me sound like something stale in the fridge', Conran quipped. 'But I'm not. I've got more on my plate than ever before and an awful lot more still to achieve'. I always find it inspiring when people at the top of their game never seem to want to give up. At a time when he could so easily be resting on his laurels, Conran is clearly up with the lark and as fired up as ever to keep working and expanding his restaurant and retail empires.

After the speeches, my friend and I got chatting to a trio of ebullient Argentines: Sebastian, Santiago and Gustavo, who run Constancia, an Argentine Grill on Tanner Street. They were very excited about their debut in the Tatler Restaurant Guide and invited us down to sample their steaks and Argentine wines. I think I just might.