Telephone: 020 7928 5533 (Brasserie: 020 7928 4433)
Address: Neat, Second Floor, Oxo Tower Wharf, Barge House Street, London SE1
There is something of the second coming about the opening of Neat. Richard Neat was, if you remember, the wunderkind who powered the kitchen of Pied à Terre to double Michelin stardom. Then, all of a sudden, he pushed off to India to take up some consultancy how's-your-father, leaving his many admirers mystified. Still odder, he then turns up in Cannes, winning further Michelin stardom in the face of that genial welcome and warm-hearted appreciation that all French people offer to foreigners who show them how it should be done in a restaurant. The odd report filtered back from travellers who had made it to Cannes and back, but frankly, the south of France is a hell of a long way to go for lunch, even to enjoy the work of one of the sparkiest cooks of his generation. Now Neat is back among us, albeit Mondays to Fridays. Weekends, it seems, he prefers to man the kitchen in Cannes and top up his tan. For the life of me I can't think why, but there you go.
In point of fact, there isn't just one new Neat restaurant but two - a brasserie, in the modern idiom, and a full-blown restaurant, each occupying a different end of the same, second floor of London's Oxo Tower, six floors below the Harvey Nichols gastrodome. While Neat may not quite command the same sweeping panorama of the river that HN's extravaganza does, nevertheless it seemed seductive and sun-drenched on the day Mustapha and I slid into the round-backed, burgundy leather-bound chairs.
The menu was short - four first courses, four second courses, five puddings - and the price was set at £29 for three courses. Such restraint is sensible in the early days of an enterprise of this size and this ambition. I am sure that the dishes on the fixed-price menu will simplify in the fullness of time, to distinguish them from the more expensive dinner menu. As it is, the dishes have been brought lock, stock and sophisticated refinement direct from the Cannes establishment, another sensible move. Actually, I think that the provenance of at least one of them, the first course of snails with morels, garlic purée and asparagus, goes back even further to Pied à Terre days.
Foreign sojourns do not seem to have dimmed Mr Neat's idiosyncratic powers of invention, or, indeed, had much effect at all. He blithely remains the highly individual chef he always was. What else can you say about smoked foie gras with onion purée and black mushroom vinaigrette; rillette of red mullet with prune purée and almond cream; lamb cutlets with ballotine of offal and vegetable consommé; and saddle of rabbit with tortellini of braised leg meat and green olive sauce; banana chiboust with lemon anglaise?
None of these dishes is much like anyone else's that I know about. Of course, the originality of the combinations is one thing, how they eat quite another. As a matter of fact, both Mustapha and I reckoned they ate beautifully but for the odd detail (notably under-seasoning of the rabbit and an over-dense prune thatch to the rillette of red mullet).
While parts of some of the dishes tasted oddly disjointed individually, when put together into the mouth, they achieved a subtle and sophisticated unity. The thick slice of smoked foie gras had the distinct flavour of smoky barbecue sauce, but when allied with the onion purée, and, more particularly, the black mushroom vinaigrette, with their distinctive contrasts in textures, degrees of richness and the resonant acidity of the vinaigrette, it became within an ace of the sublime. The parts of the lamb cutlets with offal and vegetable consommé were each beautifully defined, but together they brought out qualities in each other that weren't there in the parts. Once lightly salted, the rabbit wove together streams of flavours with exquisite, deft delicacy.
While these were going down, their passing was eased by a bottle of heady Jurancon Sec and headier Dom Castera from Spain, which Mustapha had winkled out of the equally interesting, and remarkably approachably priced, wine list with the help of the elegant Danish sommelier.
The two wines cost £24 and £19.95 respectively, contributing £43.95 to the bill. The food matters came to £58 as advertised, which is more than reasonable for such thoughtful, pleasure-provoking cooking, and seemed all the more so when I learnt that one of my colleagues had been faced with a bill for £77 for two people in the brasserie for a lunch that included no booze.
· Open Mon-Fri, 2 noon - 2.30pm; Mon-Sat, 7 - 9.30pm. Menus: Lunch, £29 for three courses; dinner, £49 for three courses. All major credit cards. Wheelchair access and wheelchair WC.
