It is a curious fish dish which encourages the maître d', on hearing you order it, to announce: 'I am Belgian and in Belgium this is not how we cook turbot.' My dear, this is not how they cook turbot anywhere. The menu read: 'Braised turbot with Welsh rarebit glaze, smoked cod roe with aubergine caviar and sautéed baby gem lettuce, lemon grass velouté.' The maître d' described the dish to me, just as it was written. He said something like, 'I wanted you to know how complex it is,' and wandered off. My wife, Pat, watched him go. 'That sounded like he was dissuading you from ordering it.'
Perhaps he was nervous. The re-opening of Marcus Wareing's flagship restaurant, Pétrus, at the Berkeley Hotel in London's Knightsbridge, is a big deal, most of all for Wareing. It is no secret that the chef, a protégé of Gordon Ramsay, was dismayed not to be upgraded from one to two Michelin stars at the old site in St James's. The new premises are supposed to provide him with a launch pad from which to reach those stars.
I should say that I, too, was surprised the old Pétrus didn't get upgraded. Wareing is a gifted and unashamedly bourgeois chef who is not scared of big flavours. I still have taste memories of his dishes: of seared scallops in a lobster bisque tasting ripely of the sea, for example, or his sweet, glazed round of pork belly. More recently, at the Savoy Grill, he showed an understanding of classy simplicity. Here, though, simplicity has gone out of the over-gilded window. It's not just bells and whistles: it's the whole damn percussion section of the London Symphony Orchestra. And not all the instruments are playing the same tune.
First, though, the good things. The new room, until recently La Tante Claire, is a huge improvement on the old Pétrus, which felt like a place you went to be interred rather than fed. The walls have been padded in a warm shade of claret and the old formal service, which made it feel as if there was a party of bishops on table seven, has given way to something brisk, light and jolly. The giddy, theatrical turn of the many trolleys - for champagne and wine, for cheese and sweets - adds to the drama.
Top marks also go to sommelier Alan Holmes for creating a truly democratic list. (To declare an interest, Holmes also writes the drink-tasting notes for the Observer Food Monthly.) Yes, there are some of the finest wines available to humanity. A 1928 Château Pétrus, perhaps? Yours for £11,600. But the list also starts with a 'Sommelier's selection' of 24 wines. All are under £20 and the cheapest costs £14.50, which immediately gets the punters onside. We chose a gorgeous Lebanese Hochar Rouge from the makers of Château Musar. Every top-flight restaurant in London should have a list like this.
They won't be wanting the menu, though. It is expensive, at £55 for three courses, but that is of a piece with other London restaurants at the level to which Pétrus aspires. There are, however, supplements which look purely opportunistic. At the Square, which already has two Michelin stars, grouse costs £5 extra, around the price of the raw ingredient. Here the supplement is an inexcusable £12.
More important is the quality this big-money buys. Not everything we ate was bad. As a taster we were served a shot glass of gazpacho, unnecessarily sweetened with pineapple. Pat, allergic to pineapple, was brought instead a cup of hot, creamy white onion soup. Wareing does these truffled soups spectacularly well, as this one proved. She also ordered the best main dish, 'braised hare served with creamed savoy cabbage, glazed red onions and a rich Madeira wine sauce'. It read well and it ate well. The meat came in an unctuous, tender cake and it was intense with the flavour of field and autumn.
We were much less lucky elsewhere. Because I am here to serve you, I ordered not according to appetite, but description. If a dish read badly I had to discover if it really was a car crash. So, 'crispy chargrilled veal sweetbread, braised marrow with garlic and thyme, velouté infused with Amaretto and almonds'. The sauce was so sweet it needed a health warning from the British Dental Association, and left me with the claggy mouthfeel one gets from drinking sweet, creamy cocktails in Essex. For the record, almonds had nothing to say to sweetbreads apart from: go away.
A starter of over-spiced scallops with a potato salad, artichokes and truffled cream was, again, a collection of ingredients that made little sense together. It was not a patch on Wareing's old way with scallops. And then that turbot, with the cacophony of smoked cod roe and spiced aubergine, Welsh rarebit and, Lord help us, the lemon grass velouté. The dish made me ponder the purpose of cooking at this level, which should be about preparing the best produce so that it tastes most intensely of itself. Here the fish was obliterated, partly by a very heavy hand on the salt, but mostly by the weird assemblage. Turbot is a noble fish. Leave the poor thing alone. I should have listened to the maître d'.
Here's the problem: Wareing is now cooking to get two or three Michelin stars, and it doesn't work that way. You just have to cook the way you cook, and if it's good, the accolades will come. Wareing isn't being himself - and it's a crying shame.
· Pétrus, Berkeley Hotel, Wilton Place, London SW1 (020 7235 1200). Dinner for two, including wine and service, £150
