What the Press Say

«....cuisine of bewildering technicality, some say avant-gardiste, where the Tian of Crab and Skate with Veloute of Cucumber is in itself an enigma, such an object of fascination that we hesitate to undo it. No irony here, just a vague sense of powerlessness in the face of such a desire for perfectionism». Gault Millau Magazine.

"Neat is the complete craftsman - dead clever, cautiously wild, fabulously precise. And constantly on song". The Times UK. Jan 1995.

"Neat is the consistent perfectionist who can touch greatness in a simple parsley sauce". 

Harper's 100 Best.

“…impeccable, fabulous, the best meal I ever ate anywhere” The Daily Meal. April 2017

"Richard Neat is an extraordinary chef. Presentation is stunning, with each dish a miniature work of art'. Time Out. 2005

"Deserves to become one of the London restaurants of the decade". The Times UK.

"Possibly the best new restaurant in London.." AA Guide.

 

“Neat has been called the hyper-perfectionist” Pied-a-Terre 30 years old Book

"Heralded as one of the greatest chefs of his generation" Chef Magazine Nov. 2013

"The food on your plate is more a work of art than the Warhol and Liechtenstein's on the walls. Faultless, impeccable, imaginative cooking that dares to mix anchovy with Foie Gras, knowing the end result will be spectacular." New Journal Review of the Year. 1995.

" ...one of the most talented chefs of his generation..." Caterer and Hotelkeeper.

"The highlight of my culinary year, a roasted veal sweetbread with pea puree - a masterful riot of soft, sweet flavours." London Newspaper.

"A symphony of savours, orchestrated with expertise and devotion." Gourmet magazine.

"The dishes exhibit an unforced originality, gentle and distinct flavours, fantastic deftness". Johnathon Meades, The Times. Jan 2000.

"it is perhaps ironic that the best Snails I have ever eaten should be cooked by an Englishman in France". Table Talk. Eating Out.

"A cuisine ingenious and creative..." Joël Robuchon for Le Figaro.

"The food is exquisite, stunningly created and presented". Tico Times Costa Rica.

"To eat the food of one of the most talented young chefs to come out of Britain, you must now go to France. .....casually sublime food.... Fay Maschler. Evening Standard. 3***/3.

"Neat's Smoked Foie Gras. Utterly, utterly delicious. Sometimes all a restaurant needs to keep people coming back is one gobsmackingly terrific dish and this one alone would do it". Telegraph Magazine. 2001.

"Neat has a brilliant understanding of modern cuisine, incorporating a respect for tradition and curiosity for the new". Homes and Gardens Eating Out.

"Neat delivers innovative, exquisitely cooked French food with ultra-delicate taste." Tatler Restaurant Guide.

"The food is electrifying, the most powerful expression of a chef's personality and talent since Marco-Pierre White opened Harveys, but with more originality and consistency". Telegraph Newspaper after Pied-a-Terre's first week.

The food is bold, inventive, refined and beautifully presented. ……chef Richard Neat and his team served a procession of some of the finest French cuisine London can offer.

Richard Neat’s Rabbit saddle and Pear Tatin with Roquette is possibly London’s finest Rabbit dish.  The Guardian Guide. 

This quiet, understated dining room provides a suitably undistracting foil for Richard Neat’s pursuit of perfection. Those uncomprehending the cult of the chef should come here and discover why they make a difference to even the simplest sauce.   
Harpers & Queen’s Best 

Richard Neat, a real prodigy, who lacks neither talent nor nerve, his ingenious and creative cuisine reflecting the curious route of a gifted person. Joel Robuchon in Figaro. 

Where will all of London want a table this spring? There’s only one place. Neat. It’s already causing a frenzy of anticipation among London’s dining cognoscenti. ES Magazine.

His six-course menu comprised some of the most intensely delicious food I have ever tasted. Guardian Travel. 

It (Neat Restaurant) should be a major step forward in eating out in London. Independent.

 

Richard Neat is a genius. Highlights include a light Quail tagine…. Guardian Travel Guide.

 

Knives are flashing, blood is spattered on their clothes. Et voila! Suddenly, out of the inferno come moments of heaven. The most sublime tastes and flavours. Independent on Sunday. 

"A Cathedral to Gastronomy........where Richard's cooking is both voluptuous and delicately sensual." La Republica.

http://www.thedailymeal.com/eat/interview-richard-neat-british-master-chef-who-started-over-costa-rica

"Perhaps the most important restaurant to ever hit the Costa Rican dining scene...." Sherman's Travel, Costa Rica Guide

RICHARD NEAT - TALK TO THE CHEF. CHEF Magazine.

“I was afraid of waking up one day having spent my entire life in a basement kitchen in Charlotte Street”

Heralded as possibly the greatest chef of his generation, Richard Neat trained in the UK and France with some of the greats including Raymond Blanc, Marco Pierre White, and Joel Robuchon during the late 1980s.

He opened Pied-a-Terre as Chef and co-proprietor with David Moore in 1992 to un-precedented acclaim, winning his first Michelin star a year later, and his second Michelin star at just 29 years old. 

So where do you go from being described by the UK’s most jaded restaurant critics as ‘masterful’ ‘exquisite’, ‘genius’, ‘electrifying’?  In Richard’s case, you leave your successful London restaurant, and travel the world via a highly successful stint for the Taj Group in India; a consultancy role in Moscow, running a rhiad in Marrakesh, and opening an eponymous and award winning restaurant in Cannes – where you are the first British chef to receive a Michelin star in France.

Since 1996, Richard has been in Costa Rica.  He runs a small but exquisite restaurant which is housed in his partner Louise’s antiques store in Sabana Norte, in the centre of San Jose.  With just five tables which are scattered partly around a garden with a trickling fountain or beneath the aisles that house the antiques, Richard's Park Café is a perfect vehicle for his cooking and his chosen life.

Chef Magazine interviewed Richard whilst he was in London for a short trip at his chosen location Bistro Galvin Deluxe on Baker Street.

Q:  Why did you quit Pied-a-Terre?

After five years there, I found I was afraid of waking up one day having spent my entire life in a basement kitchen in Charlotte Street. I just wanted to go away and have some adventure, experience the world

It wasn’t that I wanted to do anything specific, but I have a natural curiosity for life and I wanted to accumulate as many life experiences as possible. I think this is really crucial. I remember it was Michael Caines who asked rhetorically: ‘Where is Richard Neat?” but I’ve had an interesting life and being a successful chef and restaurateur in London is not the only litmus for success in life – there is more out there than begging for alms off the guides and food critics.

I’ve lived in Moscow for two years, I’ve lived in India,  Morocco, now Costa Rica, and it has been very exciting.

On top of this, we visit the UK every year to see family and friends, and we go to Asia for a month, so that my partner can source the antiques she needs: India, Indonesia, Vietnam, China.

We close the restaurant whilst we’re away, and our fabulous restaurant manager looks after the antiques store.

Q:  So you’re travelling, but you’re cooking too?  How important is it to keep on cooking for you?

No one could accuse me of being hardworking but I’m really dutiful and fanatical about doing something right, and this is what makes me work 17 – 19 hours a day when I cook, because I want to do something I want to be proud of.

But it’s something I can do in India, or Marrakesh, and it’s not contingent on any particular guide seeing what I’m doing, or showering of accolades.  You have to be courageous enough to mark your own homework, do your own appraisals.

Q: Have you been influenced by what you’ve eaten on your travels?

It’s not in my character to be influenced by other cuisines.  My background is in French gastronomic cooking, I served eight years apprenticeship in classically influenced restaurants, and I feel that there is a greater integrity with this style of food – I love Thai and Chinese food but it would be ridiculous for me to try and attempt it.

Q:  Is there anything you miss about being outside the London restaurant scene?

Some of the people; once in a while I like to see Warren who was my head chef at Pied-a-Terre and about once a month I feel nostalgic about how easy it is to get the breadth of produce that you can get in the UK.

Q:  Tell me about the Park Café?

This is a restaurant that I’m really proud of.  In Costa Rica, I inherited a clientele of the hacienda antiques house.  It’s primarily the antiques store and its garden where I run my five table restaurant.  But having Park Café is one of the most exciting periods of my life. I have some fantastic friends there and Costa Rica is a really super country to live in.

The menu isn’t casual, it’s the food that I know how to make and enjoy doing – finding the best produce whether it’s foie gras, duck, lamb, scallops, or great fish, and using the skills I brought with me to try some local dishes.  I am doing more raw food though, ceviches are obviously very popular in Latin America.

The clientele I’ve inherited from the antiques store are super-sophisticated people, they travel a lot, so the dishes I have always made go down well with them.  The Latins like to be at the table, in conversation, drinking good wines, they’re very appreciative of my food.

We open about four days a week, because I have reached a stage in my life when I don’t have the same energy as I had in my twenties, and my partner doesn’t want to be married to a ‘restaurateur’. We have a beach house we go down to at weekends.  We want to enjoy this life that we have.

One of the best things about running  a small restaurant is that I get to know my diners.  At Pied-a- Terre we had plenty of regulars, but I didn’t know. Maybe after I’d served the last petit fours if the night I might see a regular leaving, it was only when I moved to South of France that I started making friends amongst our clientele. In Cannes there are ¼ million Brits who live around there, and many don’t work, so they’re happy to sit with us until 2.00 in the morning and get to know them. 

In Costa Rica all my friends I met because they bought antiques though Louise, then started coming to the restaurant, and I have the time to spend talking to them

Q: Do you see continuing this role for years down the line, or do you want to do something different?

Louise would be happy if I never opened a restaurant again, and I have plenty of other things to keep me interested.

I’ve written a book ‘Observations from the Kitchen’.  It has 12 chapters and 12 favourite recipes. Each chapter features a conversation between me the cook, and 12 people whose lives have touched mine.  The chapters cover topics like ambition, contentment, hubris, and chess threads its way through the narrative as I’ve played chess since the age of four and it’s a very important part of my life.

I am publishing this myself, and you can get it online at www.parkcafecostarica.blogspot.com

If it’s well received I want to do more writing in the future, I’ve already started 120,000 words for a book of fiction.  I’m grateful to Louise and to Costa Rica for affording me the time to do it.  There is a better pace of life here, and I’m convinced that the Latins have a duty to teach us barbaric Anglo Saxons how to live.

We also have a TV idea around a pop-up tropical kitchen which would relocate to some of the amazing natural beauty around Costa Rica; volcanoes, primary rainforest, great coastal scenery, we’d make it really spontaneous setting up a barbecue in a wheelbarrow and eating at an improvised table. 

Quick questions:

Favourite ingredient – I can get excited over anything that’s really good, like live scallops, pungent ginger, super-fresh fish it’s a pleasure to use beautiful produce.

Signature dish – Snails rolled in Powered Morilles with Asparagus Tagliatelle

Favourite restaurant – Bistro Galvin Deluxe, a restaurant you feel really comfortable in, with really good staff.  I like what the Galvins do, it’s flawless

Fondest memory – Nothing prepares you for the beauty of Florence.

Exquisite Park Café transitions back to small plates, dinner-only

Dorothy MacKinnon Tico Times.

 

For proof that smaller is better, look no further than Park Café, Sabana Norte’s intimate temple of gastronomy, presided over by internationally celebrated British chef Richard Neat.

When he opened the restaurant in 2006, Neat created a sensation with a menu of small plates of intricate haute cuisine, the likes of which Costa Rica had never seen. Now, the globetrotting, author and chef has also created a true “menu dégustation,” a tasting menu to give diners “the opportunity to experience more tastes and combinations.”

Though each dish is small, the choice is large, with 17 delectable “tastes” currently appearing on the menu. Restaurants usually require the whole table to order a dégustation, with each dish chosen by the chef. So you are out of luck if you can’t persuade your dining companion(s) to join you in the tasting menu. The beauty of Neat’s new menu is that you design your very own dégustation.

Of course, you can also order dishes to share with a like-minded friend. However, forewarned is forearmed: Once you take the first bite, you may quickly renege and shamelessly gobble up the whole dish yourself. Portions are definitely on the small side. Don’t expect to leave stuffed, just satisfied, since the goal here is quality, not quantity. Dining here is definitely easy on the waistline.

Half the fun is salivating over the menu and making your choices. Prices per dish, including tax and service, range from $6-$12. With three Michelin stars to his credit over four decades, Neat never disappoints. His dishes are innovative, exciting and expertly crafted.

For example: Pan-seared scallop wrapped in prosciutto with parmesan. This was the first of six plates my enthusiastic dining companion and I ordered. One large, tender and sweet, caramelized scallop wrapped in salty prosciutto, topped with an afro of fried green onion frizzles, sat on a pillow of savory parmesan risotto. Only one problem: This is one dish you have to order two of to avoid any table tug-of-war.

Next up: Ravioli of crab with asparagus and ginger cappuccino. Delicate crab-filled ravioli bathed in a white ginger-flavored foam. The ginger started as a slow burn, then exploded with flavor. We used the asparagus spears to dip up the ephemeral but tasty foam. This one was easier to share.

Our third dish was the artistic and flavor hit of the evening: Carpaccio of beef with mustard dressing. Four shareable rounds of meltingly tender morsels of raw beef were each surrounded by a ring of green pesto, topped with a swirl of mustard sauce, a sprinkle of parmesan and Neat’s signature, lighter-than-tempura fried green onions. The centerpiece for this quartet was an edible vase of hearts of romaine lettuce.

Once we got over our ecstatic praise, we asked Neat where he found such tender lomito?

Carpaccio of beef with mustard dressing.

“Oh it’s local beef,” he answered. “I add just a little salt and pepper, a squeeze of lemon and truffle oil to tenderize the beef.”Somehow I think that even if I had truffle oil on hand, my results would never be the same.

My companion and I worked our way through the menu, sharing fillet of red snapper freshened with a complementary vanilla sauce, over a purée of green peas; Chinese-spiced duck breast and crispy leg meat with Hoisin sauce, paired with a cooling cucumber and mint salad; octopus braised in red wine and tomato with Greek salad.

All went companionably until the last dish: an exquisite single lamb chop balanced atop a large wild mushroom ravioli. This is food for the gods and one you have to order two of. Trust me. It will prevent a brawl.

We chose a bottle of crisp, fruity California chardonnay to accompany our tasting adventure. The interesting wine list roams the globe: South America, the U.S., Europe and Australia. The average price for a bottle is ₡25,000 ($45) – not cheap, but the quality is on par with the level of the cuisine. You can also order a few wines by the glass (₡4,600/$8.40). For romantic dinners à deux, there’s a half-bottle of Champagne (₡40,950/$74.50).

The sweet finish is a six-course dessert platter (₡11,000, $20), meant to share, with large portions of crème brûlée, tarte tatin, caramel ice cream, a chocolate-banana soufflé, tiramisù and strawberry shortcake, every dish prettily presented.

Art and elegance imbue the entire experience here. Enclosed in a cloistered courtyard, tables are set in a romantic garden and under colonnades furnished with an exotic collection of Balinese antiques and curios. The Indonesian theme appears on tables, too: small serving platters, patterned with natural swirls and whorls, are cut from petrified Indonesian wood, more than 1.5 million years in the making.

The elegant Park Café doubles as an antiques shop.

By day the restaurant is a showroom for Louise France’s Asian antique collection. At 5:30 p.m., the place transforms into the restaurant. Service is smooth and polished, never rushed. Neat often appears to present his creations.

Dining here is expensive. But how many opportunities are there in Costa Rica to experience world-class, gastronomic artistry and creativity?

For three hours or so, any evening from Tuesday to Saturday, you can enter the rarefied realm of haute cuisine, in a serene, exotic setting, without buying an airplane ticket to foreign shores.

Even though Park Café offers seriously crafted food, it’s also the best fun a food-lover can have a chance to indulge in a sensory experience.