Recent visits to London classics - Mar 2011

Where: Quaglino's and The Wolseley

With who: Dr Vole, the Northern Mother and Auntie Pat

What is it that defines a restaurant as a classic? And how often do you need to reconsider it's place in the pantheon? A contemplative mood made me head back to two restaurants, both of which have featured among my favourite haunts over the years, with the only possible arbiters of London style and taste, two small middle aged Northern ladies. 

"Quaglino's Fashionably Glamorous restaurant in Mayfair" (their description, and extraneous capitalisation...)
Quaglino's was never just about the food. To call it a basement space may be factually accurate, but like describing QEII as a passenger ferry it doesn't give the full picture. Cavernous, marbled and lit from above like the Crystal Caves. I used to come here on sophisticated dates, back when the trademark Conran 'Q' ashtrays used to vanish into elegant clutchbags and jacket pockets so often they started flogging them at reception.

The crowd tonight feel a little unlike other West End restaurant audiences. There's a real whiff of bridge and tunnel on a Friday night, glammed and gussied up without the kids to have A Good Time. It used to be quite a masculine, relatively powerful Mayfair/St James crowd of bankers, creatives and art dealers, fans of Conran's "let it be simple, let it be seasonal, let it be good" mantra, though the solo party of young bucks braying through champagne in their suits seem more trainee accountants than masters of the universe in waiting.

The food is acceptable rather than exceptional. Like the trainee accountants, we go for the Champagne set menu. £25 for three courses and a glass of fizz, and after some really quite excellent cocktails at the raised bar, share a slightly too sweet bottle of Spanish Gewürztraminer. Starters followed, a ham hock terrine came with overly mustardy piccalilli, that other 80's fave of sliced beetroot, walnut and blue cheese was perfectly fine, but nothing you wouldn't expect from a suburban dinner party. There was a elderly mottled gent in a pinched Jermyn Street suit on the table one over eating a prawn cocktail too. Retro, but just about chic. Mains weren't setting hearts or stomachs a flutter either, but "let it be simple. Let it be good"... I'll grant you, fish and chips isn't an exciting choice, but as I've forgotten most of the other options on the menu already, I could hardly describe it as a great advert for innovation. There was a goodish sea bass, randomly served with baked beans, liver and a chicken thing. Desserts followed the same slight staid path. It's a great spot for a small Northern mother, especially if they're not keen on the new, but it's not somewhere you'd go to have your senses wowed.
Brunch at The Wolseley
At 8 years young, the dark art deco doors of The Wolseley are as difficult to breach as they ever where. Owners Corbin and King came up trumps with reboots of Le Caprice, The Ivy and others, though failed in the hinterland of Haymarket with the neither one thing nor the other of St Albans. I always loved that jewelbox of a dining room a little more than its monochrome older sibling The Wolseley, but it wasn't really close enough to anywhere or quite popular enough to be a destination.

We head to The Wolseley for brunch, one of the highlights of a fine menu that runs through from 8 till (very) late every day. Like Quaglino's the space imposes itself as you enter. Built as an old luxury car showroom in Piccadilly, it then spent years as a bank and they've kept much of the original space, along with the fixtures and fittings from both periods, intact. Architecturally, it's worth popping in for a coffee alone.

we go for a mixed basket of pastries to start (the small Northern Mother and Auntie Pat are annoying daffodils in Kew Gardens later on and need the sustenance). For £7.50, I've certainly had better. The 6 bite sized samples are buttery enough, but overcooked and too crispy in the main. The exception is a dark custardy French piece called a cannelé bordelais which tasted infinitely better than it looked (and sounded). My 'main' was a thick disc of deep brown haggis. Roughly crumbled meat, studded with grains; oaty, salty and meaty in equal measures, served on a Melba toast with a brace of sun golden duck eggs and lashings of (slightly too strong) gravy. It's not an everyday brekkie, even my well conditioned gut would struggle to cope with that level of salty swine regularly, but it's a satisfying one off treat.

With so many places keen and able to define themselves London classics in one shape or another, I'd struggle to place either of these at the top of the list, but for out of town guests, you won't go wrong with The Wolseley.

Review of Kopapa - March 2011

Where: Kopapa, Covent Garden
How much: £60 a head (including wine) for 3/4 tapas plates each and dessert
Come here if: your mother told you to stop playing with your food, and you never listened



Peter Gordon, one of the chefs responsible for bringing fusion cooking to mainstream London and the man behind Marylebone foodie Mecca the Providores, has finally opened a new restaurant in Covent Garden. Several notable meals at his old place mean I'm bound for a visit, and so round up an eclectic (read weird) bunch of friends for the visit. Two of them got married after meeting on a plane, one I met running shoeless round a wedding and another lives with me. As I say, weird.

The space is cleanly bistro crafted. There's no sign of zany imaginations here at least. Small tables squeeze into rows and solo diners seated at the long marble bar. It's open all day, for brunch, coffees and main meals - like the Wolesley's chain restaurant style brother, with slightly less style.

A measly four mains appear to follow an enormous number of starter sized tapas plates on the menu, it's clear where you should be ordering. It's truly lip-smacking stuff on paper and not a single item fails to tick my boxes. The joys of fusion cooking are to paraphrase, that you get to try every flavour combination that you walk past in the street. Go and have a look at the menu, seriously, it's hilarious. The delicious agony of shared plate negotiation would be real fun for two or three gastronomic diplomats but it swiftly gets unwieldy for six, not helped by the speed of the service. Apart from a rush of plates at the end it's two hours after we start before anyone is feeling remotely sated. Too often solo single plates arrive leaving the eater looking round guiltily while five forks hover. There's a yawning pause in the middle explained blithely as 'busy kitchen, they're getting to it'. I get that its tapas service, but know that it doesn't have to be like this. A trip to Dehesa, Fino or any of a number of others would tell them that.

So many dishes came listed with 2 or 3 ingredients more than you could identify, or need, or want. It's a style of flavour fusion that relies on throwing a lot of tastes together in your mouth and letting them fight for supremacy. When it's good it's very, very good and when it's bad it's, well, pretty pointless.

Highlights included fluffy, sweet, roast Cassava chips with a tangy chilli sauce and meaty fillets of pan fried John Dory on a garlicky bed of ratte potatoes. Char-grilled aubergine came stuffed with tahini tofu, slightly overpowering the black bean miso and ginger dressing alongside, but stickily tasty. A simple plate of grilled sardine was spot on. It came with a caper, olive and tomato salsa, a marriage of fresh fish cooked expertly and a sharp, made for it, accompaniment. The only total misfire was a dish of lambs sweetbreads. They were cooked well, but totally obliterated by an over reduced sticky sweet mess of Madeira jus that rendered the thing inedible.

Seared scallop on the other hand, didn't have enough caramel colour or texture to stop it rather blandly merging into the pinenut purée it came with. Alongside this a thin pressed Jamon toastie was a welcome textural addition, though I was slightly bemused by the tasteless hibiscus jus slopped on the plate like spilt Ribena. The other no score draw was the panko crusted, rough chopped Iberico sausage stuffed with Cheddar (really? why?!) and shiso (what? a Japanese minty herb, flavour not strong enough to come through) - the bastard son of a corndog and a Scotch egg. Served with Vietnamese coleslaw and a seemingly there for the ingredients list Tamarind Caramel. A double baked cheese souffle is just that, and tasty with it, though I've no idea why it's served with pomegranate seeds. Texturally interesting, but unnecessary and fairly irrelevant.

Like the fusion style it espouses, Kopapa should be much more than the sum of its parts. Sadly they hit the high notes just too rarely for me to rush back, and at the price, it's just not worth the risk. A shame, as there's quite obviously real talent here. I'd be tempted back for a fairly reasonable £15.50 2 course pre-theatre set menu, but not much else.