The Frontline Club Restaurant Review: Modern British Cooking at Its Finest in Paddington

I’m going through this rather odd stage of my life right now when it comes to dining. Six years or so ago, before the London restaurant scene started booming, all of the restaurants I was eating in were pleasant enough, but perfection didn’t become a thing to really discover until the scene exploded. Freeze dried, water baths, herb gardens on roofs and trainer wearing staff were all thrown into the mix too. And while I love Michelin starred dining and risk-taking cooking very much, my tastes are changing once again. Right now I’m craving simple, sometimes old-fashioned cooking – but most importantly with precision and quality ingredients. My latest discovery offering all of this and more is The Frontline Club in Paddington.

The Frontline Club is nestled away on the back streets of Paddington and in all honesty I really wasn’t holding out for much. I read its simple menu online and was expecting it to be just nice. But a few days later, menu in hand and some starters in front of us all we could mutter over dinner to each other was “omg try this forkful” and “these scallops are amazing they have so much flavour”. The latter muttered by me. It really was a delight because I’m rarely surprised in London these days. My Isle of Mull scallops arrived cooked to utter perfection, smothered with sea vegetables, parsley and garlic butter. Each mouthful exploded in the mouth with a real taste of the sea and all that garlic. Portion wise it was perhaps a little small, but I stopped caring given how good it was. Fresh, creamy and sour burrata was served with Sardinian artichoke, which was incredibly well prepared and cooked – along with some frightfully zesty Amalfi lemon. Utter heaven and very well priced.

Main course didn’t disappoint either. Perfectly cooked grilled hanger steak, with baked bone marrow, an outstanding burnt onion puree sauce served as a smear and drizzled in a Bordelais sauce. So much flavour and so much satisfaction from this dish. Even my side was good of crispy iceberg lettuce, covered in chunks and a sauce of blue cheese. Simple, but flavoursome.

We’d quite literally just come back from Bordeaux in France after visiting The Frontline Club and so ordering steak tartar was going to be a risky one given the incredible versions we had been eating on a constant daily basis. But of course,The Frontline Club pulled it out of the bag, with its simple presentation and texture led version. Good quality beef, well-seasoned and well-spiced. The side of chips were also great. Fluffy in the middle and crunchy on the outside. The oil that they had been cooked in even tasted fresh.

Cheese course admittedly arrived to our table by mistake and given my blue cheese overload from the side salad, I wasn’t really feeling it – but that truffled brie got devoured within minutes. The blue was great too, as were the thin crackers.

Desserts came in the form of some terrific honeycomb laced scoops of ice cream and a rich moist ginger cake with vanilla cream. Both of which offered everything thing we could have hoped for to finish on, and a fair bit of heat from the ginger. By this point the restaurant around us was almost completely packed.

We had such a lovely evening at The Frontline Club and it really did catch us by surprise. Loads of flavour, terrific service, excellent pricing and a lovely setting – with a menu focusing on flavour and quality. I highly recommend a visit to The Frontline Club. You’ll be just as surprised as I was and will never leave disappointed.

NB: I was invited to review and my meal was complimentary. All views are as always, my own. My views are not influenced by anyone other than my own palate and slightly poor eyesight.