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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Rusacks

The day: 8^th December 2008, Dinner.
The place: Pilmour Links Saint Andrews, KY16 (tel: 0870 400 8128)
The venue: Rusacks Hotel and restaurant
The food: Modern British/French
The drinks: Quite well stocked on French wines, good range of prices

THE HOTEL IS STILL THERE, BUT WITH A DIFFERENT RESTAURANT

We did not come to St. Andrews, Fife, to play golf, a sport (a sport?) about which we know nothing. But we must admit that, overlooking the green with one of the most famous golf ‘holes’ in the world, and then the ravishingly beautiful beaches and sea beyond, the Rusacks Hotel dining room, with its slightly retro elegance

makes us feel comfortable and relaxed,

notwithstanding the golf types surrounding us :-)

The short, well-designed menu offers a few choices in each category. We note a Crotin of goat cheese, Caramelised red onion, Pithiver (£6.25) among the starters, and the Slow cooked pork belly, Granny Smith apple puree, Boulangere potato, Winter vegetables, Cider sauce (£15.95) among the mains.

While we examine the menu, some bread arrives.

A choice of four varieties from a tray (granary brown, ciabatta, tomato, olive). Here’s our selection:

More than passable, it’s accompanied not only by butter, but also –a pleasant surprise for us- by olive oil. We confine ourselves to a mere tasting (for dietary reasons), and we are even more pleasantly surprised to discover it’s of good quality. We’d like to tell them that it would be better to serve the balsamic vinegar separately, and not already mixed (forming an emulsion) with the oil, but never mind…we’re in Scotland, not in the Mediterranean, so do as the Scots do.

No amuse bouche arrives.

Here are our starters:

- Pickled red mullet, fennel salad, sauce grabiche (£6.50)

- Classic moules mariniere (£6.95)

The mullet portion is ridiculous, basically an amuse bouche. But we appreciate the prettiness, and especialy the pickling which provides sweet and sour notes at the same time decisive and balanced, as well as the freshness of the sauce. Pleasant.

The moules are not as tender and meaty and sea-infused as they can be and as we expected in a place like St. Andrews, but are not too bad either, immersed as they are in a competently made sauce.

And next here are our mains:

- Panfried cod fillet, smoked bacon and Puy lentils, sage veloute (£16.95)

- Grilled Scottish Ribeye steak (8oz) (£19.00)

The beef offers some depth of flavour and an agreeable texture, coming from it being of good quality and having been hung properly (21 days). The chips are real, thick cut chips, another level compared to what we endured recently here, and assembled in the plate with solid Northern grace. What are the cherry tomatoes doing in here? It’s December, for godsake. Anyway, how persuasive, luscious, tasty is the sauce, providing a good peppery background for the beef (this is Man speaking: it’s a bit TOO peppery for Woman). And even the mushroom offers full flavour. Another enjoyable dish, though we made the mistake of accepting the waiter’s insistent recommendation that we have it medium rare (instead of rare as we like it: but we are always wary of contradicting the waiter, he may know things we don’t…), with the result that in the end it was drier than we savage carnivores like.

The cod is a bit muted, but it’s cooked sympathetically. The puy lentils, also cooked well and with the velvety sauce which carries the flavours delicately and far, complete this simple looking but perfectly satisfying dish.

To conclude, here are our desserts:

- Chocolate three ways (£5.95)

- Apple Bavaroise, Cinnamom ice cream (£5.50)

The three ways of the chocolate are an ice-cream (intense), a white chocolate ‘cheese cake’ (very good), and a tarte au chocolate (buttery, pleasant, brownie-like). The combination of flavours and textures is well judged, the whole rather satisfying (expecially if you consider that by this time we were worried about death by starvation...).

In the bavaroise, the cinnamon ice cream was delightful, playing nicely texture-wise with the bavaroise (note also the dried apple splice), which in fact was verging on a mousse. This and the previous desserts bordered on the seriously good territory.

With a bottle of 0.75 litres of water at a ludicrous £5 (ok, we insisted on bottled water because we know restaurants need the markup, but there is a limit to everything: next time we’re getting tap water), and an unremarkable Pinot Noir Robert Skalli 2006 at £24.50, the total came to a reasonable £89.00, good value also in comparison with the local prices for this level of cuisine. No service charge is added.

The service was polite and formal, even with some smiles and human touches, very nice but lacking a bit of agility when multitasking (there was a looong wait when they had to serve a large table).

While this is by no means a destination restaurant which you should travel many miles to go to, it is a good hotel restaurant to exploit once you are there; a venue with a very competent if unspectacular cuisine, produced by a chef who knows his way very well around French technique, decent materials, and an extremely pleasant physical environment. (We also tried their breakfast and came out happy).

Bocca di Lupo: good news for ice-cream lovers

Love ice cream but are worried about the consequences for your waist line? We have some good news for you...

In our recent post on Bocca di Lupo, we commented on their gelati that 'The ice-creams were of the rich, fat variety, which we like less than the leaner one, but very smooth and gratifying on the palate'.

Well, we have now discovered with pleasure (from the horse's mouth) the we were completely wrong on fatness (but not on goodness!).

Their gelato base is only 7% fat! This is about as low as you can get (by comparison, we believe Haagen Dazs vanilla is a whopping 18%.)

The total fat content of course will vary according to the flavour. For example, other things being equal, chestnut is lower fat than the base while pistachio and hazelnut are slightly higher.

The chef conjectures that 'the perceived richness [of the gelato at Bocca di Lupo] comes from the lack of air in the ice cream (we take extreme measures to reduce over-run and obtain a dense product'. And we now recall the room manager mentioning to us, during our dinner, the rare machinery used in the kitchen to produce the gelato.

We are happy to have learned something - and even about a topic we thought we knew inside out...This is the spirit in which we write this blog, offering what we hope are constructive criticism, but always open to gaining knowledge from the true professionals.

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