Quality Wines
88 Farringdon Road, EC1
Meal for two about £220
The more you squint at it, and because of the two bottles of wine I’ve gone through I am doing quite a bit of that, Quality Wines is a weird restaurant. To start with, the shape of the place is fairly mad: two half-rooms, stitched together with a low step I always seem to go over, corner tables that open out immediately to the bar, stools wobbling precariously close to wine racks, a bathroom you have to queue by the pot-washing sink for.
The entire idea of it is weird, a corner wine bar suctioned on to the restaurant next door — Quality Chop House — that somehow over the years became its own restaurant. Quality Wines started as a place to stand at a butcher’s block and drink good bottles of plonk. Then they started doing sandwiches, kind of as a joke. Then they put tables in and started slinging some of the best European plates in the city. Like I said: it’s weird.
I have been to this restaurant a lot, and I think the mark of a good establishment is that you’re able to go in different moods and seasons and get a different version of the ball thrown at you: every few weeks they put on a new sandwich-and-drink lunchtime special that makes me groan at my phone when I see it on Instagram. One of my better Saturdays of 2025 was a lunch that lurched into an afternoon, and then evening, when our method of ordering was, simply, “Whatever Nick wants to send us”. Quality Wines is very easy to fall into and very hard to leave. There is some spooky magic to that.
Today we start with melon and coppa, dressed as everything is here in a peppery pool of good olive oil, and listen: there’s more coppa than melon and that correct excess is exactly why I come here. Next is asparagus with tomato and anchovy beurre blanc, which tastes like a neat little allotment a moment after a mist of spring rain; four slices of London’s bubbliest focaccia help to wipe the plate immaculately clean. Hand-dived scallops with Café de Paris butter come with two fat molluscs perched on each shell and, yes, I clean that out with the bread, too. A bottle of really well-priced Catarratto has me gazing around this jollily bustling restaurant and saying pathetically soppy things like, “I love how the windows mist up with people’s steam.” We ask for a break before mains so I can pull myself together.
As best I can tell the philosophy here is: what if things were really good? Would that be cool? Marcos, the general manager, leans on your table, lazily flaps through the extensive (obviously) wine list, listens to the three bottles you were sort-of-maybe-thinking you were going to get and does a “yeah, sure” shrug before pointing with his thumb at something better. Behind the counter, Nick Bramham has quietly been one of the city’s most in-form head chefs for a while now — he loves nudging a rich yellow plate-bowl of pasta across the counter like he’s played a really good trick on you, but the trick is always, “haha, you prat: this ragù is really delicious.” It gets me every time.
Tonight we veer away from pasta to focus on this week’s blink-and-you’ll-miss-them showstopping mains: a perfectly cooked whole John Dory with tzatziki and peppers which we pick as clean as a cartoon alley cat might, and an Iberico dish, puckered with iron, exquisite little bites of neck nestled on a chickpea and sobrassada base (the third plate to be licked clean: this place turns me into an animal).
To finish there is only one option — you’re getting cannolo, all right? — but bite into Quality Wines’ version and you understand why these things were such a major aspect of Tony Soprano’s life: a single roll of thin-but-stiff, pig-fat enhanced dough, tonight filled to not-quite-but-almost-bursting with a combination of cherry and chocolate creams, I finish it in three perfect shattering bites. I have a theory that one of the better moves for a restaurant is to do one dessert exceptionally well, like it or lump it — the French House’s madeleines, say — and Quality Wines’ cannoli can take a huff of that rarefied air. Predictably, it takes a while to drag me out of there — but I already know it’s a matter of weeks before I fall back in here again.
What you say
Hannah Uría LaBovick: “The food was truly delicious. The salad, chickpeas and rabbit leg were amazing. The rabbit was tender and fell right off the bone. Also the sourdough bread to start was simply delicious. And the wines were SPOT ON.”
Food In London: “Quality Wines is great and chef Nick Bramham effortlessly and consistently serves delicious food. Bifana (pork sandwich) and lamb shoulder with fasolakia and tzatziki are all great.”
Yuliia Pastushenko: “Absolutely fantastic experience at Quality Wines! The food was incredible.”
