Camille

Here we have a little haven of French provincial cooking amid the bustle of Borough Market, a neat, simply dressed bistro with candles on the tables and a menu featuring pâté en croûte, grilled ox heart with Café de Paris butter, and a daily line-up of blackboard specials. Clare Lattin and Tom Hill cut their teeth at London’s Ducksoup, then moved on to osteria Emilia in Devon, so they have serious chops when it comes to running restaurants. There’s nothing quite like the buzz in here when the place is full, with upbeat service adding to the all-round joie de vivre. The kitchen is run by Elliot Hashtroudi, who takes due account of seasonal British produce for a series of delicious French vignettes where each plate is allowed to shine in its own right. We kicked off with a snack of smoked eel served atop curried devilled eggs, before tackling a starter of white crabmeat perfectly matched with a barattiere melon and cucumber emulsion, heritage tomatoes and a melon granita. For the main course, the richness of a superb Welsh pork schnitzel (crisp on the outside, juicy on the inside) was offset by a salad of greengage and crispy pig's ear – although a combo of octopus, pig's trotter and bacon looked equally intriguing. To finish, we were taken by the peach tart and the canelé with lemon curd, but finally settled for a rich dark chocolate marquise topped with Chantilly cream and beef-fat salted caramel. A dozen low-intervention wines from small French and Italian producers start at £35, with by-the-glass selections changing each day.

Billed as a ‘reflection of imagined jaunts through regional France’, Camille offers a blackboard menu of rustic-yet-precisely-cooked dishes that wouldn’t look out of place on a hip Parisian backstreet alongside a carefully-chosen selection of low-intervention wine. London is not short of contemporary takes on French bistros, but this small-yet-perfectly-formed Borough Market restaurant stands out thanks to the talent of its owners Clare Lattin and Tom Hill, who are also behind Ducksoup in Soho and Emilia’s in south Devon. The pair are low-key in their approach but are well-versed in the fundamentals of hospitality, with Camille proving that you don’t need a huge budget and a massive team to deliver a fantastic restaurant experience. Head chef Elliot Hashtroudi – whose cooking CV includes wine bar 107 and nose-to-tail pioneer St John – has created a menu that is perfectly in step with Camille’s timeless Parisian bistro aesthetic. Made up of small plates, main course-sized dishes and larger plates for sharing the daily-changing blackboard menu is big on delicious but cost-effective ingredients including fromage de tete; trotters; and pig’s cheeks. The wine list follows suit, offering a relatively good value selection of natural wines with a focus on French producers. Launched in 2024, the restaurant is partly inspired by chef Pierre Koffmann’s brilliant Memories of Gascony cookbook (Camille was the name of his grandma).