Telephone: 0870 777 4488
Address: Sketch, 9 Conduit Street, London W1
Lunch for two, including wine and service, £150. Dinner, if you need to ask...
A question: who among you would be willing to spend £250 a head on dinner; that is, £500 for two? As I thought. At best you think the idea absurd, at worst obscene. OK. Let me try a different tack. Who among you would have been prepared to pay £250 to see Frank Sinatra sing live? Aah! Now there are a few more hands in the air. To be inclusive, how about £250 for a seat at the FA cup final, with your team playing? The best seat in the house at a Chris de Burgh concert? No takers for that one? Shame.
Still, I think I've made the point. If it is remarkable enough, many of us are willing to pay top dollars to purchase an experience which, at the end of the day, will leave us only with memories. The difference with an experience based about food, of course, is that, while we don't need Sinatra's music to live, we do need food. People die without it. But that is to misunderstand the nature of haute cuisine. We don't go to big restaurants simply to purchase ingredients. We go to experience what great chefs can do with them.
To pursue the opposing argument is like saying that to pay to see Sinatra was wrong, because we could get our local pub singer for free.
The key, I think, is the status of the experience. Before we crash the plastic, we have to feel the main draw is important enough to warrant the sacrifice. Which brings me to Sketch, a complex of eateries which has just opened on London's Conduit Street. To say the gastronomic restaurant at Sketch - called the Lecture Room - is expensive, is a little like saying Dolly Parton is a quite a big girl. It is nose-bleedingly expensive.
Starters top out at £58 in the evenings. Main courses are £75. It should be clear by now that I genuinely do believe there to be chefs who are worth big bucks, but I also believe they have to earn the right to charge those sums. The presiding chef at Sketch - Pierre Gagnaire - has not yet earned that right. Have you heard of him? Thought not. Sure, he's huge in France, a three-star colossus of modern French gastronomy. But here? No.
He also isn't in the kitchen; he has sent over a team. So he has a lot of work to do to earn that cash-worthy legend.
Still, there is a way that some of us can get to decide for ourselves whether Sketch is worth it. At lunchtime they serve what is called a 'casual tasting menu'. It costs £48 a head, hardly a steal, but also not in fantasy land. For that money, you first of all get the building, an extra-ordinary edifice of stucco and cornice and great sweeping staircase artfully dribbled with chocolate-coloured resins. There is a patisserie selling dainty cakes like costume jewellery, an extraordinary white-out of a video gallery which becomes a 'cheaper' brasserie each evening and then, upstairs, the Lecture Room. The walls here are of shaded amber panels or are padded in white leather. In places they are marked with gold leaf. Gosh.
And then there is the food, which is of many parts and plates and technically faultless - £48 is a lot of money, but nobody could doubt the attention that has gone into your lunch. First come canapés: silver spoons with a dollop of creamed foie gras topped with a sliver of nori sea weed bringing the ocean to the liver; salty little oat biscuits; sweet cinnamon tuile; a 'salsa' of chopped cuttlefish that lacked fishiness but had a herby kick.
Next, starters in four parts. First two big, fat seared scallops on a thick smear of pumpkin velouté with a rich, chutney like spiciness. There is a sweet dice of red mullet on toast with a mustardy tang. The star is a dinky daube of beef, the intense cumin spiked stew hidden beneath a savoury biscuit of ineffable lightness and crunch. Finally, a sashimi of albacore tuna in a perfect black olive jelly, which is more unsettling than appealing.
There are two main courses. One is roasted monkfish on what is described as a smoked tea bisque, but which has about it the depth and intensity of an onion soup. Alongside is a deliciously creamy risotto of a barley-like grain. The other is tender breast of Bresse chicken with a light curried saucing that, as my companion said approvingly, made it taste like an upmarket coronation chicken. These were two exceptionally assured and balanced dishes. Lastly, four doll's house puddings: an exquisite cube of iced blood orange mousse on a compote of fresh oranges, a quenelle of sweet green apple sorbet on a bitter jelly of Campari and a soft caramel mousse, topped with a layer of light liquorice jelly in the middle of which lay a single cognac-soaked prune. And then finally, the 'Winter 2002 Sketch Chocolate': an unsweetened chocolate ganache that was a massive, eye-bulging pure cocoa hit, topped with a dollop of white chocolate mousse, holding a little tart with a syrup of sugar crusted cognac. Oh my god. Etc.
This is seriously impressive modernist food. Most importantly it made me hanker after the £500 experience. I simply want to know. Service is a little on the over-attentive side (if this is casual, what happens when they get formal?). The wine list has nothing below £28 and only one white and red by the glass, though the white, an Alsatian Riesling blend, is terrific.
One serious criticism. At the end we were handed a closed hardback book - a copy of Boswell's London Journal - out of which the heart had been cut to make a cavity for the bill. I'm sorry but the desecration of books distresses me. It's a philistine act and all it does is reinforce the prejudices of those who find the notion of such a place offensive. In the job of legend-building, it does them no favours.
