Alkimia

The day: 10 November 2009, Dinner.
The place: Industria 79, Barcelona
The venue: Alkimia
Closest Airport: Barcelona (BA, Easyjet), Girona (Ryanair)
The food: Modern Spanish
The drinks: Strong on Spanish with some very strong international

This is the first of two starred experiences in a chilly and beautiful November Barcelona. Semiformal, young and English speaking service greets you at the entrance of the stark, modern, elegant room. Behind the stoves, chef Jordi Vilà.

We order a €35 Priorat and the wine waitress asks us whether we have noticed the section at the end of the wine list, which contains the ‘top wines’. Let’s have a look. Mmhh, prices ranging from a handful of hundred euro bills to teens of hundreds. Does she really think we can suddenly change our mind? Yes, she does. Man jokingly orders a €1,700 Pommerol and then has to frantically stop the obliging sommelier who in all seriousness was going for the bottle.

Of the two available menus, both tasting, we are forced to choose the shorter because of the lack of capacity in our stomachs. Unfortunately this is also the one designated ‘traditional’, but with chef Jordi Vilà it is always going to be a very modern traditional.

We begin with the famous and many-times pictured amuse bouche of Alkimia: tomato water with breadcrumbs, the glass covered by a thin slice of fuet (a Catalan sausage).

We want to compete in the category 'worst picture' (there weren't the conditions to use a flash), but please do not be put off: it is a high note of pure concentrated flavours and fun cooking, setting high expectations indeed.

Yet, our dinner will be ups and downs (even if ups and downs always remaining at a very, very accomplished level of cooking).

There is a vein of true genius in this cuisine, with a sense of adventure that we really appreciate and admire. A veloute’ of Jerusalem artichokes with root vegetables was amusingly presented (the tips of the roots which one would normally throw away emerging from the liquid) and wonderful, as were the cauliflowers in two ways (pickled and pureed) accompanying our monkfish fish.


It is a cuisine that can split opinions: Man thought a sorbet of lychees wonderfully complex, with a resinous jelly adding a further dimension; whereas Woman found the jelly ‘medicinal’.

But we agreed that, to our subjective taste, there were sometimes hiccups and also, we have to say, some occasional heavy-handedness and seasoning excess, a certain lack of balance, of precision, and of attention to details. We found several chicken bones, large and small, in the gorgeous chicken cannelloni (more on them below). The sauce of a wonderful and nicely cooked suckling veal was really too concentrated.


There were different cookings of our two pieces of monkfish (one almost raw, the other better done), and similarly for the otherwise beautiful crayfish on our rice.

A nice selection of Petit four concludes our dinner



The service
The service is correct but a bit cold, robotic and brusque from one member staff. The dishes are not described nicely but instead quickly and as if in a hurry, the cutlery almost thrown on the table (are we sooo unpleasant? Sigh). No apologies for the bones in the chicken, the menus are not explained - indeed, only later we overhear a conversation with another table from which we understand we could have gone for a shorter version of the innovative menu: surely something you should be told to begin with! The manager however, as well as the wine waitress, are helpful and courteous.

The low: the dessert
To our taste this was a mess of clashing flavours. Essentially a millefuille filled with coffee, sealed with caramel, and sitting on a lemon cream, plus a vanilla ice-cream. Picture this: you try and cut through the generally aethereal puff pastry, only now you cannot, as the caramel encasing makes it gummy. But you brave on, and the millefeuille still smirking at you, bend but does not break, till the pressure squeezes out the coffee cream, that shoots straight into the lemon sauce... well, we later discovered elsewhere (more on this story later...) that lemon and coffee can work together: but this definitely is not it, the lemon and coffee flavours were fighting, the ice-cream wasn’t sweet enough, and the caramel reduced the millefeuille to a gluey texture.


The high: Chicken cannelloni
It takes guts to serve chicken cannelloni in a fine dining restaurant, but the gamble pays off. So, despite the aforementioned bones, we nominate this the dish of the evening. With such intense and yet delicate flavours in both the hand-cut mince and in the side, soberly presented, chicken reduction with vinegar (we think), this dish also exudes a minimalist elegance that makes it an example of how a rustic combination can achieve fine dining heights. The perfect balance of that reduction also shows that this innovative chef could equally well cook classical dishes. Pity that our picture does not make justice to this beautiful dish!


The price
Now, where is that bill? Anyhow, the traditional menu we went for was priced at €58 (while the more adventurous Alkimia menu has a €74 price tag) and the wine, and considering how the pound has dived, we were confortably over our (upgraded) £110 rule, but not by far.

Conclusion
This is a restaurant to try if you are in Barcelona. The cuisine will surprise, amuse and please. But don’t expect consistency and be prepared for some disappointments.



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Jasmin

The day: 26th April 2009, Lunch.
The place: Griesbruck 4, 39043 Klausen/Chiusa (Bolzano), Italy (tel+39 0472 847448)
The venue: Jasmin restaurant vitale
The food: Modern regional/eclectic
Airport: Verona, Brescia (BA, Ryanair)
The drinks: Interesting, strong on regional, some Piedmont and Chianti, only few token other Italian and foreign offerings, reasonably priced

(added November 2009: now a 2* promise in the 2010 guide)

The first slightly frightening aspect of Jasmin is that when you phone to book they ask what you want to eat. I beg your pardon? yes, that's right, there is no a la carte menu. You can only choose the type of menu (fish, meat, or mixed) and the number of courses. When we say you can ‘choose’ the number of courses it is a euphemism: the minimum is four. We are sure that the courteous manager (we guess, the mum of the Michelin starred chef Martin Obermazoner, though we didn’t ask) would accommodate deviations and strange requests such as having less than four courses, but we don’t try: we feel we’d be spoiling a precision machine.

So we direct our car along the Isarco valley, to the pretty town of Chiusa. We are in Sud Tirol and, although we are nominally in Italy, the environment and the language tell you that we are not. The restaurant is located in what must have been once a corner of Paradise, overlooked by a rock with the great abbey and immersed in a sea of green.

Now it is unfortunately overlooked by the monstrous motorway that slashes the forest above. We show you the pretty angle:

while here you can check for yourself how the motorway cuts through the beautiful scenery.

On arrival, you find on the table the menu, with your name on it, that the chef has concocted for you. (We actually visited Jasmin twice, once for the fish menu and the other time for the mixed menu: this is an account of our first visit, but the impressions we had in the second were punctually confirmed).

The small room is very prettily set, with the usual high-end south-tirolean mixture of Alpine rusticity and cutting edge elegance, but the four tables in such a tiny environment create an almost excessively intimate atmosphere, with the three couples reduced to whispering to each other in fear of breaking a religious-like quiet.
The bread arrives, accompanied by three types of butter (malga/alpine pasture butter, goat butter and irish butter):

Wow, ten varieties. Chef, you have found the right people for your flour efforts: they are very appreciative and impressed.

We start with a first amuse bouche:

It’s a warm quince tea, topped with cold champagne foam and with a generous sprinkle of ginger ‘pearls’ (spherification) at the bottom. The manager informs us that the pearls are the product of a ‘new technique’: obviously we don’t immediately strike people as gourmets... Anyway, this is absolutely brilliant. The champagne is ‘boiling’ to great effect. Neatly contrasted flavours, temperatures and textures are a light delight on the palate and immediately predispose you to discover more.

The second amuse is...

We have a cream of purple and white cauliflower with coffee foam, a langoustine cappuccino with cocoa, and an oyster with warm passion fruit jelly and slivers of white chocolate. Ehm, if the chef wanted to strike us from the very beginning, he succeeded. All these ingredients could have been a horrible mess, and are instead an elegant, balanced and bold ensemble. If one minor imbalance has to be found, one might point at some excessively pungent cheesiness in the cauliflower. But this is quibbling, for the cream is a warm caress on your palate. The bitter cocoa and the langoustine riskily skirt the edge of a jarring combination, but instead they are simply stunning together, in a miraculous equilibrium. And the oyster soon deflects any worry that the passion fruit might have overshadowed it: the flavours are unbelievably clear, the white chocolate softening just enough the zing of the passion fruit. This is an extremely assertive amuse, with great cooking precision on display.

So far we have moved from liquid to creamy and semi-solid consistencies, and we are fully ready for something more substantial: here is our starter:

- Wild sea-bass with ratatouille

The sea bass is accompanied by a white tomato foam, ratatouille and ‘tomato cous cous’. Man and woman after the first bite of the bass look at each other in amazement: The cooking and the material are stratospheric, with everything you want, crispiness, moistness, flavour. The ratatouille confers almost excessively bitter notes, it is very meticulously made, but the vegetables are slightly unseasonal, never a suitable match for the fantastic bass.

Oh my God, another extra ‘amuse’!


Potato cream with sour milk, leek sprouts, and Asetra caviar. Despite the ennobling presence of the caviar, this dish manages to also satisfy your ‘gluttony’ instincts, the potatoes being quite cheesy, and yet the cream while bodily is delightfully light. The caviar elevates the whole immensely, and all the flavours, once again, feel simply sculpted so clear they are.

It feels like a long way, already, and yet we are only at our first course:

- Sesame ravioli with red Sicilian prawns on pumpin cream, green apple:

Sweetness and voluptuous richness in this dish (almost a vanilla flavour, maybe the ravioli have been cooked in cocoa butter, and certainly the oil is of black sesame), on the verge of being too fat. The pasta has a very interesting texture. The quality of the prawn is supreme for Man, while Woman finds it a notch down, but they agree on the excellent cooking. There is also much generosity in the quantity, adding to the overall impression of unabashed lusciousness.

Ready for our main:

- Amberjack with river watercress puree, Vesuvio tomatoes


In this dish it’s small but crucial details that count: the ‘lime caviar’, the sesame coating... and with the fish (almost raw) we are again in the stratosphere, and so, this time, also with the vegetables: the `crescione' (watercress) is an excellent sweet match. But also, once again, a hint of excess unctuositiy.

Next, we are brought some sorbets as a predessert, and we are invited to guess the flavours ourselves:

We like the game, as well as the playful chromatism. Before we tell how you we went with the guesses, let us say that these sorbets were a true joy to eat, a great assortment. Now we are finished and it’s exam time… brrr. We and the couple remaining at another table (ther were six covers in all on that Sunday lunchtime) are very worried not to pass: it is clear that if the chef wants us to guess he is sure to find us out in some embarrassing blunder. And the situation turns out to be worse, for the other couple simply bottles up and you faithful reporters now have to shoulder the entire responsibility. For the green one we guess ‘some tangy fruit like orange and some herbs, like basil’, and the true answer is basil and lime. Not quite, but the manager looks impressed nonetheless – clearly she has seen much worse... For the white one we guess ‘ricotta and and coconut’, and the true answer is mozzarella and coconut. Damn! Close again, but the chef has managed to trick us (it was bloody good, by the way). The last one feels so simple that we see another trick coming: ‘small wild fruits’, we say, to be general and parry surprises, and it turns out that they are wild strawberries as we thought (yeah, yeah).
We feel we have passed the exam, so now we can proceed to the dessert.

- Medlar fruit with blanc manger, coconut souffle', blanc manger ice cream

Ok, we notice a crème fraiche ice-cream, a hazelnut mousse with nespole (medlar), blanc manger with goat milk and almonds, a strawberry ‘ragout’ with chocolate ‘fritto’, a coconut souffle’, and a nespole juice. They are all very good, very well-made, original and nicely presented: a triumph of assorted flavours which leaves Man completely and utterly satisfied. Especially the acompanying nectar of nespole is an extremely nice touch.
However, Woman complains about the lack of more ‘robust’ consistencies, and Man has to agree that a truly balanced dessert would have featured some more crunchy and floury sections. Actually, it has been a theme throughout the meal: maybe the chef likes best soft, creamy consistencies.

The petit four conclude what for us was a very large meal:


Excellent, accompanied by a good coffee.

With a (1 Litre!) bottle of water and a Chardonnay Alois Lageder (we think, but we are going from memory) at around €34, the total comes to €162. For such a large meal with such materials, this is a very reasonable price.

The service is conducted by ‘mum’ with courteousness and smiles but also with a touch of distance and a lack of genuine warmth. There is a feel of everything being a bit mechanical, from the way the dishes are recited to you to the way questions are answered (this may be compounded by a language problem). There is no sense that in the room staff really care for or understand what the chef in the kitchen is pursuing. On our second visit, there were also unacceptable delays and lack of a proper pace during the meal, also in view of the fact that there were again only very few (eight) people to serve. And the helping waitress was terribly awkward. On balance, we venture to say that this restaurant has a service problem, relative to its obviously high ambitions.
The cuisine itself, however, is spectacular. Martin Obermazoner is a chef of frightening precision and ability. His dishes give an impression of total control and almost maniacal attention to details. As we have had occasion to remark already, his flavours are marvellously clean, despite coming from combinations that reveal a taste for complexity, opulence, and also boldness. This chef stretches the palette of flavours using all modern techniques, but without overdoing it. And the hints of playfulness and the obvious generosity make it all more human. But is has to be said that depriving the customer of choice pushes control-freakery a bit too far for our taste, and it also gives the chef an ‘unfair’ advantage compared to other colleagues that have to take more risks for the sake of putting his customers more at ease. Commercially, too, it looks like a strange choice, for you can only go to Jasmin if you are prepared to have a gargantuan meal, never simply to relax. In conclusion, we felt that the only obstacle to an otherwise totally deserved second star –which may well arrive- lie in things that are around the dishes, certainly not in the dishes themselves. At least once, however, try it: it is definitely not an ordinary culinary experience.

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Au Valet de Coeur

The day: 30th December 2008, Dinner.
The place: 40 route de Ste-Marie-aux-Mines F-68150 RIBEAUVILLE (tel: +33 (0)3 89736414)
The venue: Restaurant Au Valet de Coeur, Hostel ‘La Pepiniere’.
The food: French
The drinks: Adequate for a starred French venue, interesting wine-menu pairings at €25, 32, 40.

For the second year in a row family events prevent us from taking a proper break over the Winter holidays. But on the road back to London we allow ourselves one treat: driving along the axis Basel-Strasbourg, just past Colmar (where we stayed last year), we turn straight towards the freezing Vosges forests and, upwards on the icy road next to the charming village of Ribeauville’, we find this hotel restaurant. As we notice not infrequently in our pilgrimages to Alsace, the restaurant seems to be one step ahead of the attached hotel in terms of comfort and overall quality. With its Michelin star, and given the excellent levels of Alsatian cuisine, we are expecting a bloody good dinner! There is a religious pilgrimage route nearby in case we want to expiate our sins later (but there is also a ‘cremant’ wine maker almost in front of the route, making for a hard choice, or an intriguing combination).

The décor is warm, in light brown and white tones, pleasant, unpretentious and varied, with several areas in the large room and the (slightly corny to be fair) ‘heart’ motif all around, even in the butter on the table. The tables are very comfortable and well-spaced. The jovial Maitre d’ adds to the sense of comfort.



Several menus are on offer, from the largest 6 course tasting menu at €85, to the 4 course ‘Menu decouverte’ at €65, to the 3 course ‘Menu saveur’ at €45. And a ‘Menu du marche’ at €33.50 features on weekday evenings and Saturday lunches. A la carte choices afford less good value, with starters at €25-35 and mains at €29-38, and with some items only available in the set menus. Had we gone a la carte, we would have tried the ‘Cour de saumon mi-cuit/mi-fume, Remoulade de Celery et Caviar d’ Aquitaine, Blinis’ (€35) as a starter. For mains, we’d been happy with our set menu which you’ll see in a minute.

We go for the Menu Decouverte (€65), and we begin with a little snack of puff pastry with poppy and sesame seeds, or topped with some kind of bechamelle sauce and lardons:



Well, not your average Gregg's offering, these are high levels of bakery.
And the bread rolls are already expecting us:

Beautiful to look at (again the corny heart motif), excellent taste, made with strong flour as we like it, and really well made. Good start, if they can make Man and Woman happy about the bread!

And an amouse bouche:

A salmon mousse, St. Jacques on a mousse of green veggies, and a chestnut mousse. The cold salmon mousse regales a surprising sweetness, and is bodily, buttery, rich and compact, satisfying. Equally pleasing is the scallop, also cold, with a peppery punch that Man appreciates more than Woman, who finds it close to overpowering. As for the chestnuts, we detect potatoes in the warm, delicate and airy combination. We must say that this beginning already reveals an assured hand, with clear flavours, variety and seasoning judgement.

Our starters:

- Raviole de Foie Gras de Canard a la Farine de Chataigne dans un Bouillon Corse’.
- Delicate gelee de Crabe Royale, Creme de Crustaces et Harenga.



The foie gras is intense, carried by the delicate bouillon with sweet fine carrots in abundance. We appreciate the good texture of the chestnut ravioli, while the truffle is more of a decoration. This is a good dish but not altogether convincing: most of the work is really done by the great foie gras, with the rest adding little and not integrating appropriately, in our judgement.
But the Gelee...the gelee is on a different level of cuisine, the technique presenting us with a sumptuous multitude of flavours (the crab is dominant –it’s a king after all- but the lobster mousse/cream and the non-salty jelly are a very valid support) and a ravishing soft-solid consistency: this is an occasion where richness (mayonnaise is present) comes with absolute balance and lightness, leaving on the palate a satisfied sense of freshness. This is haute cuisine.

Next we have:

- Maree du jour accomodee selon l’Inspiration du Chef
- Le Baeckeoffe de Homard Gratine’ aux Poireaux

The ‘fish according to the chef inspiration’ is an Atlantic seabass on risotto and a creamy lobster reduction. Fresh and cooked perfectly (‘crispissimo’ on the skin and moist inside) and sitting on a pleasant risotto ‘cake’ which also has a crispy outer layer, still the fish is slightly inexpressive on the palate. The rice is a tad over (Woman here unusually sterner than Man on risotto), but as Italians we’ll always say that in France… The lobster reduction is, conversely, fantastic, providing a backbone of pungent burnt flavour. A very sound dish where once again several cooking skills converge.
The beackaoffe is, as you know, a traditional Alsatian casserole, typically a rustic dish which here the chef offers instead in an ennobled and sophisticated version, with lobster instead of, for example, game. The result is totally convincing: the lobster is simply wonderful and cooked just so, held together by a texturally interesting eggy quiche-like filling with leeks adding vegetable depth. Another definite hit.

What delights. We arrive to the main mains:

- Dos de Cochon de lait Laque’, Boudin maison et Pomme de Terre Ecrasee a la Fourchette
- Pigeonneau en croute Feuilletee aux Choux Vert et Foie Gras



Oooh: In the eye-pleasing pork dish we encounter the first (and only) serious cooking flaw of the evening: it’s rather dry (remember: this is moist suckling pig, so it takes a real error to dry it up). A pity, because the rest is perfect, its flavour, its elegant ‘laque’ exterior, the exemplary reduction. And the potato and boudin ‘cake’ is to scream for, rich and velvety and decadent, a punch of strong traditional cuisine flavours classily reinterpreted.
And talking about potent flavours… the foie gras stuffing in the pigeon, which you reach after going through a pretty and texture-wise very apt ‘puff pastry’ enveloping the juicy, tender bird, is an explosion (notice the similarity of this dish with what we had here) that calls for even more screams of contentment. All accompanied by an excellent Savoy cabbage. What a movingly good dish!

And we have come to the desserts:

- Baba au vieux Rhum, Crème legere et Minestrone de Fruits Exotiques
- Carre’ Chocolat Grand Cru, Glace vanille’

For the baba’ we have a conceptual disagreement with the Chef…We appreciate the humour of the deconstruction, serving the (excellent) rhum and (equally excellent) vanilla mousse separated: but for us the pleasure of baba’ has always been and always will remain that of the rhum enveloping your palate at the first, soft bite. So we’d say this is a deconstruction too far. This aside, there’s also a problem with the baba’ itself which, while good in flavour, is inelastic and (of course) dry and heavy. The ‘minestrone’ is, however most tasty and welcome.
No such problems with the other dessert: accompanied by a fine vanilla icecream, stunning chocolate and masterful technique combine to create a ravishing, marvellously beautiful cake: you go through the several layers (the chocolate ‘ganache’ covering, the chocolate mousse, some thin praline layer, the jelly/chocolate cream, the white chocolate) and...you dream.

To conclude, the petit four:



They are all very pleasant, the almond madeleine, the hazelnut praline - especially fine is the jammy density of the apricot jelly, and we also like very much the sort of chocolate brownie, which is lighter than a brownie.

(We prefer to forget this...


...just look at it! And that heart shape again, this is begining to be a little obsessive)

We said we went for the Menu Decouverte. In fact, to be precise, we went for a ‘Formule carte blanche’ (€250) which included a night in a large room for two, the Discovery menu for two, and the €25 wine paring plus water – so let’s say our dinner for two all inclusive cost €180, well deserved for the quality and quantity we experienced (the wines we tried were a Muscat d’Alsace, a Riesling 2006, a Vouvray 2006 and a Haut Medoc 1998, all nice, especially the Medoc - Chateaux Hantellan).

The service was smooth, correct, less rigid and more human than can be the case in French venues.
As you have seen we enjoyed a great dinner. Chef Christophe Cavelier is not God and does make the occasional mistake (and we even had our ‘conceptual’ problems!) but the variety of perfectly executed and conceived dishes he put in front of us, with very strong, powerful but at the same time balanced and clear flavours, always classically and elegantly presented, must make this one of the best examples of cuisine in Alsace. Not an innovative cuisine, one deeply rooted in tradition but also in a profound technique and cooking mastery, thanks to which heartiness is married to modern criteria of lightness. The menu itself was also nicely designed. And after you are satiated, the choice is yours: a religious pilgrimage, a peaceful walk in the steep woods, or a visit to the sparkling wine maker. Whatever you prefer, we recommend that you go to the Valet du Coeur!

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Wandering in Mayfair...

...maybe after an exhausting shopping day, or maybe just because you're lucky enough to live there, you may stumble in one of our favourite Italian restaurants in London. We’ve had several delightful dinner at Semplice (fully reviewed here). On the last occasion in December, just before our non-holiday, we tried, for example, these memorable pheasant ravioli with potato sauce


To non-Italians such a type of dish may look overly rich in carbs, and while this might well be the case in pure dietary terms (not that it has harmed us so far)…on the palate there is really no sense of imbalance, the dense, starchy texture and sweet aroma of the potato sauce forming a really apt ligature for the freshly made pasta and the fragrant game filling.

And just to keep our carb intake at our needed levels for the night…we were also blown away by this perfect execution



of egg Sedanini with venison ragout in a black cabbage sauce. The picture and the colour perhaps convey something of the depth of flavour of a properly made pasta and ragout. This is a dish of both heartiness and composure.

They say at Semplice that the pasta is made every day. Opinions split as to whether one can really detect the difference between pasta made on the day and pasta that has been frozen (as most Italian restaurants, even the best, normally do, for obvious logistics reasons). At home we regularly freeze the excess pasta we make. Be that as it may, we merely underscore the integrity and conviction of a restaurant where such laborious practices are followed.

At the end of the meal (which also included a lot of proteins, e.g. in the form of this mouthwatering beast (do take a guess at what it is):



we are treated to a sample of a semi-hard cheese from the Val Brembana, with a nice brioche

whose one thousand aromas blew us away. This is ‘alpeggio’ cheese: made from milk of cows grazing on pastures at altitude in the Alps: and it does make a difference! The Italian cheese list at Semplice is probably the most interesting in London (together with the one here), worth a trip on its own if you want to learn about Italian cheeses.


Semplice have now expanded to a nearby ‘Trattoria’, where simpler food is served in a more informal setting: more on this story later!

By the way, they have just received a Michelin star: congratulations to Marco Torri and all his staff.

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L' Autre Pied

The day: December 12^th 2008, Lunch.
The place: 5-7 Blandford Street, Marylebone Village, London W1U 3DB.
The venue: L’ Autre Pied
The food: French
The drinks: Nice, well priced and ranged selection, also in smaller sizes (glasses, 460ml pot).

(Note: Chef Marcus Eaves has moved to Pied a Terre since this review)

Let's check this sister operation of bi-starred Pied a Terre, with Chef Marcus Eaves in command of the kitchen, before the crazed praises of the critics, the powerful patrons and public relation machine behind it, and the inevitable Michelin star bring it into the price stratosphere.

As you can see, we come in pretty cynical and disenchanted - we have learned enough by now of how things work in the restaurant business. Will we come out equally disenchated? Let's see.

The interior is Arbutus style, minimalistic, stark, with unclothed tables (there are however pseudomats (rubber?) encased in the tables), and floral, modernist (apparently handmade) decorations on a glass partition and on the wall adding some curvy lines to the linear interior.

The menu offers several possibilities. There's Sunday menu affording a four course lunch at £34.50. A la carte choices for the starters are in the £9-14 range and for mains in the £16-20 range. The seven course tasting menu is at £52. But there is a temptingly well priced menu du jour (lunch) and pre-theater at £21 for three course. We take advantage of another very reasonable looking three course Sunday Lunch menu for £26.50 (it also includes a complimentary Bellini

on arrival).

When we order our courses we ask the Italian waiter to take our wine order too, and we’ll be punished by the sommelier/waiter who will just place the bottle on the table without making us try it – this is a first.

The bread arrives:

Served warm and with nice butter, but really they won't win a star for this.

For starters we had chosen:

- Caramelised onion veloute’, cannellini beans, smoked olive oil

- Lasagna of game, chanterelle mushrooms, chestnut foam

Man takes the first sip the veloute’ and Woman the first dig into the lasagna. They look at each other, and they instantly realize, without exchanging a word but just a delighted expression, that they agree: this is not an ordinary place. This instant recognition is a rare experience (so different, for example from the highly acclaimed and already starred One Lombard Street).

The layered flavours emanating so clearly from both dishes are striking. The veloute’ has a sweet acidic background, perfect thickness, balance, charme, with the cannelloni slightly ‘al dente’ (let’s say), and the olive oil, as always, making the dish soar.

The lasagna is ever so fine, packing concentrated, moist, soft, beautiful game. The dish is nicely presented on a slate tile (quite fashionable of late, but not very comfortable, though), the various components integrating very well in terms of texture and flavour.

We are looking forward to our mains:

- Aged (how much?) sirloin of Angus beef, caramelized cauliflower puree’, shallot fondant, roasting juices (£3 supplement)

- Roasted breast of pheasant, Savoy cabbage, Puy lentils, and red wine sauce

The beef has a reasonably deep flavour and a great texture. In our book this is cooked longer, and so is drier, than the 'rare' we had asked for. The roasting juices are nice and sharp, and can be soaked up by an admirable, floury side puree,

but the shallot fondant... the shallot fondant is an explosion of goodness from another world (the caramelised cauliflower puree was there, fine and beautiful and surely adding moisture and richness of flavour –Eaves likes caramelized stuff, obviously- but in a dish already so rewarding it did not register a deep impression on us).

The pheasant, too, while its meat was very pleasant on the palate, could have been cooked more sympathetically – it was slightly drier than the best samples we’ve had (recently here for example), and with some bitterness on the outside. We think there’s some scope for improvement in the cooking here. The sweet wine sauce was extremely apt, and so was the Savoy cabbage, with a tangy push coming from somewhere (citrus fruit?). The lentils, the baby onion and the beetroot created a full vegetable taste spectrum which we appreciated.

We are already happy, but here are are the desserts:

- Apple and blackberry crumble, bayleaf custard, blackberry sorbet

- Warm custard of Valrhona chocolate, Passion fruit icecream

The apple crumble is superb, the volatile bayleaf delicately permeating the whole dish and our nostrils and providing an unmistakable background character, integrating absolutely smoothly with the rest, the delightful pistachios, the sorbet, the crumble in a feast of assorted zingness and sweetness.

We were initially skeptical about the chocolate and passion fruit combination, but we were completely won over by the idea and the execution. The ‘custard’ is a sort of divinely airy liquid mousse (if this renders the idea) with apple bits. The ice cream is just as creamy as we like it (you know we are fussy about icecream), perfect and tangy, enriched by a crunchy help from the hazelnuts. With such delicate yet intense flavours, this dessert was frighteningly good.

A bottle of Syrah Vin de Pays des Collines Rhodaniennes Jean Luc Jamet 2006 at £29.60, the water at £3.50 (you won’t be frowned upon if you ask tap water), the £3.00 supplement for the beef, and the usual 12.5% service charge, brought the total to £96.30, truly great value for this level of cuisine.

The service was cheerful and friendly and chatty, though not yet at a level matching the food. The waiter described the dishes wrongly, somehow defeating the purpose of this usual litany you are subjected to in 'high-end' restaurants while the dish cools off. The sommelier or wine waiter was forever offended and distant. It being Sunday, however, the big manager wasn't there to keep a look on things.

We had a most impressive lunch. Marcus Eaves is clearly a young chef of superior talent who prepares interesting, expressive and controlled dishes. It's not bistro cusine, by a long strech, but rather a form of haute cusine firmly and pleasantly anchored on the ground: no foamy bullshit here. Not that everything was perfect: the cooking precision in both our mains left something to be desired, for example (to be fair, being Sunday the kitchen boss wasn’t there either – so things may be different on weekdays). But this is definitely cuisine that comfortably passes the one star level (and one day maybe even more) . So, we came in cycnical and we came out mollified. We are glad we went in the first year of its opening, and we suggest you hurry up, too!

(Added on 18 January 2009: of course we were right: L'AP has just got its Michelin star).

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