Please note, Hibiscus is now closed. Time Out Food & Drink Editors, October 2016.
Chef Claude Bosi opened a gastropub in Fulham in 2012 to go with his other one in Wimbledon, but he clearly hasn’t taken his eye off this flagship restaurant. There’s no à la carte (unless you really want it), so choose three, six or eight courses – and marvel, as the extraordinarily composed dishes arrive on your table with military timing.
On a ‘Taste of Spring’ menu, almost everything included a potentially unusual combination of fruit/savoury flavours – a single spear of grilled asparagus with confit orange and black truffle purée as a starter; scallop sharpened with pink grapefruit gel; gariguette strawberries topped with celeriac foam. Some of the pairings tend towards the experimental; it takes a few mouthfuls to convince yourself that morels with kaffir lime, coffee and tarragon actually works. But it does – as does everything else in this often vividly exciting restaurant.
Even the unobtrusively adept service is far from buttoned-up. The impressive wine list is big on biodynamic and natural expressions, but there’s a house wine at £6 a glass, meaning lunch (with its reasonably priced offerings) needn’t be as expensive a prospect as dinner inevitably is.