Telephone: 020 7370 2010
Address: 160 Old Brompton Road, London SW5
Open evenings only. Dinner for two, including wine and service, £90
Never trust a fat chef or a thin restaurant critic. The fat chef isn't working hard enough and the thin restaurant critic isn't greedy enough. This is my excuse. I am fat because my profession demands it. Actually I am fatter because my profession demands it. I was always a lard-arse - but, since starting this job, my waistline has increased by about two inches. 'It's the puddings,' I was told a year or so back by John Lanchester, a former incumbent of this very column, who also suffered weight gain while doing the job. I think he was partly right. It is indeed the puddings. And the main courses. And the starters. And the nibbles and the bread and the wine and... you get the idea. I try to keep my weight in check. I belong to a gym which I attend whenever I have the energy to heave myself into the car to drive to the treadmill. I once tried to claim my gym membership fees as a tax-deductible expense but my accountant told me it wouldn't wash. I could be fat and still do my job. It's true, of course. I am fat and I can still do my job.
The arrival in London of Montignac should, therefore, be a godsend to me. It is named after the Frenchman Michel Montignac who, a decade or more ago, created a diet which allowed for eating out in restaurants. This went down exceptionally well in France, where he has sold millions of books. He has also opened food shops and restaurants of his own, practising the Montignac method. The diet is not based on calorie intake but food types. Fats are not the problem, apparently. It is bad carbohydrates with a high glycemic index which are the problem. According to Montignac, they encourage the body to produce insulin which, in turn, encourages cells to store fat. So, in the Montignac diet, potatoes, pasta, white rice, sugar and caffeine are bad. Lentils, chickpeas, brown rice and dark chocolate are good. Any diet which says yes to dark chocolate has to have something going for it.
That said, I am deeply suspicious of the Montignac method. It strikes me as little more than an intellectual cover for food faddism. That the London branch of Montignac sits on the Old Brompton Road, spiritual home of faddanistas everywhere, does not help matters.
At ground level is the food shop and café. Downstairs, in a space that looks like it was previously the basement storeroom, and probably was, is the newly opened restaurant. It is a simple, rather austere space, of white walls and floorboards, fitted out with cheap tables and even cheaper chairs, some of which are specifically designed to make you aware of the size of your arse. They are tight little aluminium constructions with arms that squeeze and dig. If that was not enough to remind you of your purpose here, the two rather amateurish waiters, who occasionally broke off from serving us to argue with each other, wear T-shirts bearing the legend 'Eat Yourself Slim.'
And an irrelevant one, as far as I was concerned. The only grounds upon which to judge a restaurant is the quality of the cooking at the time of eating, not what impact it may have on you at a later date. Further, where a kitchen has imposed upon itself an ingredients regime, I think it is right to demand that the dishes work not in spite of those restrictions but because of them. On this score, Montignac did pretty well. Of the six dishes tried by myself and my thin friend Larry - I thought it important to have one of those in a place like this - only one suffered from the regime. Others merely suffered from bad kitchen skills.
There is no defining theme to the less than cheap menu. (All diets require sacrifice; maybe here it is financial.) It's a bit French, a bit British, a bit inexplicable. One dish, for example, is 'Arnold Bennet - finnan haddock and gruyère cheese - oven glazed.' This made it sound like poor old Arnold Bennet himself was being served up. We passed on that. I started with grilled field mushrooms with black pudding, parsley and garlic toast. It was a very black dish and a very earthy one, too. Mushrooms and black pudding work spectacularly well together. Larry chose the pissaladière, the classic Provençal tart of onions, olives and anchovies. It was a generous portion, but the pastry was dense and thoroughly lacklustre.
For his main course, Larry had a vast serving of pot-roast guinea fowl with baby leeks and forest mushrooms on a Madeira-cream sauce. The bird was tender and gamey and the sauce had a real depth. I was far less lucky. My fritto misto was dire. The coating on the fish was saggy, soggy and tired. For £17.25, I had the right to expect better. As we were eating ourselves slim, we decided we could allow ourselves pudding. I wish I hadn't. My sugar-free ice cream was as poor as it sounds; the scoop of chocolate, grainy and granular on the tongue, was particularly unpleasant. Larry did better with chestnut panacotta served with chocolate sauce.
To drink with this, we chose a bottle of Bordeaux from a short winelist which, unlike the food, was reasonably priced at £14.50. And the final bill for this seriously patchy meal: £90. I know you can see this gag coming but I'll do it anyway. When you eat at Montignac the only thing guaranteed to lose weight is your wallet.
Contact Jay Rayner on jay.rayner@observer.co.uk
