MANY moons have passed since my last restaurant column. Much
up there is to be caught. No time for verbal trick-cycling today. I'm going to discuss, very briefly and without embellishment, some restaurants I've been to since the summer, and what I thought. If you're not really interested in restaurants, there's no point in reading any further.
The best lunch I've had in a while was at Le Chapon Fin in the city of Bordeaux. The dining-room is a masterpiece of rococo vul- garity, which it is conventional not to describe in order that the 'surprise' is not spoiled for the new visitor. A proper jour- nalist would sketch it anyway, but I'm not going to. The chef is a Spaniard, but the cooking is French. Front of house is charm- ing and waiters friendly and efficient. The dish that sticks in my mind more than a month later is a terrine of pike and leek. Texture and temperature were exactly right; and the chef pulled off the trick of making pike, essentially a rather unpleas- ant fish, taste sophisticated. It was delicate- ly sauced. The rest of the food showed sim- ilar finesse. This lunch was a very pleasant experience; and at about £40 per head for four courses (including two children who weren't drinking), it was a bargain.
Speaking of pike, the day job takes me frequently to Zander, the Bank Group restaurant attached to the St James Court Hotel in Buckingham Gate. As with the rest of the chain, I wouldn't make a special journey, but they do simple things well enough for it to be a painless experience when one does. I always have lobster fol- lowed by steak frites, and it's always fine, which is a prouder boast, even in London, than it might seem. Like Bank Birming- ham, Zander is much less unpleasantly loud and dark than the original on Aldwych.
The food is better than that at the only other Westminster restaurant, Shepherd's, but not by much. Shepherd's, a sister to Langan's, is inoffensive in a clubby, wood- en-and-plushly-upholstered-booths kind of Way. But it's boring. And, for me at any rate, it's too stressfully full of politicians. You can never concentrate on your lunch because you're constantly distracted by observing who is doing what with whom. Facing the wall just makes it worse, because you end up watching your com- panion watch and hoping — vainly — to deduce what they're watching. It's not so bad at dinner.
There was briefly an interesting private dining club on the site of the late lamented Victoria Club opposite the House of Lords. It failed because of a stupidly high mem- bership fee (not much less than the Gar- rick) and a marketing policy which preclud- ed it ever becoming fashionable. A shame, because the cooking was sometimes quite good, and a decent restaurant so close to the Palace of Westminster would be a) a great public service, and b) a goldmine. If anybody would like to lend me a few hun- dred thousand, I'd gladly organise it. (Please do not send cash.) The best-value fine food in London is still Pied a Terre — certainly if one discounts the places to which one has to make a for- mal application, supported by three refer- ees, up to two years in advance, to secure a table. I don't know why the Ivy — not that there's anything particularly fine about the food there — doesn't just issue debentures. And I can't understand how people can book dinner three months in advance. How do they know whether they'll feel hungry?
Since being outrageously stripped of its second star in this year's Michelin Guide, Pied a Terre has scaled down its perfor- mance. Gone are the frothy cappuccinos of this and that, although the mixed plate of assorted chef's appetisers remains, and remains strongly flavoured but fine. Pud- ding is still superfluous given the enormous number of pleasant petits fours served with coffee. But they are less numerous than before. The cheese we had instead on a visit last week was sensational. Small por- tions of ten different types were arranged on the rim of a plate, in the order in which they were intended to be eaten. I can see that some might think that pretentious or silly. I thought it worked very well. At about £60 or £70 a head all in, Pied a Terre is not cheap. But, for what it is, it's even better value than it used to be.
My other current favourite is l'Escargot. A lot of people still think of it as the run- down shadow of its former self that it became. But since it was bought by Jimmy Lahoud about five years ago, it's been beautifully restored and culinarily revi- talised. I always eat downstairs, which I understand to be slightly the less formal of the two rooms. It's an extremely pleas- ant atmosphere, tellingly accommodating an unusually wide range of types and age groups. The cooking has a suitably pluto- cratic richness without being heavy. A couple of weeks ago I had duck, some- thing I wouldn't order in many places because it's so often over-rich, over- cooked, and even overseasoned in an effort to crisp up the skin. At l'Escargot it managed, somehow, to be terrifically light, though not insipid. A friend's tuna — so often underseasoned — was equally perfectly cooked (that is, scarcely at all) and dagger-red with pure freshness. The wine list is impressively full of classed growths, but expensive as a result. Forty pounds for a bottle of the 1993 Chateau Musar was good value, not because it's a reasonable multiple of the retail price (it isn't) but because the retail price is so low for such a good wine.
Assaggi is the best Italian restaurant in London, and has a lovely ambience. But you do tend to have to wait weeks for a table, and they do pursue rather an aggres- sive pricing policy. I was taken to Clarke's and Launceston Place, both of which were perfectly pleasant but neither of which I would choose to patronise, because they are essentially boring. Chor Bizarre is like all posh Indian restaurants: nice, and noticeably better than its ordinary cousins, but nowhere near as better as the differ- ence in price. Toodle pip.
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