Telephone: 020-7584 2003
Address: 43 Elystan Street, London SW3
Rating: 18.5/20
Tom Aikens is a serious chef. At one time he was a little too serious for his own good, and departed from Pied à Terre under confused circumstances. That was three years ago. Now he has returned to the London restaurant scene, in his own name. It has been some time since a new restaurant generated so much interest (rather than PR hype) among chefs and foodies. Quite rightly, too. Tom Aikens is a terrific place. It is comfortable and smart, in a black, dark brown- and-white, understated way, handsome without being self-esteem-shatteringly chic, with personable, able, unpushy service. And the food is fabulous, or well on its way to being so.
When I last ate Aikens' cooking, lunch was a form of extreme eating. He drove flavours hard, so that they exploded in the mouth, saturating the sensations. It was thrilling stuff, right on the edge, but exhausting. During those years away, his approach has matured. Flavours have lost none of their weight and depth, but they are gentler, more considered. They unfurl rather than bombard.
The texture of the cooking has lightened, too. Aikens uses jellies, sweetish, off-sweet, fruity or fragrant, that add a melting delicacy to contrast with the heavier weight of protein and sauce: carrot and Sauternes jelly with rabbit confit; fig and red wine with spiced crème fraîche; not to mention a jelly-like, warm cassonade of crab before proceedings proper started.
He gives vegetables, fruit and herbs a central role, providing many dishes with a fresh counterpoint. They are sourced with great care, too, to judge by the distinct flavours he draws out of them. So the carrot stockade around a refined cold rabbit rillette featured the kind of tender young veg that the rabbit itself would have nibbled before it was potted for the pot. Tucker's pea mousseline with jabugo ham and pea vinaigrette was the distillation of the summer kitchen garden; frogs' legs came in a chervil sauce with chervil pasta; the eel dish celebrated this underappreciated fish with delicate modulations involving apple juice, apple jelly and apple syrup.
Aikens' dishes tend to be multifaceted, which is a polite way of saying that they are a composite of several separate parts. The contemporary version of an old Pied à Terre favourite - pig's head braised with spices and ginger, stuffed trotter and tongue with celeriac purée and crisp pork belly - is a case in point: it was a succession of nuggets of sweetly fibrous pig, topped with other nuggets - brain, tongue, curls of crisp belly. Some find this multum in parvo business distracting and, to be truthful, so do I in lesser hands. But Aikens manages to unite the elements into a balanced whole, linking them through source, sauce, cooking techniques or straightforward magic.
Lunch was not without faults. The acidity of apple in apple and eel soup overwhelmed the fish in that part of an otherwise fine dish. To serve veal with a honey sauce is to sweeten a naturally sweet meat. The liquorice in the liquorice ice cream did not have the impact of the Allsorts that I love. But for the most part it was yum, yum, yum. The food bill for three was £168.50. We could have reduced that by not sharing an extra course (roast turbot with celeriac fondant, braised chicken wing, confit onion and thyme sauce at £20, since you ask) or cheese at £10 a head. That would have made it £39.50 a head. We could have reduced that still further, to £24.50, had we had the set menu. My companions paid the drinks bill, so I cannot comment on its size, but the list is interesting and not absurdly priced.
It is always chancy going to a restaurant of serious ambition in the first few weeks. It takes at least six months for a kitchen to settle down - I got the feeling that some of the dishes were evolving even as we ate them. My advice is to wait a few months. The kitchen will be really hitting its stride, and the feeding frenzy may have died down - though I rather doubt it.
· Open Mon-Fri, lunch 12 noon-2.30pm, dinner 7-11pm. Menus Lunch, £24.50 for three courses. Wheelchair access and WC.
