A lot of Mayfair restaurants are sorely reminiscent of plush car interiors: aircon overkill, dreadful lift music and stilted conversation.
5.30pms exhausted Londoners will head instead to Soho or Covent Garden for a much-needed ching ching and a knees up.
But where to go when you fancy a bit of culture, potentially a spot of hip-shaking and to spoil your taste buds with something utterly delicious beforehand?
Someone prescribed us with Coya Restaurant. "But it's in Mayfair? Surely it can't be that fun?"
Well, thursday seemed like a good day for Latin American - you can let your hair down (everyone knows Thursday is the new Friday) and really contemplate what you're eating without thinking about tomorrow's 8am meeting.
This contemporary Peruvian cuisine joint and members' club is fairly new, opening only in 2012 and already bagging the 2014 Best Restaurant of the Year by the London Lifestyle Awards. They'll do speedy business lunches but for the evening, they'll rob you of your work thoughts and make you forget what city you're in - and what time it is!
Come here for a quick meal and you'll be sorely disappointed - these guys ask more from you, sorry.
The surroundings made us feel like we were cast members of Man On Fire. With a firm nod to its colonial past, Coya combines an opulent, dilapidated décor with a rich Incan palette and modern metallic finishes. The place smacks of Latino Glamour - if you're after chic minimalism, you got the wrong door.
The downstairs restaurant and Pisco Bar (we'll come onto this tipple in a sec), are open to all, - not just members - and they host a menu imagined by Coya's Executive Head Chef, honing in skills laerned in some of Lima's best restaurants. They've kept the old school Peruvian slant but have injected it with a contemporary, 'flashy' twist to satiate the refined palette of the buzzy London lot.
We perched our tired Thursday bottoms at the open ceviche bar where we were promptly handed 2 large Pisco cocktails. Sorry, what's Pisco? Well, it's the juice of Latin America apparently and rarely escapes one of their PHENOMENAL cocktails. Dotted along the bar were traditional botija mud containers - where pisco has been traditionally stored since the 1800's, alongside a selection of exclusive spirits and hard to find tequilas and rums. If choice isn't your forte then you'll have a hard time in this resto-com-bar.
So two, sorry, three cocktails later and we thought we'd best survey the menu before things got way too Peruvian.
Our enthusiastic (and admittedly gorgeous) waiter, Daniel, took us through the various ceviches and tiraditos which are all freshly prepared. We ummed over robata grill ox hearts, duck breast and tiger prawns, then ahhed over Josper rib eye with chimichurri and Chilean sea bass. Daniel reassured us that, while most people have two dishes each, we looked 'like girls with healthy appetites' and thus we opted for four. Ahem, each.
The informative and yet far-from-patronising manner in which we were driven through the various plates with Daniel sparked conversation, taste buds and even put us off our cocktails for a few minutes. It was refreshing and welcome rather than irritating or ornamental - this guy was the real Peruvian deal and spoke about each dish like it was his very own labour of love. Daniel successfully conned us into pudding - a salted caramel chocolate fantasy and a light coconut and white chocolate palette cleanser. This sort of tutelage and effortless persuasion can be experienced by all at Coya's masterclasesses, teaching wannabe-Peruvians everything from ceviche to pisco sour tricks.
The thought of standing up after the Peruvian food marathon was daunting to say the least but curiously, the food here is so healthy (no rabbit food) that it satisfies you in the right way, leaving you craving a boogie over bed. So we made it, all the way upstairs to the members bar and outdoor terrace. And it was worth it.
Think 'Narnia'.
The doors opened and Latin American music spilled out in all its glory. Like a colonial hangover, a glamorous lady shimmied and sang all at once to an electric room of Pisco'd punters. The terrace out the back is a hidden gem, for it still hid Coya's deepest secret - that it is, in fact, not in Latin America but 118 Piccadilly, Mayfair.
http://www.coyarestaurant.com/index
020 7042 7118
By Serena Chambers and Rosalyn Wikeley
Follow on Instagram: @SerenaChambers @RosalynWikeley
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