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