The last time I bumped into Frédéric Desmette, the idiosyncratic chef/patron of La Chouette, was nine years ago. I got out of a taxi by the green in Westlington in deepest rural Buckinghamshire. I saw him watching me out of one of the restaurant windows as I paid the driver and made my way to the front door. I was his only customer that lunchtime and, as he had seen me arrive, I couldn't very well pretend that I had just happened to drop by. So, after a brief skirmish, I owned up that I had come to review his restaurant. Well, I had to do something - he thought that I was a Michelin inspector.
Nothing much seemed to have changed with La Chouette or Monsieur Desmette, I am pleased to say, when the wife of my bosom and I stopped off for lunch there the other day. Westlington still put me in mind of Sir Henry Newbolt's words about there being "a deathly hush in the close". Ours was the only car in the car park. The beetle-browed chef watched us out of a window of the very pretty brick-and-flint building as we marched across to the door, and welcomed us, the only customers for that lunch. I must have changed a bit since the last time we met, because he didn't exactly fall on me, instead treated us with his brisk line of charm and hospitality.
M. Desmette is a true original. You'd have to be to have survived 10 years in Westlington. That was the reason we were there. I had passed on the official celebrations marking this achievement a week or so back, which involved dozens of regular customers, friends and two jazz bands. M. Desmette is something of an aficionado of jazz. In fact, it wouldn't be going too far to say that he was obsessed by it, just as he is by photographing birds, cooking, serving and drinking Belgian beers, and being tremendously forthright about his views on his neighbours, other chefs, food on TV, the iniquities of banks and much else beside, which he announces with considerable vigour in between bringing courses of food and wine or beer. The fact that he does both on all but his busiest nights is one of the reasons he has kept going when many around him have struck camp and crept away.
The style of his cooking hasn't changed much, either, I was pleased to note from the menu. M. Desmette is Belgian, and he has no truck with dietary niceties and the modern taste for culinary mix'n'match, airy-fairy sauces and olive oil washing over everything. It has not been touched by kaffir lime leaves, balsamic vinegar, lemongrass, stir fry or any nonsense of that kind. His style is unabashedly old-fashioned and chunky-cut. It stands full square on both the plate and the palate, and is reminiscent of the kind of food you used to get in traditional restaurants de famille in France.
My filet de barbue à la Duvel was a typical Desmette dish. Duvel is a Belgian beer, and its particular light scent ran like a melody through the buttery richness of the sauce, which made a particularly opulent and classic accompaniment to a magnificent hunk of brill, all taut and muscular as fresh brill should be.
The wife of my bosom's salade de blanc de volaille was a rather less classic affair, encompassing bits of warm chicken, endive frisée, bits of plum and a quite-tart dressing made with very good red-wine vinegar. Strange as it may seem, it was delightfully refreshing, full of crunch in various keys.
The salad was a useful contrast to her filet de saumon d'Écosse à la blanche, which, although made with a different beer, was a close cousin to my first dish, with a sauce like liquid velvet wrapping a carefully-cooked brick of salmon. My cte de veau à jus was just as majestic: a great slab of a chop covering two thirds of the plate, the rest of which was covered with an Andy Flintoff of a gravy and little bundles of vegetables arranged like points around a compass.
These last represent my only reservation about the food at La Chouette: the vegetables hark back to plate accessories of 10, even 20 years ago. I would have thought it much easier, and much more satisfactory, to give larger helpings of two, or at most three, veg. But there you go - M. Desmette is his own man and has his own way of going about things.
Sadly we did not have time - our fault - to explore the diaspora of the Desmette puddings. (I have very happy memories of a pear soufflé from nine years ago. So happy, in fact, that I had two of them.) Still, we contented ourselves with a hefty bit of impeccable Roquefort washed down by the remains of a deliciously fresh, rounded Chinon 1996 from Charles Voguet, served correctly at cellar temperature. In fact, the wine list, with unusual length in wine from Alsace, the Rhne and the Loire, as well as a pretty fair weight from the classic areas of Bordeaux and Burgundy, is for serious drinking. The prices, although stiff by general standards, are not steep for wines of these vintages and this character. Anyway, there are plenty at the £20 mark and below to keep distressed gentlefolk such as myself very happy.
I was in a similar mood when signing the credit-card slip for £85.38. It seemed a small contribution to the next decade of one of Britain's more individual outposts of gastronomy
