Coq d’Argent review: Is this the best rooftop restaurant in the City?
City AM’s inaugural Toast the City Awards has set off to discover the things that make the Square Mile great, from the coffee shop you always stop at to the gym class you never skip. Among the categories is the Best Restaurant, which will celebrate the top place to eat in the City of London. This week our Life&Style editor Steve Dinneen visits one of the contenders, Coq d’Argent.
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When I first arrived in the City of London, my then-editor Allister Heath took me for lunch in Coq d’Argent. “These are your readers,” he said, gesturing around the room filled with men in suits. Founded by Sir Terence Conran in 1998, Coq d’Argent is perhaps the archetypal City restaurant, emblematic of the post Big Bang, pre-crash era when anything seemed possible and long, Champagne lunches were practically de rigueur. When it opened, there was only one skyscraper in the City – the Natwest building, now known as Tower 42.
Even the building it’s housed in – a strange, stripy-pink, curved modernist creation – has a certain “we do what we want” swagger. Once described by King Charles as a “carbuncle”, it remains one of the more divisive structures in an increasingly homogenous Square Mile.
From ground level (fun fact: Putt Shack in the basement is built on what would have been the ground floor in Roman Londinium), Coq d’Argent is accessed by a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it lift, which beams you up to the 6th floor, where you can pick between the sprawling restaurant and a terrace that wraps around the central atrium.
And let me tell you: this terrace is where you want to be in a heatwave. Rocking up on a blisteringly hot Friday afternoon, it feels more like Los Angeles than central London. Lush greenery snakes all around while parasols keep the heat off. Here a mixed crowd – not a pin stripe to be seen – sip beers to the sounds of lounge jazz.
The maitre d’ greets me by name, having remembered me from the last time I dined here the best part of a year ago, then shuffles the tables around when the sun creeps out from behind our parasol. The service is on point.
The menu – it’s French, should the name “of the restaurant”Coq d’Argent” not have given that away – is ideal for a summer’s day. I started with a crab and giant couscous salad, served in an impressively ornate silver crab that I briefly considered sticking in my rucksack. Delicious. My guest had the world’s most retro entree of dressed melon. I went for a comte tart for my main, which was about as perfect as a comte tart can be, the pastry crisp and buttery, a little squiggle of leek compote and apple lying on top. Across the table was a nicely cooked entrecôte and chips. We finished it all off with sorbet and beers, marvelling at how far from the Square Mile this Square Mile staple feels when the sun’s out.
The City has transformed over the last decade into a genuine gastronomic destination. But don’t sleep on Coq d’Argent, one of the places where it all started. The food is reliably good, the service always great and the venue is unlike anywhere in the Square Mile.
