I dare say that there are moments when we all hanker after a bit of fine dining. Value for money, cutting-edge cooking, designer daftness are all very well in their way, but how about a night of grandeur for a change, a sense of heady indulgence, of the stateliness and standards of the hautest of haute cuisine. London manages to support one or two restaurants staking out this particular territory - Le Gavroche, the Oak Room, the Ritz, the Capital Hotel, the Connaught, Gordon Ramsay, the Square, Chez Nico to name a few - but then so it should if it has serious claims to be a major eating centre.
As a fellow who is as partial to a spot of coddling and class as the next, and in the interests of science, naturally, I recently visited two new arrivals in what you might call the Ultra Class - Foliage at the Mandarin Oriental Hyde Park Hotel and John Burton-Race at the Landmark Hotel.
However, it would be pointless to argue that the fact they are in hotels has not affected them in certain ways. For example, John Burton-Race's dining room is ineffably the grander of the two, with a vaulting ceiling encrusted with creamy plasterwork like a formalised coral reef somewhere high above your head. There is a huge sense of old-fashioned space, formality and hush, fostered by widely spaced tables, the lush luxury of the tablecloths, napkins, tableware and the squadrons of slippered staff.
Foliage, on the other hand, which the powers that created it insist on pronouncing Foe-li-arge for some reason, is the epitome of modern hotel restaurant design. Enormous expense has managed to turn an awkward space into a kind of business-class airport lounge as designed by Hugh Hefner, with lacquered and smoky mirrored surfaces and submarine colours. It is something of an achievement to spend so much money and come up with something so utterly sexless.
There is nothing sexless or gutless about Hywel Jones's cooking. Mr Jones works under the kindly eye of executive chef David Nichols, a high-class veteran of the hotel restaurant scene, but is, apparently, left pretty much to his own devices, which makes very good sense, as he can cook pretty seriously.
Festina and I chuntered our way through poached lobster, vinaigrette of crab, confit tomatoes and caviar dressing; roast scallops, turnip purée, creamed parsley, verjus glaze, fricassee of ceps and snails from among the first courses; braised pork, raviolo of braised trotter, summer asparagus, tomatoes and basil; and saddle of rabbit, creamed sweetcorn, pithivier and grilled Alsace bacon among the main courses; and goats' milk pannacotta, marinated peaches and almond biscotti and bergamot crème brûlée with fresh raspberry millefeuille among the puddings.
There was only one duff dish among the lot, and that was the goats' milk pannacotta. Goats' milk does not make a nice pannacotta is all I can say.
Nor were the marinated peaches much cop. For the rest, however, working within the idiom of classic modern French haute cuisine, Mr Jones produces lovingly detailed, sometimes overdetailed - there is a sense that some of the dishes would work just as well with a couple of ingredients less - exquisitely worked grub. Outstanding was the huge fat roasted scallops with a supremely subtle turnip purée so smooth that it was almost liquid, the richness of these two being cut by the fruity acidity of the verjus; and the braised pork, which was cooked to a fabulous delicacy.
The words fabulous delicacy aren't ones you would readily apply to John Burton-Race's cooking. Fabulously rich and fabulously luxurious, certainly, and fabulously opulent. I have been twice, the second time for serious field work with my old friend Antrobus, an eater of the old school. We turned our backs on the set-price lunch at £28 for three courses and the menu gourmand at £160, which delivers seven principal courses and any number of walk-ons for two people, to explore the full à la carte, on which the cheapest course is £22 and the most expensive is £36.
On the whole, our dishes came from the upper end of the price spectrum - suprême de pigeonneau en raviole; langoustines à la vapeur, sauce vierge et sa petite salade de pomme de terre; queue de boeuf farci aux champignons, crème raifort; assiette de veau au deux saveurs; tiare marjolaine and cheese. You don't go away feeling hungry after that lot.
The menu is a paeon of praise to the traditional values of French high culinary culture. The cooking is old fashioned, richly wrought, prodigiously upholstered. Mr Burton-Race is as unafraid of butter and cream as he is of truffles, foie gras and caviar. But there is fabulous depth to the saucing (which is not the same as sticky over-reductions), a sophisticated muscularity, precision in textures, sureness in handling these materials. Each dish is constructed on epic proportions. There's not much of this kind of thing around.
And if you like this kind of thing, then this is the kind of thing - pigeon breast as soft as suede in the emollient embrace of foie gras and fine pasta; creamed horseradish pouring out of a delicate, hollow pastry cap down over a stupendously squidgy block of oxtail, the apotheosis of unctuous richness; a sequence of veal bits and bobs, each cooked with masterly precision and sauced separately to release wave after wave of silky flavours.
And the cost? Well, I hoped that we might not come to that. There is a price, of course, a ridiculous price, an absurd price. Our lunch at John Burton-Race cost £274. That included £109 for non-food items, but £165 for two is very, very steep. Compare that to £124.50 all in at Foliage, which included £59.50 of drinks, with the full dinner à la carte menu offered at £32.50 for three courses. Both wine lists are as absurdly overpriced as they are overblown, but at Burton-Race a glass of champagne is £11, while at Foliage a mere £7.50. A bottle of water will cost you £3.75 at JB-R, £3.50 at Foliage, and so on and so on. In terms of value for money, Foliage wins hands down. But if an out-of-wallet experience is no barrier and guilt no consideration, then feel the quality of John Burton-Race. Isn't that what indulgence is all about?
