First Look, October 4th 2026:
Chiswick has been missing a proper neighbourhood hangout since Sam's Brasserie closed its doors in the summer of 2015, and Charlotte's Bistro followed just before the pandemic.
Tim Price, owner of The Silver Birch and now Brook & Green on the same spot, says it himself on their new website:
Every neighbourhood deserves somewhere it can wander into any day of the week.
And that's exactly what we want for Chiswick. A swish hangout on the High Road to drop into with friends for great food, a proper coffee, or an evening with some interesting wines, no occasion needed.
So could this be the place that finally fills the gap? We really, really want it to be.
On paper, it gets everything right. But does the reality live up to the aims?
Here's what we found.
The missing story
As long-time Chiswickians, we dine out far more than is sensible, and the best bit of writing about a new place is finding out about the story behind it.
Why this site? Why this menu? What are they actually trying to do? At Brook & Green we came away with almost nothing. We had a few minutes with the people behind it, and the shutters stayed firmly down. We never got under the skin of the place.
We totally get that a restaurant shouldn't hang its whole reputation on one person. The chef-as-celebrity thing is exhausting, and plenty of great places are deliberately about the room rather than the name above the door. But there has to be some hook. If it isn't a person, it must then be the team: a killer dynamic or a confident front of house that ensures every guest is made to feel a little bit special. That just wasn't there.
That matters, because a neighbourhood place runs on more than just food. Once we'd sat down, nobody was working the room.
Waiting tables, asking if the food was okay? Yes.
Making meaningful connections with everyone who walks through the door? No.
It opened on 24 September, so we went for Sunday brunch ten days in, just before 10.30am. Think of this as a first look: we'll go back once it has settled in, and update this review.
On a bright morning the front room looks lovely. Tap water arrived quickly, and the coffees soon after.
The order
We write the menus around whatever the season happens to be giving us at the time.
The brunch menu reads that way.
The ricotta hot cakes come from the griddle with seasonal fruit compote, sour cream, maple syrup, toasted seeds, and coconut shavings. They were the surprise of the morning, and definitely one to keep on the menu. They have that American pancake and maple syrup flavour that anyone with a sweet tooth loves, but in the format of something more British, like a scone. We haven't had anything quite like them.
The compote was beautifully presented. A compote can mean anything from an amorphous dollop of fruity jam on the plate to a delicately prepared and flavoured fruit reduction, and this was 10/10 on the latter: it looked and tasted gorgeous. It's not something you'd get on every menu, and it's worth calling out as very good.
The smoked salmon royale is soft poached eggs and oak smoked salmon on a potato rosti, with burnt lemon hollandaise and dill oil.
Swapping the muffin for a rosti is an interesting change, and it makes the dish a lot more foodie than just wanging an egg on a muffin.
The rosti was beautifully seasoned, and the hollandaise was reliably good, exactly as it should be. It tasted good. But the rosti makes it taste less like eggs royale and more like a new dish, and can you really call it eggs royale if it isn't the original recipe? Perhaps, perhaps not. Either way it didn't win us over quite the way the hot cakes did.
At full price, brunch for two with a coffee each comes to £37, or £41.63 with the 12.5% service charge. We showed our Chiswick Club Card, and the bill came back with 50% off the food. Nobody mentioned it and we didn't ask, so it looked like an opening offer rather than anything to do with this review. The prices above are the full menu prices.
Drinks
We're curious to sample the cocktails and hope to come back and check the wine menu some time. At 10.30am, and given this just our first look, we thought we'd stick to coffee for now.
It was pretty basic. Nobody expects a specialist coffee house, but the website pitches Brook & Green as a place for coffee on your own:
Somewhere you can come on your own for a coffee.
For that, the coffee needs to look and taste a lot better than this.
And one small thing. The website promises:
Good things, kept simple, and nothing travels further than it has to.
But the coffee beans aren't local. Chiswick has its own roastery, Curious Roo, and coffee is the one thing on the menu that really could come from round the corner. It feels like the most obvious missed opportunity in the place.
The room
The service style sits awkwardly between formal and casual, without the polish of the first or the warmth of the second, and no one front of house was working the tables. The acoustics are soft, which should feel relaxed, but conversations carry, so the whole room ends up talking in hushed tones.
To us, a bistro means restaurant-quality food with a more relaxed vibe, and that's exactly what Brook & Green should be. The food is already there. The relaxed bit isn't, yet.
As one of us put it on the way home, we were excited to go, but the atmosphere doesn't yet match what it promises. None of that is about the food. It's about the feeling that the people running the place are glad you came, and that's what turns a nice brunch into somewhere you go every Sunday.
Downstairs
The wine room is the part that feels most finished.
A quieter, low-lit wine bar built around our own working wine collection. Exposed brick, bottles on show, warm wooden shelving.
It has the big "semi-private table" for a group. Their site says it opens properly in mid-October.
Verdict
Chiswick needs a place like this, and on paper Brook & Green is it.
The kitchen is ready and the wine room looks lovely. What's missing is the story and the people telling it. It's early days, and plenty of the Google reviews are glowing about both the food and the atmosphere, so please go and try it for yourself rather than relying only on our experience. We'd love to be proved wrong. We'll be back once the wine room is open properly to see how the place is settling in, and we'll tell you what we find.
When we went, Chiswick Calendar Club Card holders got 20% off food and drink.
Visited October 2026 · Published 4 October 2026
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