Aubergine and La Tante Claire • .
THERE MAY be no such thing as a free lunch, but it is certainly a less expensive meal than dinner, especially if taken in one of London's gastronomic pinnacles. Take those two in Chelsea, for example: Aubergine's three-course dinner menu is priced at £44, without wines, and La Tante Claire's carte imposes a £45 minimum charge for food, and with three courses eaten you would be pushed to keep inside it. Lunch at both places is, however, a dif- ferent story. Aubergine's three-course lunch, changed daily, costs £22, plus drink and coffee, La Tante Claire's is £26 and includes unlimited mineral water and cof- fee. Another advantage of the mid-day meal is accessibility. As one of the smartest places on the London map, Gordon Ram- say's Aubergine will have great difficulty in fitting you in for dinner at less than a month's notice, and Pierre Koffmann's Tante Claire similarly requires reservation well in advance for dinner. My lunch tables on the other hand were available at ten days' and a week's notice respectively, and on the day Aubergine had no more than a pleasant sprinkling of occupied tables (true, it was a Monday), though Tante Claire's 32-seat room was in fact full. In both places, when reserving, there is the slightly irritating business of having both to give your phone number and to call them to confirm on the day. I suppose it demon- strates the prevalence of no-show cus- tomers in London, but it does seem to make rather a meal of it.
Having duly arrived at Aubergine's Park Walk premises on time, we were led with a welcoming smile to a spacious round table in the prettily decorated room. Tables are covered with crisp white cloths and chairs are pleasant shades of deep pink and yel- low ochre. The back wall is of casemented mirrors to increase the feeling of size, and the place feels bright, airy, yet intimate. The daily lunch menu is hand-written and without choice, but as there are two of them you can mix and match between the courses of each if you so desire. In fact, Judith went for the right, with meaty starter and fishy main course, and I for the left, which was the other way round, and we both plumped for the right-hand dessert, so that the Parfait Banane with chocolate sor- bet was left untasted.
Before our starters came an amuse- gueule. This was simply the best cold vichyssoise I have ever tasted, served in a demi-tasse, with a quenelle of whipped creme fraiche floating in the centre. Its per- fection of intensity and texture set the scene for the dishes to come. Judith's first course was little discs of fresh foie gras, mi- cult, surrounded by crisp baby haricots vents and a pleasing selection of leaves, beautifully dressed. She, as an account director of a leading advertising agency, and thus a veteran of many a lunch-table campaign, announced at this point that it made 'L'Ortolan look like school dinners' — praise indeed. My veloute of scallops and langoustines was equally sensational: the exquisitely poached fish surmounted by large beads of caviar and floating in a per-
'Oh, dear, it's just as we always feared, they do come from a different planet.'
feet fishy cream containing chives and tiny spheres of cucumber. Both main courses maintained the tempo, with Judith's nage of five fishes, including turbot, salmon, and sea bass, dressed in a red wine sauce 'aux cinq epices', truly brilliant. Likewise, my breast of guinea fowl, roasted, skinned, and stuffed with herbs, served with a frothy sauce flavoured with thyme and surround- ed by girolle and chanterelle mushrooms: sublime.
As we were drinking a delicious red Saumur Champigny, well recommended by Jean, the keen young Angevin sommelier, and served lightly chilled, we could not resist the magnificent cheeseboard before our desserts, and were well rewarded with a splendid selection of goats' as well as cows'. The dessert moved crème bailee into a whole new stratosphere, a perfectly light cream coming covered with wafer-thin slices of strawberry dipped in crystallised sugar to echo the bridge's topping, and sur- rounded by a light, subtle, not over-sweet strawberry jus. With cooking like this it was no wonder the entire room radiated happi- ness. Excellent coffee and sensational petits fours brought the meal to an ecstatic close, and with kirs to begin with, the wine at £21, cheese supplement, coffee, and immaculate service, £96 seemed not a penny too much. I can't wait to go back.
La Tante Claire, though good, was markedly less exciting. The same menu for- mat offered less imaginative dishes, and the novelist Clare Francis who joined me — a fish- rather than meat-eater — wished it could have been any fish but salmon. Before that, she started with artichoke hearts stuffed with delicious fillets of salted sardine, and I had a creamy, rather bland warm gateau of chicken livers, surrounded by an equally bland tomato sauce whose colour bore an alarming resemblance to a certain canned soup. Clare's salmon was pleasantly undercooked with a sauce in which the announced tarragon was rather subdued, accompanied by some diced aubergine and tomato and excellent pureed potato. My confit de canard, served with aubergines, was precisely that: ample, tradi- tional, correctly prepared but unexciting. Clare's apricot tarte tatin had chewy tart and rather sharp apricots, and my gratin de fruits rouges was fine but would have bene- fited from a different flavour of sorbet to avoid the repetition of red fruits. With cof- fee, dreary petits fours and a sound Provencal rose, very fairly priced at £14.90, the bill came to £66.90. It said both on it and on the menu that service was included, and good, if cool, it had been. Yet sadly they left the bottom line blank on my card slip. It seemed to sum the whole thing up.
Aubergine, 11 Park Walk, London SW10; tel: 0171 352 3449.
La Tante Claire, 68/69 Royal Hospital Road, London SW3; id. 0171 352 6045.
David Fingleton
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