Salon Brixton

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Salon serves seasonal and inventive food in a relaxed setting in Brixton Village market.

We have a downstairs bar with a menu of snacks and sharing dishes, and an upstairs dining room, where we serve an ever changing seasonal set menu of either four or seven courses.

It’s like fine dining, but without any of the fuss.

http://www.salonbrixton.co.uk

Salon Brixton Review - mirandasnotebook

On Sunday, I headed for lunch with my mum at a restaurant I’ve been wanting to try for ages: Salon Brixton.

When I first stumbled across Salon Brixton’s website, I was instantly hooked by the delicious sounding dishes and intrigued by the restaurant’s policy of using mainly British ingredients (many of which are sourced in Brixton!)

As we were in a celebratory mood, we kicked off the meal with a rhubarb fizz cocktail, whilst nibbling on some delicious sourdough bread and poring over the menu.

Salon Brixton restaurant is intimate, with only a few long and small tables upstairs, and there was a pleasant, bustling atmosphere, with groups of friends and families lingering over their meals as they laughed and chatted.

Even though it was busy, our service was attentive, and our lovely waitress Jeanette took the time to explain the menu and thoroughly introduce each course, along with its accompanying wine.

Salon Brixton

Salon serves seasonal and inventive food in a relaxed setting in Brixton Village market.

We have a downstairs bar with a menu of snacks and sharing dishes, and an upstairs dining room, where we serve an ever changing seasonal set menu of either four or seven courses.

It’s like fine dining, but without any of the fuss.

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Salon, Brixton: restaurant and wine bar review | Foodism

In the maze of Brixton Village, you'll find Salon: a funky little restaurant housed in the market's old hairdressers, that comes complete with an oh-so-charming wine bar and bottle shop.

Salon has been keeping Brixton happy since 2012, but the wine store only opened its doors at the tail end of 2017.

If you don't at least pop your head into the wine store, you're missing the point.

The bottle shop, which specialises in low intervention and natural wines, is managed by Alex Prymaka, Salon's energetic wine expert.

At some point, probably about halfway through your bottle of wine, you might have an existential crisis and question the meaning of life, and sharing plates – especially if you go all in and regret agreeing to share the umami flavour bomb that is the shredded lamb with nutty celeriac puree.

Salon, Brixton Market - restaurant review | London Evening Standard

If everyone is compelled to eat the same dishes in a fairly small restaurant, ordering is simple, pressure on chefs ameliorated, wastage minimised (a good thing, of course, unless no one turns up) and one day’s menu can segue almost imperceptibly into the next.

Salon, where ex-Brunswick House Café head chef Nicholas Balfe is cooking, is a small rackety restaurant — seating about 26 — above the British deli Cannon Cannon on Brixton’s Market Row.

Cheeses (£7 supplement), Denhay, Gubbeen and Perl Las, a blue Caerphilly from West Wales, were supplied by the deli and well worth ordering except that it brings the cost of a meal for one consumed in coltish discomfort to £36, or £58 with the chosen wines.

Lunch on Sunday, because of the time of year, comprised a short à la carte (normal service of a fixed-price menu has now resumed).

Listening to Radio 6 Music, gazing out of the window onto Market Row, which is quite diverting, we waited ages for one dish of chickpeas, fennel and smoked pig’s cheek and another of braised venison shank with celeriac purée and Jerusalem artichokes.

Salon, restaurant review: All hail this second coming | London ...

The first course, “mackerel, elderberries, horseradish”, both looked and tasted remarkably good — the fresh line-caught mackerel from Dorset, as we were assured it was, converted into three fillets that had been quickly marinated then heated with a blowtorch, sitting in a pink berry juice, bedecked with caramelised wild elderberries, a few green leaves and a blob of mild, creamy horseradish sauce.

They were sitting in a herby green jus, not overpowered by the cheese, topped with Scottish girolles, some sautéed, others sweetly pickled in wine and bay leaf, pickling being a thing here.

Again, there was a terrific accompanying wine, a Toscana IGT, “Prunecchio”, from Fattoria di Sammontana, mainly sauvignon blanc but with a little malvasia and trebbiano too, fresh yet aromatic, lovingly made (only 6,000 bottles a year).

Again, the wines were sumptuous (although under-described on the wine list): a massive, concentrated 15 per cent abv biodynamic Primitivo, from Fatalone in Puglia, and one of the best Chilean reds I have tasted, Cinsault/Pais, made by Rogue Vine, from dry bush farmed vines in the small vineyards of the Itata Valley, 400km south of Santiago, £45.50 a bottle here and well worth it, presumably secondarily sourced from nearby Indigo Wines.

Bavette alla granseola — spaghetti-like pasta with spider crab — for a last lunch on the Lido before leaving the Venice Film Festival last week, at soothing beachside Da Graziano, one of the few restaurants not attached to a care home where the average customer age is a generation older than me, still.