THERE ARE a few chefs one can imagine having started
off as footballers, but Gor- don Ramsay — who did indeed once play for Glasgow Rangers — isn't one of them. His food is so delicate, his touch so light, he is such a chef's chef. While nearly every new restaurant to have opened over the past few years has been turning out the sort of food Tuscan farmhands purportedly tuck into for their lunch, Ramsay's food — first at Aubergine in South Kensington and now in his new joint in St James's — is designed for more aristocratic palates.
Normally, I don't like restaurants in the Aubergine mould: I find something rather lowering about too much hushed opulence and that very French, gleaming, burnished, somehow prissy chic, but, in this case, the cooking makes up for it. Of course, it's the clientele I should be blaming, not the outfit itself. At L'Oranger, too, the place is crammed with the sort of people who would gleefully be featured in a Bunuel film. But, you see, once again the food lulls one into a mood of benign tolerance. Let them bray: only let me eat.
L'Oranger is owned by Ramsay, together with his partner, Claudio Pulze. The inter- esting thing, apart from the fact that it is partly an Italian venture while still being, as I said, one of the few non-Italianate new restaurants, is that Ramsay is branching out like this. He's still under 30, and one of the best chefs around (they even whisper rever- entially about him in Paris), but he is evi- dently also a businessman. And I'd say this has been a shrewd move: it hasn't been open long, but L'Oranger is already com- fortably full (you don't yet have to put your name down at birth for a table as you do at Aubergine). It is also extremely well- priced: a three-course lunch is just under £20, and a three-course dinner barely over; two courses come to £16 and £18 respec- tively.
Ramsay himself may not actually be in the kitchen here, but it is — without wish- ing to insult Marcus Waring, his chef very much his menu. Waring did cook under him at Aubergine and has also done a stint at Danielle's in New York and with Guy Savoy, a strong influence in Ramsay's own career, in Paris. Perhaps the menu is a little less refined than it is at Aubergine but this is still elegant stuff. And the requisite atmosphere is deftly maintained by the maitre d', Dominique Colleurie (also from Aubergine), who is full of old-style discretion and courtesy.
I went for lunch and had, to start, a cou- ple of things that anywhere else I would have been rather hesitant about; here I was interested. The first was a dish of scallops, in a salad, with ratatouille and gazpacho sauce. Normally, I am unconvinced by the marriage of fish and tomato, but this was a revelation: the scallops were sweet, as was the aromatic dressing and accompaniment, but not cloyingly so. And the scallops were cooked with such an exquisitely light touch that they remained almost unbelievably tender. This plate carried a £2 supplement, and was well worth it. I tried, too, the ravio- li of confit of duck which came, with braised cabbage, in a smoky cep consom- mé. I have said that L'Oranger is not Ital- ian-influenced and I don't retract now. This dish is rather more French in construction than it might seem. The only nod to mod- ishness is that the ravioli is really one big raviolo. Usually, I feel, this doesn't really work: the ratio of pasta to stuffing is all wrong. But this one did work: the pasta was silky-thin and the nubbly interior of intensely flavoured duck perfectly con- tained within it. The broth was heady yet light and gloriously restorative. I couldn't resist trying another of the starters, a plate of raw tuna with transparent slices, as thin as tissue paper, of white radish, in a sesame-oil vinaigrette: perfection.
I am less exuberant about the main courses. One choice didn't entirely reward, and that was the brill. There was nothing wrong with it (and much that was right: in particular the crisped potatoes which formed a batter-emulating carapace around it), only the fish itself lacked resonance. However, the red wine reduction it sat upon was as far removed from those intru- sive and over-reduced gluey messes that familiarly masquerade as such as you could imagine. The braised ox cheek, which came with some parsnip purée, was fabulous: long, patient, slow cooking had made it and its sauce sticky and velvety and unctuous.
I should have been perfectly happy with- out pudding, but soldiered on. I chose a chocolate fondant sitting on a disc of nutty praline, and although I loved the praline, I'd have liked a darker, more malevolently bitter chocolate. This was not a great cause for regret, however: I left the restaurant a happy woman.
With a couple of glasses of champagne before, a couple more glasses of wine dur- ing (a grassy white and a good, thick, soupy red) and fizzy water the bill came to around — I cannot be exact, having lost it — £70. As I said when I reviewed Aubergine, for food as good as this, you'd have to pay about twice as much in Paris at the moment.
L'Oranger: 5 St James's Street, London SW1; tel: 0171 839 3774.
Nigella Lawson
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