Telephone: 01892 511 921
Address: Thackeray's, 85 London Road, Tunbridge Wells, Kent.
Lunch for two, including wine and service, £90. Also set lunch at £15.95 for three courses.
Until recently Richard Philips was, for his sins, executive chef at Ian Schrager's St Martin's Lane hotel where he oversaw some of the silliest, most over-priced restaurants in the capital. One of these, Tuscan Steak, had the single most expensive dish I have seen on any restaurant menu: an American T-bone steak costing £65 for two. It was never available because British customs and excise would never give Philips a license to import the meat. At one point, in an attempt to get around the problem, he purchased 200 head of live Texan cattle thinking that he might be able to import them whole and then turn them into steaks. Customs still refused to play ball and he had to sell them on. That was how silly his job at St Martin's Lane could be.
The restaurant world is a curiously peripatetic one, and no chef should be judged by what they once did but, instead, by what they are doing now. For his part Philips says that, while not all the food at Schrager's gaff was to his taste, it did teach him a lot about the business side of the trade. That should come in handy now because, after the better part of a decade, Philips has left London and returned to Kent, from whence he came. He has opened his own restaurant, Thackeray's, in Tunbridge Wells.
Philips actually comes from Gillingham, but he didn't think the Medway towns were really the right place for the kind of thing he wanted to do. Before St Martin's Lane, he was one of Marco Pierre White's boys, working first at the Canteen, then at Le Saveurs and the Oak Room, and it is that experience - complete with bells and whistles - which informs what he is trying to do now. Put bluntly, he needed a ready clientele with big, fat wallets. Gillingham isn't the place. Tunbridge Wells is.
Thackeray's occupies a Grade II-listed building of ancient floorboards and low ceilings, which has been the subject of a gloriously tasteful conversion, at least on the ground floor. The two downstairs dining rooms manage to be both cool and modern while remaining sympathetic to the age of the building. Upstairs, which houses the private dining rooms, is a different matter. One room has been decorated entirely in gold leaf. Another is called the Africa Room, and is hung with animal skins. The third is called the Goldfish Room and therefore houses more goldfish than is strictly necessary. If times get tough they can, I suppose, plunder the room for the fish dishes. And if they get really tough, the three rooms would make a perfect gay brothel - if 'Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells' would allow.
But for now, it is a restaurant - and a rather good one. Granted, I ate alone, but almost everything I ate was perfectly pitched. There is a clear, culinary intelligence at work here that understands how ingredients work together. A single, fat ravioli of wild mushrooms on a purée of Jerusalem artichokes and surrounded by a light, creamy sauce rich in truffle oil, was a lovely dish of autumnal flavours. The pasta was silky and the purée smooth. At £5.50 for a starter, it was also distinctly good value.
Main courses are rather more enthusiastically priced at between £13 and £16, which is one way to signal ambition. In my dish, that ambition was achieved. A pot roast shoulder of lamb with potato and celeriac purée was a much cleverer piece of work than it sounded. The lamb had been pre-cooked until it was falling apart. Then the meat had been taken off the bone, wrapped in caul as a cake and roasted again. It came on an unadvertised and deliciously crisp rösti, which returned the caramelised crunch that I always hanker after from roasted meats. I would put this up there as one of the best lamb dishes I have ever eaten.
There is also a very good pastry chef at work here. A caramelised organic lemon tart, for example, brought a zingy and extraordinarily light crème, alongside an equally light lemon sorbet which dissolved almost instantly on the tongue. Even the two strands of candied peel that came with the dish were somehow more succulent and more satisfying than usual.
Clearly, there is a fine kitchen here, but Thackeray's is not without its problems. Philips seems a little too wedded to the Marco Pierre White 'fine dining' style than is either strictly necessary or appropriate. A taster of pumpkin soup mounted with truffle oil to start was a less impressive version of that dispensed by Gordon Ramsay at Claridges in London. It was also served too shallow in too big a bowl and, as a result, had cooled by the time it reached the table. It was as if the soup was making a virtue of the tableware rather than the other way round. The wine list is also poorly weighted, with very little below £20 and only two red wines by the glass.
Finally, he is devoted to tiresome notions of grand service which require one poor chap to bring the dishes from the kitchen on a tray so that another may place them on the table. Too often the tray-guy ended up cooling his heels - and the food - in the hall while placer-man chatted on the phone or dug about in the laundry cupboard. When tray-guy arrived with my pudding and placer-man wasn't there I told him he could give it to me himself, but he refused. He just couldn't break with protocol. That kind of service is silly, pompous and a waste of good service staff. These, then, are the wrinkles, but it shouldn't take much to iron them out. Maybe all that Philips and his restaurant needs is a little more time away from the pretensions of London.
Contact Jay Rayner at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk
