BL-24 - Flipbook - Page 95
FOOD & DRINK
Bray, which already boasted Michel’s Roux’s three-star
Waterside Inn, a much more traditional establishment,
had become a culinary Mecca: not every gastronomic
innovation played out in London. So we London-based
food writers would have to get on a train to Maidenhead,
then get a cab to Bray in order to hang out with Heston in
his food laboratory.
with anchovy toast. But by then more intimate and casual
places were all the rage, and the High Priest of this new
style of dining was a man called Russell Norman.
There, armed with dragée pans (a sort of kitchen cement
mixer), water baths, aerators and rotary evaporators, he
would spherify, freeze-dry and revel in the concept of
a low-temperature barbecue. But, to me, a meal at The
Fat Duck was a form of expensive food tourism; back in
London, I was happy to cling to more traditional forms of
dining.
Russell Norman
I went to the opening of his 昀椀rst Polpo, on Beak Street in
Soho, where – in a windowless basement beneath his little
Venetian bàcaro – Russell handed out sips of prosecco in
small tumblers.
It felt cool. It was, like Russell, determinedly cool. He
listened to cool music: Nick Drake, for example. He was
unshaven and 昀氀oppy-haired. He liked to take the plaster off
the walls of a restaurant and go back to bare brick; he hired
staff based on their smile and preferably with no previous
hospitality experience. One of his next restaurants,
Spuntino, had a no-reservations policy.
Heston Blumenthal outside The Fat Duck, 2009
At Kensington Place, for example: chef Rowley Leigh’s
magni昀椀cent hall of modern British food, steered by a 昀椀rm
adherence to classic French cookery and the in昀氀uence
of Elizabeth David. The Roux-trained Leigh’s classics
included foie gras with sweetcorn and chicken with goat’s
cheese mousse.
The place had a vast glass wall at the top of Kensington
Church Street and, until Leigh left in 2006, it was a hub
for media types and businesspeople shouting to be heard in
a vast, Julyan Wickham-designed room. It was a concept
on a collision course with a new age of dining, of smaller
establishments, of sharing plates.
But the advance of the food of the Middle East, as
dished out for the middle classes by Yotam Ottolenghi,
or the concept of luxury Chinese, as conceived by Alan
Yau at Hakkasan, saw diners encouraged to share, to
order a plethora of dishes, the dream sold being to delve
deeper into food culture, the actuality being to extract
considerably more from your pocket.
The following year, Rowley Leigh opened Le Café Anglais,
a fabulously grand dining room in Bayswater and we were
all comforted by his next great invention, parmesan custard
Which, to me, was distinctly tiresome, but trends are like
viruses and before you could dream of phoning to ask for a
table for two, the Hart brothers cottoned on with their tapas
concept, Barra昀椀na. A deliberate homage to Barcelona’s
Cal Pep, Barra昀椀na quickly became a chain: it didn’t take
reservations either, and the eventual reward for diners in
the very long queue on Frith Street was a stool at the open
kitchen bar.
My 昀椀rst taste of Barra昀椀na was with Soho House founder
Nick Jones. How would we get around the queueing
malarky? No problem: his PA was dispatched, and we
arrived just as she reached the head of the queue.
Soho was a hive of restaurant activity, but others had their
centre of gravity further east. Shoreditch became trendy,
not least because Dorset-born chef Mark Hix had opened
Tramshed. He drew a crowd excited by his simple-butappealing offer of a whole chicken on a vertical spike, in
a room dominated by the Damien Hirst installation “Cock
and Bull”: a cockerel and a Hereford cow preserved in a
glass tank of formaldehyde.
Some of us schlepped to Shoreditch, but the fashionistas
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