TO CLAIM a restaurant that has been around for three
years as a discovery takes some doing but having at last stumbled upon Chinon I feel full of the recent convert's evangelical zeal. It's true that over the years I have sporadically made a mental note to visit the place, and even once made a booking which I later had to cancel, but now that I have actually man- aged to go and eat dinner there, I don't know which is the stronger — my self- recrimination at having left it so late, thereby depriving myself of countless ear- lier pleasurable experiences, or the simple joy, the sweet relief, of having found a restaurant that is such a delight. For such discoveries — belated or not — are few in the restaurant critic's life.
The fact that the restaurant is located a mere five minutes' drive from me makes Chinon feel even more like a personal treat, but even if you are further away from the dilapidated urban thoroughfare that is Shepherd's Bush roundabout, a visit is still to be recommended. Chinon is actually tucked behind the roundabout, to the left of the Green, just down the road from one of the outposts of the BBC empire, Kens- ington House.
Light suffusing the plate-glass front beckons you in to an unfashionably cosy dining room, walls flecked coral with, (apart from a sub-Pissarro landscape) above average oils on them, and those who baulk at the strictures of fake Lloyd Loom which make sitting in restaurants these days more of an ordeal than it should be, will wel- come the plumply covered chairs which guarantee at least a comfortable evening. The menu guarantees much more than that. At the reading stage you might think You have hit upon yet another restaurant du quartier with pretensions, but at the first Mouthful you can be reassured that chefs ambitions are more than matched by his accomplishment. Chinon is, at any rate, simply the latest development of an agree- ably impressive career. Jonathan Hayes and Barbara Deane who own and run the Place (he in the kitchen, she out front, though with some overlap) have come to Richmond Way via the Perfumed Con- servatory in the Wandsworth Bridge Road (and I still remember the venison I had there seven years ago) and the Taste of Honey in Notting Hill Gate. In need of something soothing, I started with the soup of the day, a creamy delicate- ly flavoured mushroom. Simplicity is the hardest thing to excel in, but here they had got it just right. The creamy buff-coloured and bosky liquid, offset in taste and texture by a fine dice of field mushrooms cooked lightly enough to retain their rough earthi- ness, a few voluptuously fleshy pleurottes left gorgeously whole and a spiky spatter- ing of slivered spring onions. Grander was the pan-fried (is nothing just fried any longer?) foie gras, cooked just long enough to let some of the fat run off, in a teak-coloured sauce of monbazillac re- duced with fresh orange juice and flamed till it becomes a dense syrup with a bitter marmalade kick.
From the reassuringly small list of main courses we went for the lamb, wrapped first in a duxelles spruced with pesto spring made flesh — then a caul, sitting in a gentle garlic sauce, with a cluster of baby onions fried whole, and the duck — and what duck. The breast, its fat scored and seared crouton-crisp on the outside, tender and pinkly yielding within, alongside it a bulging filo-thin pastry bag filled with the duck liver pounded with twice its volume of onion and soused in madeira, and accompanied by a glossy purée of swede which bore no relation to the vegetable of that name I used to be forced to eat at school, and lightly daubed with a sauce heightened with Calvados.
There are, of course puddings but it's a brave or greedy man or woman who can face them after all this. For you don't have a choice: all of them come, and in a capacious plateful: warm lemon tart, a lozenge-shaped mound of white chocolate mousse, a brandy-snap cornet filled with fruit and creme patissiere, raspberry sorbet infused with framboise liqueur and wearing a spun-sugar helmet, a dense rich ganache of dark chocolate and praline-crunchy caramel mousse. Reader, I ate them.
Cheeses come in similar profusion. There is a wine list with a commendably decent selection of half bottles (we had a light but warmly insistent Brouilly for £8.50) and if you don't want coffee to finish with, a fragrant collection of teas and infusions. Dinner for the two of us came to just over £60. Eating in restaurants is never cheap, but I reckon this is about two thirds of what you'd have to pay in Soho and for considerably less, in quantity as in quality.
Chinon: 20 Richmond Way, London W14. Tel: 071 602 4082
Nigella Lawson
'Oh, he's just sulking because he thinks I baby him.'
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