LONDON – The pretty things of Knightsbridge were capering around Hyde Park in the sun, as white-haired old sailors made their way into the Royal Thames Yacht Club to nap. It was mid-afternoon in Belgravia, time for lunch.
I was in the city to take the measure of a few new restaurants from established names in the British dining scene, restaurants that are helping London make its mark on the world’s map of Places Where It Is Good to Eat.
Heston Blumenthal’s restaurant in the Mandarin Oriental Hotel, just down the road from Buckingham Palace, was chief among them. The restaurant, called Dinner, opened at the end of January to largely rave reviews in the prickly British press.
Blumenthal is the bald and aggressively spectacled chef and proprietor of the Fat Duck, a restaurant to the west of London. The Fat Duck is widely considered one of the world’s finest cathedrals to modernist cuisine, the sort of restaurant where a meal could start with nitro-poached aperitifs, finish with “the smell of the Black Forest” and take four hours in between. Dinner, in contrast, is a more casual if still quite expensive venture, closer to the city’s heart. It is less a cathedral than a well-appointed prayer chapel.
Reservations at Dinner, which is devoted to modern takes on historical British recipes, are in any event among the hottest tickets in town.
The restaurant’s menu has little of the kid-at-a-science-fair playfulness of the Fat Duck. Instead it features renditions of classic British food: a steak with fries based on an 1826 recipe in “The Cook and Housewife’s Manual,” say, or a dish of cod in cider taken from a 1940 dispatch of the great British food journalist Ambrose Heath. There is rosehip jam derived from a 16th-century recipe and a plate of “rice and flesh” that sees its roots in a cookbook used by the court of King Richard II. Suet pudding makes an appearance.
There may be little of the Fat Duck’s modernist glee, but wit is not entirely absent from Dinner. Ashley Palmer-Watts, the chef who opened and runs the restaurant for Blumenthal after years working as the head chef at the Fat Duck, may have developed a menu at Dinner that is rooted in ancient texts. His cooking, though, displays all the excitement and humour of his mentor, sometimes in spades.
Take as an example the meat fruit, a dish that should begin every meal (there is just one menu served, night and day). According to the menu, its origins are in a chicken-liver parfait that dates from the 14th century. It is culinary trompe l’oeil.
What you are served appears simply to be a Mandarin orange on a plain wooden board with some grilled toast. Cut through the dimpled skin of the fruit, however, and a mousse is revealed: an interior of whipped chicken liver with a flavour that is beautifully enhanced by the taste of its bright orange “skin.” Only the fruit’s stem, a waiter said, is inedible. It was incredible.
Main dishes included a large-framed and juicy spiced pigeon with ale and artichoke hearts derived from a 1777 recipe from “The Ladies’ Assistant and Complete System of Cookery.” This was intense and serious food that made a strong case for the inclusion of pigeon in any list of great poultry meats. Eaten while blindfolded, some might have thought it aged beef and forest mushrooms.
For dessert, there was a gold-flecked slab of chocolate with ginger ice cream on the side to start, and some litchi granite accompanied by the tart rose-hip jam. Both paled in comparison to the tipsy cake (a nod back to 1849) that was a bit like a cream-filled, booze-basted monkey bread served with pineapple that was elaborately caramelized on a complicated and beautiful spit in the kitchen.
I ate it down to its sticky end, paid the bill and said goodbye to my friends. A brisk walk up Piccadilly ended on a chair in Green Park, where Morpheus claimed me.
For a serious new London dinner taken closer to midnight than noon, there is the restaurant on the ground floor of the St. John Hotel, Fergus Henderson’s spare new establishment off Leicester Square, almost in the midst of London’s tiny and sporadically prosperous Chinatown.
Housed in the space that was for many years a West End theatre hangout called Manzi’s, the St. John Hotel restaurant suggests what might happen if the New York restaurateur Joe Allen turned his Orso over to the chef Andrew Carmellini of Locanda Verde and the Dutch, or for that matter to Henderson himself. It delivers extremely good food to a small crowd of insiders in a neighbourhood pulsing with tourists.
And, yes, the food is a marvel, a version of Henderson’s menu at the original St. John in Smithfield that has been cut tightly for those on their way to or from the theatre or rehearsal hall.
It is no less terrific for that. Tom Harris, who has come over from the Smithfield kitchen to be the head chef at the hotel, cooks lamb sweetbreads with butter beans and wild garlic that can set off an episode of synesthesia if you are so inclined: a Constable landscape of flavours and textures, of menacing clouds and plump trees and soft grass for the lamb, Britain on a plate.
Follow with his bacon and beans (cue Hogarth!) that leave lips sticky and minds at rest, or a simple and fantastic dish of sweet langoustines and unctuous yellow mayonnaise, or of lightly cured sea trout with pickled cucumbers. And for followers of Henderson’s belief in nose-to-tail dining, a stop along the way: smoked pig’s-cheek croquettes with radishes.
Consume with copious amounts of Bandol, and follow with burnt cream ice cream, or a ginger loaf with heady cider sauce.
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