Restaurant review: Gauthier Soho | Allan Jenkins
The portions are small, but they can pack a punch at Michelin-starred Alexis Gauthier’s new venue
21 Romilly Street, London W1 (020 7494 3111). Meal for two, including wine and service, £138
I am standing outside a closed door in Soho, scene of some of the most debauched nights of my life. No, not the late lamented Sebastian Horsley’s home just around the corner but the Romilly Street site of the Lindsay House restaurant, where the lordly Richard Corrigan recently held court. You still have to ring the bell and wait to be let in, but there the similarities end. Corrigan’s in its pomp was a place of bold and brilliant innovative dishes, a home for serious food (and sometimes serious drinking). But Gauthier Soho, as it is now named, after chef-patron Alexis Gauthier who won a Michelin star at Roussillon in Pimlico, is an altogether more subdued and safer establishment.
Gone are the Irish chef’s gaudy paintings, gold leaf and stripped floorboards; in their place, quiet white walls with a dark carpet so thick it could suck your shoes off. But Gauthier’s Ducasse-trained pedigree and hunger for more stars shine through in the quality of the cooking, the relentless pre-starters, the good butters and breads.
Our fellow diners are mostly youngish men preening before their partners and a large table of happy Japanese getting cheerily pissed on small quantities of wine. From an assortment of courses (three for £27 to five for £45), we skip the “premier plat” of chilled broad bean soup or olive oil tart to head for fennel and crab with crustacean jelly and a summer truffle risotto with chicken jus reduction and brown butter. My companion’s crab is clean-tasting, fresh if not exciting and surprisingly small (a recurring theme of the evening, as if we were Alice trapped in Wonderland). The risotto is faultless, with a generous layer of finely sliced truffles that begs to be held close to the face and inhaled. “Marmite” is the verdict from the young man a couple of tables away, but then everyone’s an expert these days.
Our meal takes a turn for the worse with the fish dishes. My monkfish with girolles, baby turnips, cured ham and more chicken jus offers satisfying savoury mouthfuls. But John Dory with lime, leeks and lobster velouté is a dull piece of fish the size of an After Eight that isn’t saved by its slick of bisque.
The meat course sees a reversal of fortunes. “Every other course is just mean,” my companion smiles as my saddle of Welsh lamb is un-domed, exposing four miniature fingers of meat. This would be fine if I were seven years old – but it is not as good as my companion’s guinea fowl, which falls from the bone. The best she’s ever eaten, she says smugly. The star of her dish is the accompanying crunchy chard with mousseron. As his 12 years at Roussillon show, Gauthier is a man with a sure talent for doing refined, lovely things with vegetables.
Then, strangely, service disintegrates. The doe-eyed waiters who could as easily have been cast for a D&G underpants ad go walkabout. The fat on our plates congeals. Another 20 minutes pass. Slowly. Still hungry, I toy with starting again on the bread, but wipe cold fat off the plate with my finger instead.
Just before I am about to beg for more dinner, a dessert menu appears and service is back on.
We order the duck egg soufflé with chocolate curd and soldiers and Gauthier’s signature Golden Louis XV chocolate and praline. The soufflé is delightfully light and comes cleverly served in the shell, but the Louis XV steals the show. “Bloody hell, this is good – can I have the gold?” my companion swoons as she grabs herself a greedy slice of the chilled chocolate with gold leaf. My favourite of the petit fours that follows is a coconut marshmallow redolent of Hawaiian Tropic and the Greek islands in the 80s.
So three sublime plates of food out of eight with one world-beater for a hefty £70 a head with a bottle of crisp Saint Mont at £27 and a glass of red. Is Gauthier good enough to take pride of place among the likes of Bruno Loubet and Pierre Koffman, whose own restaurant opens this week? Nearly. I’ll return, though more likely for lunch.
The Flavour Thesaurus by Niki Segnit | Book review
Food science has never sounded so poetic in this exquisite guide to combining flavours
Here is a marvellous idea for a book: a “thesaurus” of different flavour combinations. Former marketing executive Niki Segnit has taken 99 flavours (from potato and cucumber to black pudding and washed-rind cheese) and grouped them into hundreds of pairings, each accompanied by an elegant, and often highly witty, mini-essay. In one sense Segnit is telling us nothing new, since flavour combinations are something we all know about: why else would we chose to eat cheese and onion crisps, or mustard with ham? But she fleshes out our understanding of such classic pairings, informing us, for instance, that “the most English combination” of beef and horseradish actually originated in Germany. At the same time she enlarges our sense of the possibilities of flavour-combining. Coffee and goat’s cheese? Who would have thought it, but apparently Norwegians eat a cheese called ekte gjetost on crispbread with coffee.
The field of flavour analysis suffers from a fundamental ambiguity: is it primarily a scientific or aesthetic enterprise? One of the delights of Segnit’s book is the way it combines an air of empirical exactitude with something more loose-limbed and poetic. Here she is on chocolate and cardamom: “Like a puppeteer’s black velvet curtain, dark chocolate is the perfect smooth background for cardamom to show off its colours.” No doubt there are more rigorous ways to explain the compatibility of these ingredients, but I doubt they’d be half as satisfying. Ultimately, discussions of flavour (as opposed to taste, which is a much narrower thing) have to rely on metaphor, since the main way we identify flavours is by comparing them with other things. Happily, Segnit is blessed with an ear for figurative language. “All citrus fruit,” she writes, “lead double lives, the flavour of their juices being quite different from that of their peel.” She describes the taste of grapefruit as “standoffish”, which perfectly captures its zingy astringency.
At the same time, she doesn’t stint on the science. She is quite prepared to get into the nitty-gritty of the chemical basis of grapefruit’s oddness (all to do with mercaptan and nootkatone, apparently) and throughout the book displays impressive learning. But her enterprise is scientific in another sense, too. As she writes in her introduction: “As a naturally untidy person, I’m always looking for patterns, some means of imposing order on unruly reality.” She admits that she had envisaged the book turning into something resembling a “grand unifying flavour theory”. There is a touch of the Casaubon about Segnit, a maniacal desire to totalise, reflected in the very fact that this is a “thesaurus”. Fortunately, she is simultaneously aware of the ridiculousness of all such quests, which accounts for the pervasive tone of irony that undercuts her loftier ambitions and winningly brings the book back down to earth.
