VONG is by way of being a new Thai- French
restaurant from New York in Lon- don: now is that modern or what? You might reasonably think the name of the place to be part of the Thai element. Actu- ally, it's the rather Sixties-like shortening of Jean-George Vongerichten, the name of the Alsatian who's behind it all. He may be new to us over here, but he's a Big Deal in Manhattan, having worked with Paul Hae- berlin of Auberge de L'ill, with Paul Bocuse and, as a protégé of Louis Outhier, in the Oriental Hotel in Bangkok.
The mood of the place, like everywhere now, is chic Modern. Again, like everywhere else, it has a bold, stark, Conran feel about it, which is not surprising since its designers also worked on Pont de la Tour, Quaglino's and Mezzo.
The menu, given the address (adjoining the Berkeley Hotel), is cheaper than one might expect: starters, on the whole, for around £6; main courses for around £15. The difficulty is, no one in their right mind could possibly stick to just one starter. I gave in to the gentle tug of lustful greed: between the two of us the very minimum we felt we could allow ourselves was an order of crab spring roll with tamarind dipping sauce, chicken and coconut-milk soup, charred lamb with aromatic herbs and raw tuna wrapped in rice paper.
The crab spring roll was perhaps the least impressive: nothing wrong with it, but its sweet moussiness made one long for the pungency of coriander or the sharpness of chilli with which the more usual Thai crab- cakes are infused. The soup, though, was the best I have ever had: the subtly sweet coconut milk perfectly cut by the gentle, almost sour gingeriness of the galanghal. Charred lamb was perfect: small, pink spheres of velvety meat, soft and sweet, on a sharp, crunchy salad of carrots, cucumber, bean sprouts and daikon, sprinkled with mint and coriander and with a rice-vinegar dressing. The fad for raw tuna comes from the — entirely justified in my view — fad for Japanese food, still undiminished, but these raw tuna rolls had nothing of Japanese daintiness about them. They were great elephantine things: a wodge of garnet- coloured tuna meat packed in with another wodge of raw carrots and raw spring onions. I like all that bulgingness, although the great thicket of raw veg makes for difficult eating. But the real problem lay in the coarseness of the wrapping. Vietnamese rice-paper rolls are wrapped in an altogeth- er more pliant and more palatable material, rather like rice-flour lasagne. The rice paper at Vong was as thick and rigid as parchment. The only way of eating these rolls is by dispensing with their packaging.
If I were going again — which I will — I'd order a great clump of starters and then just one main course per head. This time, greed combined with indecision made me more profligate in my choices. The wok-fried `fish' — their inverted commas are inexpli- cable — turned out to be bream, dry-fried with water chestnuts and chillies and corian- der seeds and wonderfully flavoursome and meaty. Sea bass was rolled in an aromatic casing of ground almonds, hazelnuts, coriander seed, black pepper and sesame which adhered to it even in its bowl of mushroom broth. The menu described this broth as sweet and sour, which normally evokes some jammy, vinegary concoction. Here it was extraordinarily descriptive: the teak-coloured liquid was infused with a searing sourness but also a biting sweetness; both intense, neither cloying.
Beef, grilled, cut into strips and suspend- ed in a light gingery broth with noodles, was perhaps the masterpiece: simple, unimprov- able. Well, perhaps I'd have liked more noodles, but then I always would. And the tamarind-glazed duck, the breast cooked till a vibrant puce pink then sliced into coin slices, was, I think, the best duck I've ever had: soft but not farmed into utter bland- ness, indeed sensationally gamy. Everything you could want a duck to be, this was.
Not everything is perfect here, but so much is right, and right in a way that food often isn't in this country. The notion of a Thai-French mix has suspicious resonances of the frou-frou eclectism of nouvelle cui- sine, which was, despite all the curlicues, a somewhat barren affair, more mathematical than harmonious. But at Vong the union feels more spontaneous: the flavours are Thai, and that is predominant. What is cer- tainly the case at Vong is that the chef grasps, and can produce, that unwincing but pervasive sourness that is essentially Thai. The Frenchness is harder, in a way, to detect: it lies more in the cuts of meat, the sizes of the portions, the way in which it is all put together. I suppose it is partly a pointer to its success that one cannot always see, or taste, the joins. Puddings are sensational: a kiwi sorbet made me realise why kiwi fruits were put on earth, and a white pepper ice cream was savagely voluptuous. Now, next time I really will write about L'Odeon, Bruno Loubet's latest. There's no real rea- son for the delay, except that he opened just as I went on leave. Preliminary researches are uplifting, and a full report is to follow.
Vong: on the corner of Wilton Place and Knightsbridge, London SW1; tel: 0171 235 1010.
Nigella Lawson
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