Telephone: 0870 777 4488
Address: 9 Conduit Street, London W1
Rating: 0/20
If you cannot countenance spending £143 on food and drink for yourself, read no further. If you consider the matter obscene, do not fret, do not work yourself up into a tizz; above all, do not write to me - just turn to Pets or We Love Each Other, and wallow in normality. If, on the other hand, you want to consider what you get for £143, and then decide, read on.
The restaurant in question is Sketch, a much written about new venture from French wunder-chef, Pierre Gagnaire and Mourad Mazouz, proprietor of Momo (a soi-disant North African restaurant of which I have never thought highly). Its home, 9 Conduit Street, is a substantial 18th-century town house that has been converted into a stately gastrodome, with a cafe and patisserie, a bar and brasserie, and what used to be called a fine dining restaurant, divided into two parts, the Library and the Lecture Room. I will say right off that I find the design concept a lot of bollocks. I am not talking about the cafe, patisserie, bar and brasserie on the ground floor, which I did not inspect thoroughly, but - from the plastic swirls that look like chocolate and coffee splashed on the sweeping staircase, through the hideous vulgarity of the lavatory, to the long bars of carefully graded orange to yellow to cream rising up the walls of the dining room - the fine dining part is a ridiculous mishmash of styles.
A meal in The Lecture Room need not cost £143. There is a three-course, fixed-price lunch for £48 and a two-course one for £42, though I guess you'd have to drink water if you wanted to escape for less than £50 a head, which is slightly not the point. As I may well never go again, I decided to investigate the full glories of the à la carte menu, on which the cheapest first course was £30 and the most expensive £48; the cheapest main was £40 and the most expensive £75; and all puddings were £4. I chose a middle path, starting with the cheapest dish - potted crab with pig's ear and breast of albacore tuna from Germond and velouté of root chervil and sorrel cream - then a middle-ranking main course of pan-fried, milk-fed veal, dariole of cep-flavoured egg custard, with baby spinach and mild garlic, with a side dish of veal kidney, braised lettuce and mango. I finished with two puddings: Campari jelly with coriander and green apple sorbet, and a liquorice soft caramel.
The first thing to be said is that you don't leave hungry. The quantities can only be described as generous, and that's after three amuse bouches as you study the menu, and five more as you wait for your first course to arrive. Gagnaire is not in the kitchen himself, but those who are, are cooks of the highest order. There can be no questioning the brilliance of the individual dishes or the flawless technique. Perhaps only the kitchen of Gordon Ramsay achieves this level of virtuosity in London. The way in which each dish was conceived, and each detail integrated into it, was an absolute model of gastronomic and conceptual rigour. The kitchen also has a sophisticated understanding of the complexities of texture - between the component parts of the crab salad; between the ineffable, flaccid richness of the cep custard and the refined tautness of the veal - which is rare among European chefs.
However, all this exists within the confines of the French tradition - and that is a limitation. Food horizons in the UK have broadened in the past few years: one of the advantages of not valuing highly our own cooking traditions is that our chefs do not, perhaps, feel constrained by them. So I'd say that our food culture is being reinvigorated in a way that the French food culture is not. This may seem irrelevant in the scheme of daily life, but in terms of how we will eat in 10 or 15 years, it is immeasurably significant. Gagnaire nobly celebrates a culinary tradition that is, in effect, imperceptibly but surely, withering. It is simply too strong for even the most creative chef to break out of.
Even with its myriad virtues, is the food at Sketch worth this kind of money? I come back to the first paragraph. For many people it won't be, irrespective of its qualities: they will say that £143 is simply too much to spend on a meal for one (the bill included three glasses of wine totalling £38, which, in itself, is fairly offensive). I would argue, too, that if £143 worries you in any way, you should not go to Sketch. You will spend too much time wondering if you're getting £143-worth of pleasure. Anyway, at this level, the price is irrelevant. Consequently, I have given Sketch nought out of 20 because it defies any, even notional, value-for-money judgment.
Would I spend £143 of my own money? Unquestionably - but for one final caveat. I am a curious and greedy fellow. I like to spend my money on great food. But when a restaurant sets prices at this level, it does so to exclude rather than to embrace. There is only one type of diner who can eat in The Lecture Room without terminal damage to their bank balance. They are a type who, when they aren't shouting into their phones, are smoking cigars all the way through a meal. And, for me, the cost of three hours in the company of such people is too high, even for food as good as that at Sketch.
· Open Tues-Sat, lunch, 12 noon-2pm, dinner 7-10.30pm. Menus: Lunch, £42 for two courses, £48 for three.
