He remembers his mother preparing for parties with “the big red wine glasses, the Riedels, the smaller white ones, the water glasses. I’d always help set the table.” This lifelong imprint may be why Bistro Freddie works, and why it’s become a name approvingly murmured most weeks in restaurant circles and beyond. Despite, bafflingly, no national review from a critic, the place is “full for lunch and dinner, which means everything” and has had flattering write-ups everywhere from Vogue to the Financial Times, the Independent to Esquire. TopJaw raved, while Great British Chefs named Anna Søgaard, who heads up the kitchen, as one to watch. And her signature dishes — the chicken and tarragon pie, the steak in peppercorn sauce, the snail flatbread doused in garlic and studded with crispy chicken skin — seem to pop up constantly on social. “That pie is the new Instagram thirst trap,” says the Standard’s fashion editor Victoria Moss. “And the whole fashion industry, despite being on Ozempic, is in there at the moment.” Case in point? Parisian brand Soeur decided to hold its London launch there last month.