One O One (London): fine seafood

(Visited mid-March 2012)

Well, we finally closed our eyes and ignored all the almost irresistible competition in the vicinities of this restaurant, that we had ignored for so long, and managed to cross the One-O-One entrance for dinner.

Smart room, with those curvy walls that give an eighties feel. We like it.


And the beginning is promising. The bread is very well made (no mean compliment from us...) and comes in several qualities, the seaweed flavoured butter  is a big success, and the amuse, a fennel vichissoise with salmon confit is fresh and delightful and speaks to us with those olive oil drops.

We tried the signature Wild Norwegian Red King Crab, both visually theatrical and and delicious on the palate in both of the versions we chose. Woman went for the cold version, simply accompanied by a mayonnaise sauce (good). 

In truth, this was the best way to appreciate the marvelous flavour of the enormous legs of this beast. It was fun to eat, too, even if not very conducive to conversation.

Man opted for the more elaborate version with sweet chilli and ginger sauce. 



It was a very classy sauce with a pleasant, far from overpowering kick.

These are not cheap items but they would have been worth the full price (£27 apiece) that we didn't pay (courtesy of the usual toptable offer).

Then the seabass (also from the Barents Sea like the crab, according to the waiter) in salt crust, the preparation of it a piece of theatre seen one thousand times but, like cricket, endlessly fascinating (or have we by any chance said this already?). 

Compared to the similarly prepared fish we had had a few days earlier in Seville, we must say this London one was much better cooked: absolutely precise cooking in fact, the flesh delicately moist (however, the flavour of these Northern basses of course never matching that of their best Mediterranean cousins). Well presented too, accompanied as it was by various mollusks in a razor-clam shell, a slim cylinder of potato puree, and an airy shellfish champagne butter sauce with a sea lettuce mash, the protagonist of this dish really had the space to shine, and at the same time the chef had the opportunity to show his finesse. A very very well-judged creation. Again not cheap (£60 for the entire fish), but also very much worth it.



We skipped desserts, we skipped wine (the next day a rustic mega eat and drink at Briciole was on the cards...), and even resisted the petit fours (well, ok, let's say we did not finish them all) but we had the chance to verify that they belong to the ever expanding 'cannot make espresso' club of fine dining restaurants.

Service is sweet once you manage to get their attention, which is not always easy with a rather full room. The cost was less than £100 overall with a 40% Toptable offer, no wine, no desserts, a 1 Litre (much appreciated) water bottle, and a tea and coffee. A price and a treatment that put a smile on your face.

In sum, this was a very accomplished seafood meal, a venue to try again. We feel that the a la carte menu offers the most sumptuous and enjoyable dishes (at the nearby table a Dover sole also looked very enticing), but we also want to try the lunchtime smaller dish sequence, which appears to be good value (a report by stalwart egullet contributor David Goodfellow, with far better pictures to boot, is here), even if you may end up leaving a little perplexed, like David. And then again for dinner, possibly many times. If only Koffman's wasn't so close  


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Wallace Restaurant at the Wallace Collection

Woman spent an hour of the Sunday morning in the basement rooms showing some intricate works by the goldsmith Kevin Coates. Man, suffering from back-ache, unable to stoop to look at the details of the miniatures, irritated and very worried at the thought of Woman exposed to all that gold, took a stroll in the upper galleries looking at the portraits of rather ugly gentlemen and ladies and at terrifying armoury, and couldn't wait to sit down in the comfortably pillowed, deep metal chairs of the fantastically bright (courtesy of a glass window) and spacious dining room at the Wallace collection.


There is something about satisfying first your eyes and then your palate, about eating surrounded by beauty...


We had a very decent duck terrine, accompanied by a lovely sweet sauce, clearly the work of a competent chef.




The combination of remoulade, Bayonne ham and cucumber pickles, while simple, worked and showed attention to flavour balance, and in all honesty the combination of sweetness, sourness, saltiness and umami was a pleasure on the palate.




The papillote butternut squash kept all its flavour, although we were suffering form carbohydrate withdrawal symptoms.




Luckily there was some creamy pearl barley accompanying plump courgettes, lavishly stuffed with black olives.




To finish, three cheeses, in more than acceptable conditions and generously accompanied by apples, grapes and walnuts - from a list of seven or eight we chose an Epoisse, a Livarot and a Comte D’Estive.



And a rather floury but overall good cherry clafoutis (no stones in the cherries!)




All this, plus two glasses of wine at £7.50 each and coffees, for £93. Some good pricing here. The cheeses are £10 for three piece, or £15 for five , or £7 for one. There is a set lunch of two or three courses at £22 and £25. We will not say that you can have the best fine dining lunch of your life at the Wallace, and with L'Autre Pied and Roganics so close for a Sunday lunch that's where you should head to if you are only interested only in the food. But you can be a happy eater, you can be thoroughly content and relaxed, at the Wallace. There is competence and professionalism behind those dishes, and the environment is truly uplifting.




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PS to Koffmann's

Just a small addendum to our Koffmann's review. We went for Sunday lunch yesterday and we had the grouse: heavenly! We can hardly think of another place in London where one can have a more delicious one: if you have the chance to be there (and if you like gamey stuff, as it is potently flavoured, as one expects from a dish at Koffmann's), a must-try.

Addendum to the addendum (added 24/12/2011): some pictures of game at Koffmann's are here.

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Roganic (London): interesting but

One really wants to love this place. The front of house team (Jonathon, Sandia and the others)  are absolutely charming and enthusiastic. They genuinely believe in the project and they genuinely want you to be happy at Roganic, Simon Rogan's (of l'Enclume fame) very recent London opening with Ben Spalding at the helm.


The very fact that it's hard to describe all the dishes one by one demonstrates the complexity and uniqueness of the culinary experience: many ingredients, many unusual ingredients, many original ideas. Many dishes in tiny portions that articulate an itinerary to the special Rogan world. It's partly a forced itinerary though, as you can only choose between a 6 and a 10 course menu (we'll return to this issue at the end).


Some of these ideas strike us as less successful than others. A pear in a spelt dish is described by the waiter as 'caramelised', whereas the menu says 'burnt'. Unfortunately the menu is correct, and we wonder why anybody who hasn't some sort of ideological culinary point to prove would want to spoil a perfectly good, crunchy, delicate, spelt and grains 'risotto' with a hideous bitter burnt taste - perfect, though, if you love free radicals :)

Other dishes were more impressive, like the famous heritage potatoes with onion ashes, lovage and wood sorrel where the harmony of flavours and textures reigns supreme.

An amuse of rosemary and chickpea wafer with aioli, chervil and flowers was also extremely well conceived and executed, and the combination of the salty notes of a Kentish mackerel with elderflower honey, and beautiful green vegetables, was delicious and a joy to behold.


But other times the execution was perplexing, like the monkfish with chicken salt and chard, in which the cooking of the fish was not up to what one expects from a kitchen of this level (the fish was unanimously judged dry at the table), and which contained a really excessive amount of salt. Lovely chicken and cockle reduction though (small friendly advice for the waiter: if you don't remember what is in a dish, just say so, don't invent - we had to check again with the boss Jonathon to confirm the composition of the sauce).

We liked our slow cooked hogget, with an accompanying sweetbread adding interest, though a friend at the table found his not as pleasurable as one expects from slow cooked meat.

We again touched highs with a dessert of excellent Sweet ciceley, strawberry, buttermilk and intense verbena and after that a beautiful and very aromatic "fir tree" foam.



The breads are made inhouse, and are good (pumpernickel, spelt, and potato and buttermilk). But the coffees must, must be improved! And the petit four too (rather dry muffin like Victoria sponge).
 


So ups and downs overall. But this is not so much the point, as some snags within one month of opening are not the end of the world. For us, the main problem was that while we were always interested,  intrigued, amused and even educated, and we really rooted for them, we found it hard to fall in love with the whole concept. Perhaps it is the fact that when you have in the dish only a morsel of the main ingredient (and of the accompanying ones) it is difficult to develop a relationship with it. There was a slight sense of evanescence and lack of substance in pretty compositions which, we repeat, provoked in us interest, and pleasure too, but not the wows of the great powerful dishes that stay with you.


This is is obviously a subjective judgement, it's our taste and we know that many food-lovers disagree. Roganic definitely brings novelty to the London food scene, and we are happy to have tried the experience. What a boring world would it be if there weren't people like Rogan around.


But we also wonder if the formula that works at l'Enclume is such a great idea in London. The space here is not one for special occasions, the room small and reverberating noise, with the chairs not too comfy (Woman finding hers  positively uncomfortable). How many people want to repeatedly spend three hours for a 10 course meal with no choice? Many people would just like to go to a restaurant after work and be able to choose a few dishes. 

We think they are beginning to see the problem here. They started with just the 10 course at dinner, and now they have added a 6 course option (£80 and £55 respectively). They go out of their way to inform you that if you want some changes they'll try to accommodate them (a return with friends at another table was served, we were informed, mostly different dishes from those on the menu). If you become a regular you might even go for a Saturday lunch and have only a couple of dishes. They emphasise that the menu is always different (yet many of our dishes look almost identical to ones we had seen on other reports). They are adamant that they don't want to change who they are and what they stand for; yet they are already changing and we think they will have to change even more. We wish them good luck because, let us say it once again, they are really a great team that deserves success. We won't contribute much to it soon, but we'd like to be back in a year or so, it is a unique place after all.


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Pre-theater at Pied a Terre

Just some impressions, not a full blown careful review, about a short pre-theater December dinner at that long-standing bastion of Michelin excellence, Pied a Terre.

An impressive, generous, intricate amuse, whose list of ingredients is sufficient for a meal: pea pannacotta, toasted almond foam, jerusalem artichoke (right), foie gras in a sandwich of poppy seeds fillopastry (centre), onion and chorizo cake (centre left), parmesan and tomato gnocco (communist)

Sculpted flavours, multidimensional, and much unctuosity.

Wood pigeon in Madeira Consomme' and salt-crusted celeriac:

Deep flavours, dark flavours. Pity that the salt of the celeriac crust dissolved in the soup, defeating the purpose, we believe.

A beautiful Tempura prawns and butternut squash risotto

which stunned us for the idea, mixing two traditions, and the excellent execution of the risotto (and the toasted pumpkin seeds a perfect touch). Much unctuosity.

A brill:

perfectly cooked material of absolute quality, in a pungent reduction. For its (partly just apparent) simplicity, one the best dishes.

A lamb,
a dish of literally towering complexity whose naturally explosive flavours could have spoken for themselves even better, we think, with a simpler, lighter, less fatty preparation. But that caramelised chicory was a beauty, and that tender fillet, dreamy. Much unctuosity.

We were certainly happy, very impressed, though for some reason not totally ravished by this cuisine, in which we found expressed a flamboyant imagination and technique knowing no boundaries, yes, but which also struck us as somehow lacking lightness and the killer punch of simplicity (such as we recently found, for example at Heinz Beck's place). It's probably just a matter of subjective taste, as Shane Osborne is obviously a great professional. Dare we say it? To us it seems almost as if he is, after all these years, still trying too hard.

We were ravished, however, by the service, so friendly, charming and willing to offer all the time and attention in the world even to customers of the least profitable or least refined variety (like the guys who made a sandwich with the butter on the table). We'd like to compete for the least profitable competition, as we were there for a quick bite of the pre-theater two course offer at £32.50.

It would be nice to be back. But at full prices, and even at lunch/pre-theater prices, there's a long list of possibly more immediately compelling competitors...

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