Josephine is a Lyonnaise bistro on the Fulham Road from Claude Bosi. It is named for Bosi’s grandmother and is that rare, magical thing: a perfect restaurant. Bosi runs Bibendum (two Michelin stars, and in Michelin House) and Brooklands at the top of the appalling Peninsula hotel (two Michelin stars). He opens a second Josephine this month in Marylebone, which needs it since the Chiltern Firehouse, always a restaurant that felt like Icarus with a kitchen, burnt down to rubble. I haven’t eaten in Brooklands – I wish the Peninsula were an island, so that it could float to Victoria and then away, being an oligarchic monstrosity. But my instinct is: this is the good stuff.
When you feel love in a restaurant, you are in the right place, even in Chelsea
The exterior is painted navy blue: it has been washed by a maniac. It is smart even for Chelsea, which is always absurd – it’s the awful closeness to Fulham that corrupts it. I am 40 minutes early and arrive during a rainstorm, and I know I am in a perfect restaurant within seconds, as you do, because the diner’s instincts for security are the same as a child’s. I am settled immediately with the prelude: real French bread, (unsalted) butter, lumps of deep-fried pig fat (grattons Lyonnais) in a terra-cotta bowl, which taste better than they sound, being pork scratchings.
The interior is as perfectly wrought as a stage, which it is. There is a ruby red curtain at the entrance to repel the street, dark wood walls, a pale mosaic floor, fine lighting, posters for the long-dead of Lyon.
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