Great Queen Street: A hearty helping in the bustle of theatreland

Although part of a group that includes three of London’s outstanding gastropubs — Anchor & Hope, Canton Arms and Camberwell Arms all well worth seeking out — Great Queen Street is a restaurant with the facility to book tables and a 5.30pm dinner kick-off in a location that makes it ideal for pre-theatre eating. Ten years ago when it opened with delightful Tom Norrington-Davies at the stoves the stripped-back décor — to which nothing much seems to have been done since — was arguably more startling than the modern European cooking in the tradition of Alastair Little. Now dishes and sharing assemblies such as warm black pudding, Alsace bacon salad and a poached egg; pot roast beef shin and risotto Milanese for two; suckling pig shoulder, choucroute, Montbéliard sausage, apple and horseradish for three are harder to find in multidisciplinary Soho and Covent Garden. The premises are opposite Freemasons’ Hall where the Observer Food Monthly Awards are usually held. I find myself gravitating to GQS for reassuring dinner after.