Casual French(ish) Dining · Covent Garden · ££
Restaurant Opening: June 2026
The menu at Buvette has a pop-up in it. When you open the card, a paper bouquet of cutlery rises from the spine, the kind of engineering you’d expect from an expensive children’s book. We hadn’t ordered anything yet and Buvette had already handed us a piece of theatre.
This is the thing to understand about Buvette before you go… it isn’t a French bistro. It’s New York’s idea of one, arrived in Neal’s Yard via the West Village with its props intact. The frites come stacked in a drinking glass on a branded paper napkin. The grey marble is doing an impression of a century it hasn’t lived. The room is in costume, and the costume is, somehow, quite charming.
We went a few days before opening. The room was full of press and friends of the house, not an empty seat in it. The kitchen was still finding its rhythm, and midway through service the smoke found the fire alarm and it started to blare. What followed was the whole staff, every waiter, every runner, fanning the air in a kind of coordinated emergency choreography, faces arranged in expressions somewhere between professional calm and barely contained delight, while the alarm carried on above them. When it finally stopped, the entire room broke into applause.
In most restaurants this would be the anecdote you tell against them. Here it was the best scene of the night, because it revealed something true: I’ve rarely seen a room more completely, more instinctively, on a restaurant’s side. Whatever Buvette is doing, it’s doing it to people immediately.
The food is built for sharing. The carottes râpées arrive almost aggressively fresh, julienned carrot with pistachios, coriander and lemon, the kind of plate that cuts through richness. The steak tartare is chopped rather than minced, with cornichons, capers and sliced radishes doing the crunch work. The ratatouille tartine is lighter than it has any right to be, the vegetables roasted with actual patience. The salted butter and anchovy tartine is, let’s be honest, primarily butter, but the anchovies are doing emotional work.
The plate to order is the hachée au jambon cru: pearls of prosciutto with comté and honey, sweet and salty in a ratio I’m still thinking about days later. It was the best thing on the table, and also quite telling. No café in Paris would serve it. Buvette isn’t copying France, it’s New York’s invention of France. A real Paris café doesn’t try this hard, the trying is Buvette’s American showing, and it’s also, in the end, what makes you stay.
Next to us sat two French women who, at the end of their dinner, told the waiter it was one of the best meals they’d had all year. I had spent two hours quietly building the case that Buvette is a fiction. It turns out the only jury that matters had already ruled.
Go after the theatre. It’s Covent Garden, and this is a perfect second act.
That tartare looks heavenly!!