Nestling snugly on lovely Charlotte St., just down from Roka, Pied à Terre follows the well-established rules of the formal gastronomic experience, from amuse-bouches to slightly starchy service, to offer a two Michelin-starred meal. We went for lunch, when one tends to assume that the restaurant is taking it easy, offering the lite version, auto-piloting learners down the starter pistes; but we felt treated to the full Michelin experience for a fraction of the usual cost.
The most innovative of the amuse-bouches was the 3 forms of carrot; mousse, purée, and powder, rather irrelevantly topped by a shrimp, but deliciously matched with a crispy sage leaf. Here be virtuosity, intoned the dish. A deliberately burnt, salty poppy-seed crisp sandwiched a dollop of foie cream (boo, hiss, poor goose, but yeah, I ate it) and a parmesan gnocchi was, well, a small dumpling tasting of parmesan.
Bread was the next staging post, and despite the danger of getting too full too soon (with a family pre-theatre dinner looming only a few hours away), the oily bacon bread was too good to resist. Guinness and star anise bread sounded lovely, but I couldn’t tease out those constituent ingredients from the final-result brown bread we had. I think I forgot to eat the semolina bread.
For starters, surf ‘n’ turf first; pork belly with baby squid, glued together with a garlic purée. A little sideshow on the plate was the great taste combination of pine nuts and mushrooms. Then, salmon and horseradish had a suggestion of shiso leaf about it, and there was a slightly saline jelly accompaniment that may have been based on seawater; either way, a lovely dish.
It was pre-Christmas when we went, and turkey was an inevitable mains choice, served with stuffing, cranberry sauce and chestnut purée. The cranberry, with fermented red cabbage, did a lot for the turkey, a meat that can veer towards the bland and rubbery. The other main dish on the set menu was brill, served with capers, thin slices of turnip, and a white butter sauce with paprika – O, white fish and paprika! One of food’s more sublime combinations.
And so to dessert, where Pied à Terre subtly tries to lure cost-canny lunchers, now jovial and relaxed, away from the straight and narrow of the menu du jour, which has one £6 dessert on it, to the luscious, pricier minefields of the à la carte, where a series of £14 desserts flash tempting flanks.
Crumble came as a pre-dessert, a pleasant glassful of apple mousse and vanilla custard with a grainy topping. Then came our (set menu) pink praline, the rather humdrum praline itself much elevated by the accompaniments, a charming roundel composed of assorted citrus and a salty white chocolate crisp, with a tarragon leaf adding one more off-sweet touch. It’s a pleasure when desserts are refreshing, rather than cloying, however un-Christmas-like that sentiment may be.
Good job our guests Messrs. Pham and Jackson ordered infusions, otherwise we would have missed the petit fours. While I tend to think that petit fours are a rather unecessary bit of frippery, these were the best I’ve ever had (at least if the sweet-shop takeaway bag at the Fat Duck doesn’t count), and were highly enjoyable. There was a sugar puff (which rather reminded me of the “Tell them about the honey, Mummy” cereal), a Szechuan pepper ganache, a lovely cherry jelly, a little Seville orange, a black cherry marshmallow, a blackened, burnt sugar “volcano” filled with a soft, bready pastry, a burnt honey crisp and a nutty chocolate about which we never agreed. (Peanut? Sesame?)
Service was very good too, managing the marriage of discretion and amiability that falls like a cloaking device over the inherent, occasionally irritating formality required of Michelin star holders. The sommelier took our indecision and our preferences in hand and came up with an excellent choice in
Nußerg Alte Reben Weiner Wien
Promised the wine for free if we could identify grape and country, we struggled manfully (personfully); the mid-yellow colour (no hint of green) eliminated Sauvignon Blanc from the running immediately, and the notes of white flowers and stonefruit suggested Southern French Viognier. Equally, however, the bitter almond on the finish reminded me of Hungarian Furmint, and, geographically at least, that turned out to be not too far off. This is an Austrian field blend made from no less than 9 different grape varieties – presumably what they happen to have left at the end of the harvest. And why not? It worked well, and by the end of the evening had moved on to notes of mango.
With the set lunch costing £23.50, Pied à Terre claims to offer the best value lunch in its class in London. I wouldn’t dispute that.
Pied à Terre, 34 Charlotte St.
No comments:
Post a Comment