The section has notes on restaurants that you
may have heard of but which do not make it into my
Birdcage (now
deceased, but like a zombie has returned to Barnes in the shape of MVH)
4-5 Duke Of
020 7839 3090
3/10
£53 each
Tucked away off
020 7262 6073
3/10
£55 each
A very mixed meal. Breads (white, brown and olive rolls) are
home made, and were generally excellent, though one batch was singed
(6/10). An amuse geule
was a little cup of langoustine and mandarin orange soup – this was as bizarre
as it sounds. The soup itself was
well-made with smooth texture plenty of langoustine flavour,
and would you not thin that enough for anyone?
No, while such a dish would suffice at a 3 Michelin star establishment,
the chef here felt the need to add some orange flavour. Needless to say this
overpowered the delicate taste of the langoustines, and these two flavours are
not something to be combined
(0/10 for the concept, 5/10 for the execution). For starter I had langoustines, just several
very small langoustines indeed served in their shells. This was a poor dish, with the “langoustines”
really just prawns, tolerably cooked but not clearly – there was no additional
flavour, just a heap of tomato in the centre of the plate (1/10). Stella’s starter of haddock and white kidney
bean soup, garnished with truffle oil and finely chopped chives, was much
better, with good texture (4/10).
My
main course was very nicely cooked guinea fowl, the dish of the evening. The meat was carefully cooked, a pleasant jus
and some root vegetables accompanied the meat (6/10). Stella had pan-fried sea bass, which was
correctly cooked. The aubergine mousse
with it was satisfactory, but described on the menu as a “soufflé”. Also accompanying it were finely diced
Mediterranean vegetables and a drizzle of balsamic vinegar. Unfortunately the garnish of ginger and lime
was a blackened mass sitting on the sea bass and had to be scraped to one
side. For dessert, passion fruit sorbet
was home-made and full of flavour, with a slightly heavy texture (5/10). I had a rather runny goats milk crème brulee, but it was made with vanilla and had a good topping
(3/10). Coffee was pleasant (3/10). The wine list was mainly French with a few
gestures abroad e.g. De Bortoli Noble One dessert wine at a steep £13 a glass. The half bottle brought was not the same
vintage as the one listed. The wine
service was amateurish: when ordering the main wine we were asked to just quote
the number of the wine, as in a Chinese takeaway. The small dining room was quite empty this
evening – indeed at the start of the evening we were the only guests other than
what seemed to be a tramp who had wandered in off the street with what appeared
to be tuberculosis, but turned out to be a diner after all: no-one rushed to
sit next to him. A couple of other
people drifted in later on but this was certainly not throbbing.
Halkin Arcade.
020 7823
1166
2/10
£72 each
Very
smart décor, with the inevitable stripped wood flooring, but also very
sophisticated lighting. The kitchen, or
at least some of it, is laid out along pone wall, so one can see the tandoors in action, salads being tossed etc. Service is from a wide range of
nationalities, and was very good. There
is a small, attractive bar area in a corner of the main dining room. They are “too posh to popadom”
here and indeed the whole menu idea is a bit precious. It is styled after the supposed habits of
Indian noblemen, who would eat a bunch of grilled meats and then finish things
off with a biriani.
Well, I can’t say I have ever encountered this particular thinking, but
even if some rich guy a hundred years ago used to do this, does that mean we
all have to? Anyway, this twist gives
them the “dining concept” no doubt desired to set them aside from other Indian
restaurants. The dishes (except the biriani) arrive haphazardly, and this is not good, as we
ended up with a dry potato dish with no sauce at all, and a
bread basked arrived with no dishes whatever to eat it with. Oddly, though no popadoms
are allowed, there are some remarkably ordinary chutneys:
tomato, plum and some mango powder.
These were quite nondescript.
Having finally navigated the menu, the first dish to arrive was a
chicken tikka (with a marinade of black pepper; one
with paprika is also available). This
was actually very good, the four pieces of chicken very tender and picking up
spicy flavours from its marinade (3/10). Next up were a pair of scallops, served in
their shell with what was supposedly a green herb sauce but in fact tasted
exactly like a spicy coconut sauce. This
worked very well, the chilli edge to the coconut base
an unusual and effective one; the scallops themselves were diver caught and
nicely timed (3/10). A giant tiger prawn
was also carefully cooked, again served in its shell with a little hint of a
similar spicy green sauce (3/10). The
diced potato dish that arrived was pleasant but was not that warm, and needed
something to go with it (like another dish).
1/10 only for this. Similarly a dhal was adequate but not a patch
on the one at Yatra, lacking any great flavour (1/10).
Breads were a plain naan, a roti and a naan flavoured with mint, and these were rather ordinary,
suffering in particular from a complete lack of salt; to be fair, when we asked
for some salt this appeared without demur from the helpful Dutch waiter. Finally a dish of minced chicken served in a
banana leaf was pleasant but lacked any real interest (1/10). The briiani is
served with some ceremony in an iron pot over a little burner, and it is
correctly prepared with a coating of pastry to seal the flavour. In this case the briaini
was of vegetarian, of artichoke hearts and chickpeas, but while the rice was
pleasant the artichoke hearts were cooked ultra-lightly (on the verge of not
cooked) and the rice lacked the fragrant flavour that
the best birianis have so was again 1/10 (for good
examples of biriani without going to Hyderabad try
the Tandoor in Kingsway, and Madhus
at Southall).
There was a set of desserts offered, and I tried a granite of lime, a lychee jelly and a granite of plum, which were all pleasant
enough (2/10). There is a quite
respectable wine list with a somewhat esoteric set of New World choices, and
some eccentric Old World ones (one gewürztraminer only, and this is from
Italy?!?) but I had Cobra beer at an extortionate £3.85 a half. That’s £7.70 a pint. Indeed the bill is the big problem here,
because for over £70 a head with just four beers and one glass of cheap wine between
us, you’d have to ask why you would rather have two rather better meals at Haandi in Knightsbridge.
They are clearly aiming at the Cinnamon Club set of people who want to
eat Indian food in a posh setting, and commercially this seems to be working,
with almost a full house on this potentially dead-end Thursday between
Christmas and New Year. I must admit
that when I found out the ownership was the same as the dismal Veerswamy and the mediocre Chutney Mary my heart sank, but
this is much better than either of them.. However at this price I can’t see myself
returning.
020 7300 5500
3/10
£83 each
So chic it doesn’t design with anything tedious
like a sign, the
The waiting staff are
as trendy as you would expect, and disconcertingly our waitress tended to pull
up a chair at our table to sit down and talk to us when ordering etc; I kept
expecting her to pop along, grab a napkin and tuck in when the food
arrived. The menu is true fusion,
derived from the elder sibling Asia de Cuba restaurant in
To start with Stella tried rock shrimp salad,
grilled shrimps with some very fresh wsalad leaves
drizzled with a sweet chilli sauce and (rather idly) crème fraiche.
This actually worked better than it sounds, and the prawns were very tender
(4/10). I had marinated jumbo prawn satay, that was much plainer, reasonable enough but fairly
dull (1/10), served with a cold heap of disappointing glass noodles with a
roasted peanut and cucumber dressing.
The main course we shared was pan-seared tuna, five pieces on a bed of
excellent wasabi mash, the tuna laced with a spicy “chimichurri” sauce.
I don’t think mash and tuna is a good idea, but the mash and the tuna
themselves were very good (3/10). A side
order of
020 7323 9655
2/10
£90 each
Note that the restaurant has now folded due to
an unfortunate accident involving the chef.
“Pretentious, nous?” might be the motto of
this undeniably original restaurant. The
cooking could be described as eclectic or fusion but is really just intended to
shock (“your scorpion, sir”). It is
cramped, and I don’t mean by this bijou, or compact, I mean cramped, seemingly
deliberately so. The designer has
stuffed so many artefacts into the already limited space that you have the
impression of walking into an antique shop whose storeroom has been made
unexpectedly unavailable. The flooring
is tiled in the manner of marble, walls are orange/red, while chairs are varied
but include embroidered armchairs, some with bolsters. We were only able to get
to our corner table at all by having the waiter remove a wine cooler, shift the
table this way and that, then use a shoehorn to get into the chair (I made up
that last bit, but it felt like it).
Lighting is fairly dark, from directed ceiling spots and numerous
candles of varying sizes. The ceiling is
also dark red, with bronze-coloured ceiling coving. Around the cluttered dining room are numerous
birdcages with fake birds, huge candles, displays of peacock feathers and
various esoteric – a Tibetan prayer wheel for example. On our none-too-large table, with its red
tablecloth were: three Japanese fans, a candle, two ornamental wine glasses, a
terracotta dish with a stuffed bird, a pestle and mortar, a bell, an Indian
flute, some green and gold mats and a display card with a bird on one side and
my name (misspelt) written in on the other. The “napkin” looked like and had the texture
of a duster, so on the principle that if something looks like a duck and quacks
like a duck, it probably is a duck, then I believe
that we had dusters rather than napkins.
The walls are adorned by several paintings of male nudes, a multi-coloured
oil painting, photos of birds, framed pastels and some embroidery. It is worth noting that the toilets are
accessed via a spiral cast-iron staircase, which may put off the vertiginous. More seriously, someone had spilt something
on one of the steps, which caused me to almost fall down the staircase. I pointed this out to a waitress but based on
the rest of the service experience, I imagine the slippery patch is still there
to this day. As you enter and leave you
walk through a patch of gravel where a doormat would normally be, so perhaps
the wet patch on the stairs was a “flooring experience” that I simply had not
appreciated. The room became extremely
hot and stuffy during the many long hours the meal took, as there seems to be
just one ineffective ceiling fan. This
was a very cold day, so I cannot conceive of what this must be like during a
summer evening. Those fans on the table
are not ornamental.
The menus are brought taped inside hardback books, while the wine-list,
it should come as no surprise to you by now, comes inside a gilded spherical
wire cage with a stuffed bird on top, folded up origami style, along with a
magnifying glass to actually read it.
Eclectic music plays, from a Stevie Wonder
track at one moment to what sounded like whale noises most of the time,
intermixed with a stringed instrument in distress. The wine list, once unravelled, has a wide
range lurking on its parchment page, including Chateau Le Pin at £4,253,
Chateau Petrus 1961 at £7,630, a Gouder
Awash 1979 Ethiopian wine, a Cuvee Anne Schlumberger 1989 at a ludicrous £110
and a Vega Sicilia Valbuena
at a similarly heart-stopping £110 (not Unico, Valbuena, just to make it clear). There are also a number of more reasonably
priced wines in the £25 - £60 range. The
clientele is young, fashionable (the girl on the next table was in a striking
Gucci half-dress) and necessarily wealthy.
Mineral water is the Birdcage’s own brand, sourced from
The service is worth some discussion.
When you ring up to book you have to leave a credit card number, which I
guess for a place with just a couple of dozen covers is acceptable. The main waitress (maitre d’?) is very
fashionable and looks just like Miranda Richardson in her walk-on part in
Absolutely Fabulous; indeed this whole place feels like an Ab
Fab set.
Another waitress has a blue wig, the other face paint and glitter. Our “waiter”, a term I use advisedly since
applying the label to him brings the whole profession into disrepute, was a
casually dressed twenty something man.
Once we were eventually levered into our chairs we were asked for our
drinks order – as well as the water we had one glass of champagne. This arrived with a large slice of orange
zest dangling in the glass. This had
polluted the champagne, making it undrinkable, and it was only reluctantly
replaced with a glass that did not have sundry citrus fruit floating in
it. He went through the menu pointing
out details of some of the elusively named items, noting that “another basket”
was if we wanted a second bread basket.
I pointed out that we were still awaiting our first of these. After ordering the food we then asked to see
the wine list, which eventually arrived, closely followed by the starters. Trying to get the waiter’s attention to order
our wine was, well, difficult, despite the fact we are sitting in a tiny dining
room. After speaking and then eventually
shouting to him and being completely ignored, I found a use for the bell placed
on the table and, feeling like Michael Winner, proceeded to make enough of a
racket that eventually one of the waitresses wandered over and duly took the
wine order. The missing bread was noted
once more, and eventually it arrived some time after we had finished our
starters. Perhaps it is a little
convention here that the bell is the correct way to attract attention, since it
was the only thing that induced any sign of life into the waiter or other
waiting staff at all at any stage of the evening. Merely making a sign, or talking, is presumably
déclassé. A disturbing smell of burnt
bread wafts its way up from the kitchen at regular intervals, and when our
bread eventually arrived we saw why. The
filo was burnt, the foccacia
not burnt but too salty even for me, the pitta was
singed, the raisin and nut distinctly black around the edges, with only the
already dark pumpernickel bread surviving the attentions of the kitchen
unscathed. When I pointed to this out to
the waiter (after much bell ringing) he said “ah, the bread is crispy; if it is
burnt then it is not a great tragedy” and flounced off. Instead of butter was a dish of pumpkin puree
flavoured with green tea and wasabe, which ended up
tasting predominantly of nothing much at all.
It took, to consume three courses (and a scorpion) just under four hours from entering the restaurant until we
gratefully left. This is of epic
proportion given there are only two dozen covers, and is simply unacceptable in
my view. The scorpion seemed symbolic of
the service.
The canapé is complex, consisting of six elements. There was: a spicy beetroot salad on crostini, a mini artichoke and spring onion salad on an
oatcake, a vegetable spring roll topped with wasabe
mustard, a black pudding with sweet chilli relish, a reindeer slice with a
quarter cherry tomato and olives, and a scorpion. In addition there were deep fried parsnips
and popadoms, plus a plum relish laced with
chillies. I wasn’t kidding about the
scorpion; they apparently get these from the
My starter was carpaccio of reindeer. This was served in normal style, the thin
slices of raw reindeer (pine smoked) laid out to cover
the dinner plate, while in the centre of the plate was a little box of Caesar
salad, with pools of tomato chutney and mini-popadoms
alternating around the central salad. In
case this was a bit lacking in flavours, the kitchen (motto: “never use one
flavour when five will do”) had added some anchovies on the reindeer and some wasabe mustard. The
elements all tasted satisfactory, the reindeer having pleasant texture and
retaining its venison taste, the chutney competent and the salad having
reasonably fresh leaves and some fresh parmesan slices for garnish (3/10). Stella’s salmon was cooked rare and served in
a betel leaf which was then fried, offered with Japanese-style fried rice
wrapped in another, unidentified leaf.
The salmon was enlivened with a bowl of pickled radish, and a ginger and
a wasabe relish.
The salmon was correctly cooked, and though the flavours did not seem
harmonious, they did not jar too badly (2/10).
This was served, not on a plate, but a grey slate. Before the main course arrived (indeed when
the main course was still a distant event, hours in the future) we were offered
a choice of granita, which were pleasant. Ginger wine granita
was the better of the two (3/10) while a passion fruit granita
was short on sugar so was too astringent (1/10). I had honeyed Hungarian chilli pig, which was
small, thin slices of pork that had been cooked in paprika and honey, presented
amongst some salad leaves in a bowl.
Unfortunately, though the pork was slightly sweet and nicely cooked, the
salad was completely dominated with a dressing of aniseed, which overwhelmed
all other flavours and completely ruined the dish, so out of proportion was
it. On the side was a
Japanese lacquered dish inside which was a square of rice that had been
cooked with tiger nuts and a pesto sauce.
I do not know what they had done to this, since although I like each
component, and the rice had acceptable texture, there was a deeply unpleasant
taste that I cannot directly identify but smelt like sewage, which rendered the
dish inedible to me. The “Turkish Oil”
salad was a tiny dish of leaves in balsamic, for all I could tell. This and the equally small dish of red onion
Indian salad (I wished I had the magnifying glass again to see the salad) had
acceptably fresh components, and the dressing in each case was harmless
(1/10). The miniscule bowls even had a
false bottom, so they are certainly not going to bankrupt themselves here due
to cost of salad ingredients. Stella had
a risotto of seaweed, porcini and hemp with coriander marscapone,
which was served in an earthenware bowl and was very competent (4/10). The porcini were good, the risotto properly
made with no technical errors.
My dessert was a sherry trifle served in a glass dish on top of a rock
(what else), the trifle being dominantly biscotti and raspberries with a slight
ginger flavour, the top dusted with a coating of cocoa. Oddly, this was served with a tied up leaf
containing two cinnamon sticks – what exactly was I expected to do with
these? Actually some ideas involving the
waiter came to mind, but I’ll skip over that.
Overall this was 1/10. Stella had
two cigarillos of filo pastry in which were wrapped
pear slices laced with hardly any raisins but plenty of cloves, which had a
dominant effect on the dish (0/10).
These were on a pool of jasmine and poppy seed anglaise
that was one of the less pleasant ideas to have left the fertile imagination of
this kitchen (0/10).
A side offering of amerillo and herb ice-cream
was tolerably executed and as harmonious as most of the dishes tonight.
Surprisingly, there is ordinary espresso coffee
available here, as well as organic coffee.
The latter was completely disgusting, just stewed and burnt, while my
espresso arrived almost stone cold. After much bell ringing it was eventually
replaced, served in a bowl with no handle so that it was impossible to drink
while hot without burning your fingers, and was not very good coffee in the
sips that I managed before the pain induced me to put down the cup (0/10).
4-6 Fulham Broadway,
020 7385 6595
Below 1/10
£44 each
The
new refurbishment, with a gold leaf ship for a bar and even more lush
vegetation, is undeniably impressive, as is the service. The Thai people are probably the most
courteous in
5a
020 7434
1500
4/10
£68 each
Michelin-starred
chef Giorgio Locatelli has been unhappy for some time
with his backers at Zafferanos, who insist on him
spending his time training new chefs in the various Spighetta
spin-offs. This is his own venture as executive
chef, though he retains a similar position at Zafferanos. On tonight’s evidence (the third night this
place has been open) there are some serious teething troubles. The décor is classy enough, with a very dark
style reminiscent of Drone’s (same designer in fact). To start with I had crab salad, which was
excellent, with very fresh crab (5/10).
Spring vegetable salad was even better (6/10). My red wine risotto was rather ordinary
(3/10) while two separate pasta dishes were on the hard side (2/10). My tuna in the style of Zafferanos
was more generous in portion size was less well timed, though the rocket salad
was still good (4/10). Coffee was fine (4/10).
The wine list is mainly Italian and classy. The main problem was the service. It was, for example, exceedingly slow. We arrived a little before
020 7602
9333
5/10
£57.99 each
The Cotto is an example of the best and worst of Modern British
cooking. At its heart is French
technique, the chef here having been the head chef at Che
and previously at Pied à Terre. Hence things are cooked correctly, timed
well, the ingredients of high quality.
On the downside, there is an irresistible urge to experiment even with a
menu of limited choice. Does the berry
tart really need a basil sorbet? Is a
beautifully cooked sea bass ideally complemented by an orange sauce?!? It is one thing to be original, another to
recklessly throw together flavours that didn’t match twenty years ago and don’t
match now. The mark is really for the
refined technique, and in the hope that sanity will prevail with the menu. Despite the clearly capable kitchen this is
not especially likeable cooking.
The ground floor dining room is set out as in the illustration
above. It is modern in style, with
chrome chairs with black upholstery, a grey carpet and white walls and ceiling
decorated just with a few modern paintings of the Tate “rectangles in varying
colours” style. The high-ceilinged
dining room has patio doors with windows on two sides, so there is lots of
natural light, supplemented by a couple of racks of Italian directed spotlights
hanging from the ceiling. There is an
odd mix of salsa music and old-time crooning.
Tables are small and tightly packed, each covered with white linen tablecloth
and napkin, a dish of butter, salt and pepper mills and not much else. The sparse décor admits to colour only in a
solitary flower display on the bar.
Waiters are informal, dressed in black trousers with grey shirts, the solitary waitress similarly attired except her
shirt was black. Crockery is plain
white. There is a further dining room downstairs, unused on the evening we
visited.
A few green and black olives are on each table, and are of high
quality. The menu is enclosed. You will see that the limited selection
encompasses much experimentation. The
wine list is four pages long, organised sensibly by grape variety, and drawing
heavily on the
I had two pieces of tuna atop a heap of white radish and spring onions,
served in a soup dish resting in a pool of bouillon. The tuna was lightly seared, served cold,
with a crust of peppercorns, and was very fresh. The radish was rather bland, and the sliced
cucumber inside it almost pointless given the strong flavours of the
peppercorns and the ginger and soy of the bouillon. The radish was liberally
decorated with coriander, which was a more obvious match to the strongly
seasoned tuna (4/10). Stella had a red
pepper and artichoke terrine, served as a rectangular slab on top of a circular
bed of artichoke, the terrine topped with some fried squid, the dish decorated
with some artful dribbles of basil sauce.
Again fine technique showed up in the terrine, the pepper having clear,
strong flavour and the terrine an extremely smooth texture. However, why was there a squid on top of
this? The squid was lightly cooked and
in no way chewy, but what did it add?
5/10
Stella had sea bass, a fillet that had been baked and timed very well
indeed. This rested on a heap of caramelised endive, itself on a layer of
spinach, the whole resting in a pool of orange sauce. The sea bass itself was of good quality, very
well cooked, and indeed the endive had plenty of bitterness yet was cooked
through. The spinach was struggling with
the orange sauce, which just tasted of orange and really overpowered the other
flavours on the plate. The sea bass
itself, if presented on its own, was an easy 5/10, but I can only give this
2/10 given the crass mismatch of flavours.
I fared better, with two pieces of pigeon cooked on the bone and sitting
on top of some excellent sautéed potatoes and some wilted lettuce, the meat
surrounded by some semi-dried grapes and a few figs. The pigeon was cooked through a little more
than I would have chosen, but the potatoes were very good indeed. The figs and grapes were not as jarring as the
orange sauce with the sea bass, but again you would have to wonder whether this
was an ideal combination (5/10).
There were four cheeses that had not long left the fridge. A Fougeron was in
very good condition, while the goats cheese was a
little chalky, but a piece of
I fancied the summer berry tart but could not face the El Bulli-like basil sorbet.
They graciously substituted a very fine lime granité
which had deep flavour and lovely texture.
The tart itself had slightly hard pastry but nice raspberries
strawberries and blackberries (4/10).
Both filter and espresso coffee were of poor
quality, the filter especially having a distinctly dubious aftertaste. 1/10.
There were no petit fours.
29 Old
020 7437 9933
5/10
£76 each
A
quite large dining room (previously a nightclub called Legends) with a slightly
split level room: bar at the back, with a
couple of steps up to the higher half of the dining room facing the
street. A low ceiling, with some sort of
gold/taupe wallpaper with some fairly tasteless paintings on the wall (the sort
of things you see on the Bayswater road on Sunday lunchtime). There is a downstairs bar, which was very lively on this Saturday
night. Gary Hollihead
does have a stake in the place, so maybe he’ll hang around longer than
usual. The menu is bizarre throwback:
Lobster Thermidor, chicken Rossini, Crepes
Suzette. Despite this surreal menu, the
clientele is distinctly young and trendy: there were hordes of pretty young
girls in strapless backless numbers about to head off to the clubs on the
evening of my visit. The service was generally
good, with an excellent head (maybe not the ultimate head) waitress who some
time ago had worked at Pied a Terre.
There were no amuse gueles. Bread was in several forms, including
rosemary bread and caraway seed bread, as well as more normal affairs. The bread was fresh, served warm, had good texture and flavour (6/10). My lobster Thermidor
featured a very small dish indeed, in which was served some chewy lobster, two
ordinary scallops and some grainy sauce with a gratin topping - now I recall why this dish faded
away(3/10). Slightly better was another
tiny dish of cauliflower and truffle soup, heavy on the cauliflower and light
on the truffle, lacking in intensity (4/10).
The starter dishes were some of the most tiny I
have seen in ages: the “scallop with asparagus veloute”
featured a solitary, none-too-large scallop.
Main
courses were better: my “venison
Last visited March 2002.
7/10
£113 each
Le Gavroche sails on like an imperious liner,
fairly oblivious to fashion. This will
suit its clientele, who are generally well-off and elderly, or on business, or
both. The sense of a gentleman’s club is
never far away. The food at its best is
very fine indeed, with fresh ingredients, tasteful presentation, good timing
and attention to detail. However the
dishes are more variable than they should be at this level, and certainly at
these prices. Best bet is to go at
lunch, where is a set priced lunch (check when booking to confirm this just in
case they change their minds) that is a more restricted choice, but is still of
a very high standard, and so does represent reasonable value. Here are notes from a recent meal.
You enter Le Gavroche from its tasteful and
discreet front door in
There were an abundance of waiters and waitresses: the men formally
dressed in dinner jackets, the women with navy double-breasted dresses with a
scarf at the neck. The waiting staff was generally of French origin. Service throughout was impeccable, discreet,
welcoming and highly efficient. Wine,
water and bread were topped up effortlessly.
The sommelier, when he came to take the wine order, had already
memorised our food order and had constructive comments on the wine choice. The menu continues to be presented to the man
with prices, to a female without, which I find personally very irritating
(though very French). Tables are draped
in fine white linen tablecloths and topped with Wedgewood
china. Each table has a candle in a
brass holder, and a silver and brass animal (we had a frog, another table a
bull, another a cockerel etc), along with salt and
pepper and balls of unsalted butter in a china dish.
The menu majors on luxury ingredients and has a fairly wide and
appealing choice, though two dishes are for two people only; the English
translations are a welcome acknowledgement of the fact that the Gavroche is in
A special of this evening were grilled langoustines served out of their
shell in an intensely flavoured creamy tomato soup; the langoustines were
accompanied by tender artichokes hearts, and the soup dish topped with three
langoustine shells, not only for decoration with stuffed with langoustine
mousse. The mousse was the best part of
the dish, having lovely texture and deep flavour, but all the elements of the
dish worked well and suited each other - the langoustines were tender, the
artichokes gave a welcome rustic relief to the richness. However the execution was not uniform - some
langoustine were tender, some rather chewy (7/10).
The best dish of the night was three quail “fillets” arranged on the
plate at 12, 4 and
A main course of pigeon featured four pigeon breasts, cooked pink and heaped
in the centre of the plate, on a bed of rosemary risotto and glazed turnips;
supporting the pigeon was a hidden bed of caramelised onion, and topping the
pigeon were some celeriac crisps. This
dish was harmonious and well executed, the pigeon beautifully tender, the
juices of the meat mingling with the risotto and the perfectly cooked turnips
giving a rustic contrast, the caramelised onions a pleasing sweetness and a new
layer of flavour discovered only after duck has been disturbed from its arrangement
(8/10). Less successful was wild salmon
poached in a broth which was allegedly of lemon grass with a hint of
garlic. The broth was just of
indeterminate taste, with not even Stella’s keen sense of smell detecting any
noticeable signs of either lemongrass or garlic. The salmon itself was cooked well, surrounded
by strips of celeriac and leek, topped with deep-fried battered chives. Still, it is hard to give this dish objectively
more than 5/10.
The cheese board here is entirely French (of course). It had a wide selection of cheeses, which as
so often meant that they were not in uniformly peak condition. Best was a colomiere,
and a fresh goat and pavin auberge
were good, but Epoisses was solid and not ready yet
(6/10). The cheese was served with a
slice of walnut bread, which itself was excellent.
For dessert, apricot soufflé was light and fluffy, with a well-flavoured
hot apricot coulis flavoured with a little vanilla
(not particularly inspiring) garnished with poached dried apricots, some of which
were chewy. It would be hard to assess
this as better than soufflés from a range of other restaurants of more modest
ambition than Le Gavroche (6/10). A light lemon flan was delicate and sat on
top of a generous array of wild strawberries and blackcurrants. One could debate the wisdom of serving the
fruit so out of season here (presumably it was imported), yet it tasted fine
(7/10).
Coffee was excellent: dark roast beans full of flavour (9/10). Accompanying the coffee were a selection of
very fine tuiles (almond, coconut and hazelnut),
Chinese gooseberry, a slightly tasteless vanilla sponge and an excellent moist
sponge with pistachio (9/10).
Additionally there was a dish of orange cubes of what turned out to
passion fruit jelly dusted with sugar - unusual and lovely. The bill was odd in many ways: VAT is
included in the quoted wine prices, a trick which most restaurants play on
their customers, and water is included, as (apparently) is service. Yet when the bill arrives the credit card is
pointedly left open. This is just sharp
practice. The price here is pretty steep
when compared to its peers.
Last visited April 2004.
Claridges Hotel,
020 7499 0099
6/10
£95 each
First visit, a week after it opened. First the décor. Claridges has
spectacular art deco décor in its lobby and elsewhere, so why it was decided to
omit the themes of perhaps the best period of architecture of the 20th
century and go for a trendy look escapes me.
The spacious, high-ceilinged room is dominated by many hideous layered
orange lamp fittings, each of three concentric orange circles topped with some
purple fur which is seemingly trendy now but is going to look pretty absurd as
soon as sanity returns to the world of interior design. The tables are generously spaced though
lighting, lacking individual spots, is variable. The service is formal but very slow indeed –
our meal, a la carte, took just over three and a half hours. You start with a nibble of cream cheese with
flecks of truffle and a little toast, which works well enough. The amuse bouche
turned out to be the best dish of the night: a wonderfully intense pumpkin soup
(10/10). Bread was a let down, country
bread rolls that were rather hard and lacking salt, and some sourdough slices
that were verging on stale (bread 3/10).
The wine list is long, mainly French and costly: mark-ups are generally
as fierce as you would expect, though there are a number of wines around the
£30-40 mark if you look carefully. We
had an excellent Pinot Gris from Schlumberger at £45,
and there is also the under-rated Alion from
Stella
started with veloute of white beans with sautéed ceps
and roasted salsify, with a little grated white truffle. This worked well, the beans delicate, the
sauce frothy and the ceps fresh (8/10).
I had six scallops, on each of which was a little deep fried
cauliflower, which I have to say did nothing for me. There were little piles of cauliflower puree
and raisin vinaigrette, which worked well enough. The scallops were very good but of the
perfect diver’s standard you might hope for; the deep fried cauliflower seemed
simply misjudged to me (6/10). Stella’s
main course was a sautéed tranche of Scottish salmon,
which was well enough timed but by no means dazzling. This was served on a bed of warm lettuce with
some cucumber salad and marinated olives, with a vine tomato butter sauce
served at table. The latter did indeed
taste of tomato and tomato, but was this really a sensible match for the
salmon? (6/10).
Cheese
was better, arriving on two separate trolleys, one French
and one English. The waiter seemed
completely unfamiliar with the English cheeses e.g. “Stilton from
I returned in spring 2003 and had a pleasant
meal, though there was a feeling of being processed. The head chef shortly afterwards died while
trying to burgle a flat to support his drug habit, and when disturbed
discovered that jumping from one balcony to the next on the 8th
floor works well in
145 Knightsbridge
5/10
£72 each
Dramatic drop windows looking in at the two
levels of the restaurant, the main dining room upstairs where Bruno Loubet cooks (Italian food - nothing like re-inventing
oneself!), and the more casual bistro downstairs. It is all designer chrome and glass, with
very high ceilings and the upstairs featuring slightly odd-looking red benches
and chairs, distantly reminiscent of a British rail waiting room, though I
doubt this was the effect the designer intended. I preferred the plain white sofas and chairs
in the downstairs bistro, which seems altogether cosier to me. The menu is short, with just six starters,
four pastas, three meat and three fish dishes.
The dishes are fairly unconventional (roasted hake with squid ink stew),
so in many ways the more traditional bistro menu, which has recognisable
classic dishes, has more appeal. Breads
come in a little box on each table and are very good indeed (easily 7/10 bread,
from fine salty foccacia to crusty white). I started with a wild mushroom risotto, which
given how quickly it arrived was not cooked classically, but still had good
texture and was mad with quite a light stock.
It had ceps and a little too much parsley for me, plus cooked slices of
onion, which did nothing for me. Still
5/10.
For main course I had pot-roasted squab with
fresh lemon thyme, little deep fried olives, slivers of foie
gras as well as caramelised onions, all on a bed of
spinach with some further caramelised root vegetables. The sauce, a delicate jus made from the
pigeon cooking juices and carefully reduced, was classic French rather than
Italian style, and none the worse for that.
The pigeon was pink but there were way too many flavours and textures to
get any sense of coherence as a dish.
Still, the actual execution was very good, with lightly cooked spinach
and carefully prepared vegetables (6/10).
Stella had pan-fried red mullet with an artichoke and rocket salad; the
fish was nicely timed, the salad having good leaves (6/10). The one dessert tried was an excellent tart
filled with zabaglione, an unusual idea that worked fine, along with a nicely
textured coffee mousse. Coffee came in a
pitifully small cup, which after I moaned they at least had the decency to give
me a second cup without charging.
Service was very good, attentive and without errors. The wine list majors on Italian regions and
is very comprehensive; there is a fine selection of wines by the glass, and
also various tasting selections.
I actually prefer the downstairs restaurant
here, which does simpler and more appealing dishes, and has a vastly more
charming room than the stark upstairs.
Prices are very high though, and while objectively the food is very good
here, the question one has to ask oneself is: “why not just go round the corner
to Zafferano”, where the cooking is better and the
prices lower.
The Connaught Hotel,
020 7499
7070
5/10
£82 each
Angela Hartnett is now at the helm, a protégé of
Gordon Ramsey. The dining room is
unchanged – very traditional with lots of dark wood paneling, tables well
spaced. To start with a selection of
bread is offered (very good walnut and raisin, good crusty white bread but poor
breadsticks and very thin Italian bread).
Also a small plate of ham is presented (Angela Hartnett is half Italian,
half Irish, so I guess it is preferable to see her Italian side come to the
fore with the cold cuts than to be presented with a pint of Guinness as amuse guele). Service is
managed by the admirable Helene Hell, formerly sommelier at La Trompette. On the
evidence of tonight she has some work to do, as our starter arrived well before
the wine, and she had to chase around personally to get it delivered before we
had entirely finished our starters.
Moreover there was no attempt to refresh our empty bread basket during
the meal. Although there is no shortage
of staff, they seemed inattentive, the most competent being a French waitress
whom Helene brought with her from La Trompette. The meal tonight was something of a curate’s
egg. I started with a very fine ceps
risotto, a dish than can very easily be disappointing. Here it featured rice cooked to a perfect
texture in a rich stock, the rice having absorbed the stock fully without losing
its texture. The ceps were carefully
cooked, and overall I would give this dish 8/10. By contrast a pressed tomato mosaique with marinated goat’s cheese was just a series of
pleasant but by no means dazzling plum tomato segments in an aubergine casing, with tiny blobs of curiously tasteless
goat’s cheese surrounding the tomato (4/10 only). We were then offered a complimentary tortelli of pumpkin and amaretto in a little sage
butter. While the pasta was good, I
question the wisdom of trying to mix pumpkin with the sweet amaretto almond
taste in a savoury dish; the sage butter could also
have tasted a little more of sage (5/10 for the quality of the pasta rather
than the concept). For main course a
sole “bonne femme” was four slices of filleted sole on
a bed of spinach with a few thin slices of mushroom and tiny boiled potatoes in
a thin cream sauce. The sole itself was
nicely cooked and had good taste, and the spinach was carefully cooked, but the
mushrooms and potatoes were ordinary, and the cream sauce was merely watery
(5/10 at best). My main course was
smoked pork belly served with caramelised root
vegetables (onion, potatoes) and a thyme bouillon. The pork was reasonable, but this compared
very poorly to a similar dish at Petrus. The vegetables were merely competent though
the thyme bouillon was redolent of the scent of thyme and worked well (5/10,
saved by the bouillon). Cheese is a mix
of French, English and Italian. The
cheeses were generally in good condition, though both the St Maure and Colston Basset Stilton
were past their best (6/10 for the cheese).
Before dessert a little display tray of mini
ice-creams and sorbets arrived: mango, vanilla, strawberry, blackcurrant,
apple, coconut and chocolate. These
varied somewhat, with the vanilla and strawberry the best and the chocolate a
little too grainy (6/10 overall). For
dessert an orange and chocolate tart was served in the style of a lemon tart, a
triangular shaped slice with a thin layer of chocolate on the pastry base, but
this was very sorry for itself – the orange filling lacked intensity, the
pastry rather too hard and barely any taste of chocolate (2/10). Lemon panacotta
featured a central and very good cone of panacotta,
topped with citrus confit surrounded by a dayglo green ring of spearmint gelee,
which was an inappropriate foil to the lemon taste (lemon and mint?!?). Perhaps 3/10 here. Coffee is a steep £5, served with a
remarkably tasteless tiramisu and a couple of chocolates and chocolate-covered
roasted almonds. The coffee itself was
good (comfortably 6/10). The wine list
is mostly French with a decent Italian section and a smattering of
The Millennium Hotel,
020 7235
4377
6/10
£82 each
Overall
this parallels the Tetsuya cooking experience quite well. Tetsuya has finally gone commercial, moving
out of the suburban setting into central
Campari and grapefruit cocktail is
not a marriage made in heaven, but the sorbet had good texture and they had at
least gone easy on the campari. This was followed with three little glasses
of different cols soup: cauliflower, avocado (both good) and a jellied
aubergine with potato and leek. These
had excellent texture and, while I would not have chosen these, it is hard to
fault the technique. Salad of tuna with shiso sauce had very good quality sashimi tuna. Next up was a roll of marinated “tataki” venison, wrapped around truffle peaches with
rosemary and honey. Next to it was a
disappointing roast langoustine whose tea and
shellfish oil caused the langoustine to lose texture. Confit of wild
salmon with marinated celery is a faithful reproduction of the signature dish
at Tetsuya in
The Halkin Hotel,
020 7333
1234
0/10
£88 each
I am now a
Nahm veteran.
In years to come visions of green, blotchy tapioca will no doubt swim
before my eyes, blotting out the whirring blades of the fan above my head. Just as a few years in the jungle blurred
many a soldier’s perception, I may now have flashbacks of the bizarre cooking
at David Thompson, the cook behind the overrated culinary venture the Darley Street Thai in
The dining room is very smart, with marble floor at one end of the
dining room and wood at the other. The wallpaper
is gold, the walls otherwise unadorned.
There is a little walled garden at the bottom of the diagram above. There is good natural light from here,
supplemented by ceiling spots, box lanterns and even sidelights in some
recesses in the walls. The overall
effect is bright but relaxing. Chairs
are traditional, with gold patterned upholstery. Tables have white linen napkins but no
tablecloths. Crockery is plain white,
the cutlery real silver. There is no
distracting music – instead you can concentrate on the symphony of flavours in
the food (as if). Waiters are smart,
with dark lounge suits and ties. The
wine list had some excellent growers, with two pages of white and one of red,
though the mark-ups are egregious in places.
Most wines are in the £35-50 or so range e.g. Schlumberger
Gewürztraminer 1997 at a spine-chilling £43.
There is no grouping by style, rather by price, and the selection spans
the world fairly widely. There are
plenty of wines suitable for spicy food, so a good selection of
We tried the tasting menu, which takes you through just about half of
all the dishes on the menu. This began
with ma hor, an amuse guele
which consisted of minced chicken and prawns which had been cooked in palm sugar
with deep fried garlic, peanuts and shallots, heaped on a small circular slice
of pineapple. This was an interesting
enough “sweet and sour” combination, but the minced chicken was uninspired
(1/10). Pla
bon were two betel leaves, on each of which was presented some ground salmon,
but mainly a slice of watermelon. The
salmon was barely detectable, essentially leaving a piece of melon to which
salt and a little spice was added (0/10).
I left the second of mine after tasting the first,
and the waiter happily took the plate away without inquiring why this state of
affairs had occurred.
Then several dishes were served together (at least mostly together, as
the trout salad, of all things, was not ready).
Trout salad was surreal, a small piece of fish marinated and served
bones and all, with some salt and spices – this was hard as nails, and while in
principle perhaps the bones could be eaten, there are only so many risks a Nahm veteran is going to take in the line of duty. A squid consommé managed chewy squid and an
ill-judged flavour, dominated by samphire. Pork, supposedly sweet, served on the side of
minced prawns in a coconut cream and fennel, was badly overcooked and
lukewarm. The minced prawns had their
flavour drowned out by the fennel and spices.
Four scallops were old and tired, served with deep fried galangal,
garlic and lemongrass (0/10). A soup of
mushrooms in an oily coconut broth was very sour and barely warm. Even the rice was clumpy and lukewarm. About the best dish was a moderate duck curry
with a thick onion sauce, served with some potatoes that kept fair
texture. This was perhaps 1/10. A jungle curry of monkfish featured chewy
monkfish and shallots that were too raw.
Problems abounded with these dishes.
Above all, the flavours were usually not harmonious with each other,
either things that did not match well or strong
flavours that drowned out subtler ones.
Execution was weak, with chewy fish and overcooked pork. The scallops were of distinctly mediocre
quality. This is not classical Thai
food, where much more consideration is given to ingredient quality and balance,
but a poor attempt at experimentation laced with technical inaccuracy. I have no concept of why many media reviewers
rave about this cooking.
There were three mini-desserts. Mangosteens are essentially sub-lychees,
here floating in watery green syrup flavoured with rose water, and bizarrely
matched with deep fried onion. I can
just see the scene in the kitchen: “let’s see, a tropical fruit, some weird
smells and, yes, some deep fried onion; that should set everything off
nicely”. A green blotchy blob of
tapioca, looking like something on the run from a science fiction movie set,
was covered with a blob of white cream laced with salt. Another winner (0/10). In a poor quality tuile
(overcooked, and yet limp and flexible rather than crisp, which takes some
doing) nestled some unidentifiable tasteless white liquid and some poor noodles
(0/10). One of the nastier desserts I
have encountered since eating agar in
020 7839 3774
6/10
£85 each
After Marcus Wareing
dramatically walked out to set up Petrus,
l’Oranger has bounced back under the cooking of Kamel Benamar. The dining room is cosy, the service
comforting. The cooking does not stretch
beyond its capabilities, a common failing in (especially
French) restaurants, but instead offers an appealing menu that changes
with the seasons. The service is formal
and usually good, while the wine list is almost entirely French with the sort
of mark-ups usually more associated with a bank robbery than a restaurant. One wine is on the list at £49; I saw the
identical wine and vintage at £16 at another restaurant. So perhaps stick to something simple? You can’t actually, as there is no house
wine. While L’Oranger
si technically strong, there is a giant sucking sound
from your wallet throughout the experience.
Here are my notes from a recent meal.
There a certain ocean-liner feel to the long, thin room, though there is
a high ceiling and a large skylight roughly in the centre of the roof; this
combined with cleverly placed ceiling spot lights give good lighting. The floor is wooden, but this is partly
covered (in the centre of the room) by a carpet, mostly red in colour. Chairs have low backs and have mushroom
coloured upholstery. The un-mirrored
wall has a few Art Nouveau paintings in between the windows. Each table has a heavy white linen cloth and
napkin, with a single yellow rose in a blue glass vase. A salt and pepper pot is the only other table
adornment. Despite appearing to have air
conditioning, the room was very not and stuffy this evening.
The menu has a relative stable core set of dishes, with a more fluid
first page of changing dishes, as well as a couple of specials each
evening. The wine list is long, with 587
offerings in all. The vast majority of
these are French, with prices designed for the primarily business clientele
that L’Oranger attracts. There are ten or so choices from
Bread rolls are white, brown or raisin with sesame seeds, and are of
good quality (6/10). Service is from
formally dressed, primarily French staff, but the charm of the handsome head
waiter could not make up for an interminable wait for our dishes. With a
I started with a cube of pork belly cooked pot-au-feu style, slowly in a
casserole pot, topped with shavings of black truffles, on a bed of good
mash. The pork itself was tender but
just a little dried out, but the mash had excellent texture and the ingredients
worked well together, the richness of the pork and truffles nicely balanced by
the mash (6/10). Warm asparagus salad
had seven spears of asparagus neatly lined up, covered with a heap of sliced
baby leeks and a slice of tomato, surrounded by a few morels. A salad dressing smeared around the central
salad actually had a congealed skin; this was clearly being kept warm under a
hot lamp for too long. The asparagus
itself was very good, the leeks over-salty, the dressing (under its skin)
actually fine (4/10).
Stella’s roasted turbot was well timed and of good quality, resting on a
bed of competent but slightly lacklustre green peas that were just a little
hard for my taste. Around the turbot was
a ring of baby shrimps cooked delicately and topped with a frothed-up, light
shrimp sauce; finally, there was an asparagus spear and a slice of tomato as
garnish (5/10). Accompanying this was a
pan of very good fried new potatoes with excellent texture and taste (6/10). I had roasted corn-fed chicken, which had
excellent taste and was pleasantly moist.
This was resting in a simple jus of the cooking juices, enhanced with
herbs. The chicken was surrounded by a
ring of high quality, if slightly salty morels (6/10). On the side was a little pan of Swiss chard
with a rather watery tomato sauce with herbs (4/10).
Even the cheese took quite a long time to arrive, as if in sympathy with
the rest of the meal. Still, there was a
good board, and a knowledgeable cheese waiter.
Comte had good, firm texture (6/10), St Maure
avoided being too chalky (6/10), Camembert was reasonably ripe (5/10),
Coffee was of a very high standard, dark and full of flavour
(8/10). Petit fours consisted of a white
chocolate truffle, a sponge with currants, a Chinese gooseberry, a blackberry
tart, a raspberry tart, a fine lemon tart, a pineapple
tart with pistachio, some perfect marzipan, an elegant simple biscuit and a
frozen white chocolate encasing a liquid centre of strawberry sorbet. These were easily 8/10 petit fours.
Last visited April 2002.
4 West
020 7489 7033
1/10
£38 each
This is a basement place, with a bar to one side and
the dining room on the other (upstairs is a food shop selling Japanese
food). It is smartly decorated in a modern
style, with plenty of black in evidence.
The menu is quite approachable, with a range of starters, then a long
list of sushi, followed by some “light main” dishes and also noodle soup (udon) dishes. Portions are modest except for the soups and
main courses, encouraging tapas-style grazing. A starter of pork belly and new potato
casserole was pleasant, the new potatoes managing to retain reasonable texture
in the casserole, though the carrots were a little overcooked; the pork itself
was pleasant but not more than this, lacking the richness that it can have
(1/10). A “mini forest” of vegetables
sounds grander than it was, but had a few grilled vegetables resting on a bed
of a large field mushroom and onion (1/10).
Sashimi tuna was of good quality, prettily presented. This was not of the calibre
of somewhere like Roka, but it was still above average. It was served just with a few salad leaves
and a little wasabe (2/10).
Chicken teriyaki was cooked well enough, served with
a few wild mushrooms and a soy-based sauce (1/10). The udon noodle
soup had excellent vegetable stock, served in a large black granite bowl with
noodles that retained good texture, a little vegetable tempura that did not (it
was a little soggy) and further wild mushrooms and a little rocket as garnish
(3/10). Miso
soup was rather light on the distinctive dashi
flavor, to the extent that it lacked intensity (round up). Rice was good
(2/10). Service was friendly and capable
throughout. The place was mostly full
and the bar was quite busy even on this mid week night when most people were
outside on the pavement soaking up the sunshine. Prices are very fair, and this is certainly a
pleasant place that I would return to if in the area.
Last
visited June 2006
0870 777 4488
7/10
£170 each
After a poor booking
experience and an expectation of potentially wacky food at crazy prices, the
reality was a pleasant surprise. OK –
the prices are crazy, though less than some press reports, but no one could
deny the amount of work that goes into the dishes here. However the room is beautifully decorated,
the service is top drawer French, the food flirts with sometimes unwise
innovation but hits the mark more often the not, and technique and ingredients
are faultless. There is real talent in
the kitchen here, and the only real problem is the price.
I was not endeared to this
place by the booking experience. After
ringing up I spoke to a woman dripping with attitude who twice put me on hold,
and eventually conceded grudgingly that they may have a table free at 19:00 but
that it was needed back by 21:00, at which point “you can go to the bar”; I
then had to give my credit card details “in case you don’t turn up”. They also reconfirmed by phone. On physically arriving the female
receptionist struggled to find the reservation and then said “well, I can’t
find it – I’ll have to check with the manager” while looking on at a completely
empty dining room. Clearly down as
gatecrashers, we were ushered to a quiet corner, and only later did she admit
that they had booked us into the bistro restaurant in the same building,
despite my being very explicit about which restaurant I was booking, both on
booking and on re-confirmation. I looked
closely to see whether she was one of the valkyries
that used to be on reception at the old Canteen who always used to be the ne plus ultra in receptionist hostility but
she was not; perhaps they had gone on to set up a training class after the
restaurant closed. Grrrr…..
The dining room is set out
as in the illustration above. It is on
the first floor. You enter from
The bathrooms are
spectacular. The men’s has a entirely
mirrored effect made from highly polished black stone, with fairy lights in a
web shape embedded in the walls, while the urinal is a tasteful wall with water
moving endlessly over it. The ladies
bathroom has backlit panels with diamante decoration by the hand basins. Cubicles have a spider web design picked out
in diamante. The toilet roll is
suspended from the ceiling by chains of beads.
The doorstop, toilet seat cover and flush all have matching diamante
decoration. Mourad Mazouz, the owner, has reportedly poured in £10 million to
this building, and at least the money is “up on the screen” as they say in
The menu is attached. It actually arrives inside a leather-bound
notebook, the pages inserted at strategic points. The wine list arrives in a large volume, but this
is mostly empty, the wines being scribbled in pencil on the first few
pages. The list is by no means
extensive, with a few pages that refer to perhaps 100 or so bins, mostly
French. The rest of the wine world has a
cursory treatment, with for example just a single Spanish red. The growers are by no means all the classics,
and indeed the
Bread is either
white rolls, “Italian” bread (that to all intents and purpose seemed to be
brioche) and chestnut bread (7/10 for the white, 5/10 for the other two
breads). Amuse guele
are extensive. Cinnamon sticks and two
well-made sable biscuits are fine, though it seems a little odd to have a sweet
biscuit at this stage (5/10). Little
scales of cuttlefish were served with pepper and herbs, which worked much
better together than it sounds (6/10). A
teaspoon contained a dollop of almost liquid and very rich, very smooth foie gras (8/10). A ravioli of black
pudding was the least successful dish, as the pasta was just a little hard,
while the citrus and herb sauce that surrounded it was so acidic as to drown
out even the taste of the black pudding (2/10). A little dish contained a surprisingly
effective blend of finely diced pineapple with sesame seeds (7/10). Finally there were slivers of capable pepper
biscuits, and also, rather unnecessarily, a bowl of caramelised
mixed nuts. Perhaps best was a row of five perfectly cooked white beans with a
smear of slow cooked egg yolk that surprised and delighted when on the tongue
it was revealed that a little mustard had been added, lifting the dish and
providing a good foil to the beans (9/10).
Service is worth remarking
on. The team seem
mostly French, and I recognised one sommelier from
Louis XV in
Langoustines were cooked
three ways, each arriving on a separate white china plate. Best were two langoustines served in a
boat-shaped tuile in which was a
walnut shortcake and some shredded caramelised
pomegranate. The shellfish were very
fresh and beautifully cooked, melting in the mouth when eaten, while the
walnuts and pomegranate adding an interesting earthy texture as contrast
(9/10). Langoustine tartare
was enlivened by green mango and a little pressed grapefruit and ginger – the
contrasting tastes actually working well together, with the ginger kept
carefully in balance and the sharp taste of the mango enlivening the shellfish
without dominating it (7/10). Langoustine
mousseline featured more perfect langoustines (this
time diced) and
was topped with Malabar pepper and creamed passion fruit butter. Here the only problem was the passion fruit
butter which was too strong a flavour (also I am
unconvinced that it is a good idea to mix passion fruit with langoustine) so
was perhaps 5/10, though again the shellfish were very carefully cooked. Overall easily 7/10.
“Vegetables”
again consistent of several components. The
best dish was “wilted young winter salad, celeriac Colombo, turnip broth with
farm cider”, served as a hot turnip broth with intense flavour
containing stunningly tender turnip and a puree of celeriac at the base of a
bowl with steep sides. The sides of the
bowl were draped with wilted chard leaves, which were perfectly tender and a
delightful surprise, a brilliant dish (9/10).
Much less good was fresh pressed parsley coriander and tarragon juice,
served as a cold green broth surrounding “conserve of cucumber, preserved
lemons,
“
Turbot was served as a thick
fillet, carefully cooked, and was fine in itself.
However it rested on what was described as a shrimp and prawn infusion with wilted
cabbage, but resembled a rather tasteless bed of sauerkraut. A side dish
contained pearl barley “risotto” cooked with more of the shrimp and prawn
infusion, topped with two cooked cherry tomatoes, a wedge of roast pear and
glazed radishes that did nothing to lift the dish. Also served on the side was an egg cup
containing a Day-Glo coloured cucumber gelee and a teaspoonful of crème fraiche,
which again did not enhance the dish (4/10).
No cheese trolley here, but
a selection. The provenance is good, the
cheeses coming from a mixture of Neal’s Yard and the top notch Maison Anthony, but they couldn’t resist a little tampering here. Brie was stuffed with truffles, and a hard
cheese was marinated in wine. Stilton
was served in a spoon mixed in with some dates.
Cheddar was sliced thinly, while a Corsican goat’s cheese was about the
only cheese served just as it was. The
cheeses themselves were in very good condition and did not benefit from this
added attention in my view (7/10 – would have been higher if they had just left
them alone). There were a variety of
distractions – no cheese crackers here.
We had a cold celeriac puree flanked by hazelnuts that was very fine indeed
but surely would have been better served warm with a main course? There were
also a few dates, slivers of shortbread biscuit, pumpkin chutney and a marmalade of blackcurrant.
Some plain bread would have sufficed.
The portion control was
really odd here, as the cheese arrived in huge slabs. We were sharing a portion of cheese and could
manage substantially less than half the cheese offered between the two of
us. All other dishes had perfectly
normal portions, so I am not sure what happened here.
A “Winter
2002 Sketch Chocolate” comes in a circular dish with a ring of chocolate mousse
on top of which is a rich coffee mousse topped with a biscuit. The dark chocolate mousse was made from very
high quality chocolate and was velvety smooth, containing a few raisins steeped
in alcohol. The coffee mousse was
similarly smooth, the little biscuit on top filled with Grand Marnier(8/10). Ice
blood orange mousse was less impressive, the base having whole blood orange
segments with a dollop of orange mousse on top – the texture was fine but the
mousse flavour lacked intensity (5/10). Crispy sugar waffles made from Muscovado sugar were very good, delicate and not too sweet,
resting on a bed of silky mango mousse topped with fresh (and perfectly fresh)
mango (6/10).
Desserts are actually just
£4 for small individual portions (of course they can afford to be generous
after the other courses) or £28 for a grand plate. We found that three individual dishes was plenty for the two of us. Both filter and double espresso were very
good indeed, made from excellent quality beans with a dark roast (8/10). A slight surprise was that no petit fours
are offered – a deviation from otherwise very French style of service. Coffee is £2.50, or £3 for espresso.
The bill arrives inside a
hollowed-out hardback book, so lands on the table with an appropriate
thump. It was fine in terms of
practices - service was included at 12.5% as advertised on the menu, and the
credit card slip was closed The issue
is the magnitude of it, as with no pre-dinner drinks, a shared cheese, shared
desserts and one of the cheaper wines on the list a price tag of £170 each is,
as a marketing consultant may put this, “fully priced”. Water at £4 seems a generous bargain. What you can say is that the ingredients are
top class, the culinary technique is very fine, the décor is magnificent and
the service perfect, so at least you get something for the money.