Framing Tower Bridge in all its glory, Blueprint Café’s discreet location along the Bermondsey riverside frames London’s iconic urban setting. It’s a warm summer’s evening and the sky has been painted pink; and Blueprint Café exploits its scenic riverside location with a bright and sizable dining room and terrace with floor to ceiling windows.
The service at Blue Print Café is faultless, and before we’ve started eating it’s a place I’d return try and return to. Shifting our attention to the food, this certainty matched up to its sizeably impressive space, and was up until very recently, led by Head Chef Mini Patel. Plating up excellent British dishes carefully sourced from local farms and suppliers in the British Isles, Blue Print Café’s menu stood strongly on its own two feet.
No doubt, this waterside dining spot will undergo a transition in the kitchen and it will be intriguing to know whether it can retain its culinary strengths under the previous leadership of Mini Patel. Patel’s fabulously British dishes on the evening included, a crispy courgette flower filled with creamy goat’s curd and smoked haddock fishcakes to start, followed with an 8oz of gilled rump of Hereford Beef and an impressively executed pork chop with warm anchovy & potato puree. This, we all washed down, with rich a bottle of rich south American Rioja and espresso martinis to finish.
Up on the first floor of the design museum, Blueprint Café creates a sense of al fresco dining on the water and is both romantic but elegantly relaxed. For private events, Blue Print Café caters to a variety of occasions from groups to private hire, and the restaurant’s very own Events Manager helps to execute every occasion whilst allowing those to design their own event.
Taking advantage of its location, Blueprint Café draws the outside in, balancing its riverside setting with a superb menu with friendly and helpful service. Looking out over the historic grandeur of Tower Bridge through to the modern skyscrapers of Canary Wharf, it holds a true sense of place that satisfies both local Londoners and visitors to the city. Let’s just hope the next chef in line to take the reins can live up to Mini Patel’s British dishes that paired excellently with the restaurant’s vista over the English metropolis.
Address: 28 Shad Thames, SE1 2YD, 020 7378 7031, www.blueprintcafe.co.uk
