Midsummer House, Midsummer Common, Cambridge (01223 369 299). Meal for two, including wine and service, £140
Sitting in the sun-sodden upstairs lounge at Midsummer House in Cambridge, overlooking the river, we could smell the rich, meaty push of the stockpots in the kitchen below. It was worth remembering that aroma, the marker for any classical kitchen, when reading the menu in the buttercup-yellow dining room downstairs. Chef-patron Daniel Clifford likes the shock of the new. At the door, diners are offered a leaflet, declaring his intent, which is full of references to Ferran Adria at El Bulli and (perhaps a bit grudgingly) to Heston Blumenthal at the Fat Duck in Bray. There is much talk of foams and jellies, of water baths and pipettes.
So you might be given a tongue-stripping pink grapefruit and champagne foam to cleanse the palate, and a shot glass of cucumber jelly and cauliflower foam to follow as an amuse bouche. The menu may throw around terms Like 'sea water jelly' to go with salmon and 'chocolate jelly' to go with pigeon. All very diverting, but I would counsel against paying too much attention to any of this.
Recently, I was lucky enough to be treated to the tasting menu at the Fat Duck, and that genuinely was a journey along the furthest shores of gastronomy: green tea and lime foam poached in liquid nitrogen to begin, followed by oyster with passion-fruit puree, then snail porridge, salmon with liquorice, white chocolate and caviar, chocolates flavoured with oak and leather. They sound weird, sometimes often look weird on the plate, but never - never! - sacrifice anything to the imperatives of taste.
At Midsummer House everything tastes very good too, but as I say, the claims it makes for itself and that have been made for it elsewhere - Midsummer House has been referred to in print as the Fat Duckling - are overdone. At base, what turns up on the plate is pretty classical. A plump ravioli of quail to start comes with a garlicky, truffled puree of beautifully green Savoy cabbage. Those small cubes of salt water with the salmon and foie gras produce a dish whose innovation lies in plating rather than on the tongue. But the saltiness of the cubes adds a kick to the gloriously fresh salmon. It's a plate of summer.
My main course of pigeon with a pastilla (a Moroccan savoury pastry) of the meat sweetened with cherries came with pistachios, those cubes of chocolate jelly and a rich, meaty sauce flavoured with Valrhona chocolate. My companion's best end of lamb with broccoli puree, girolles and couscous was, to my mind, as Provençal an execution of a lamb dish as you could hope to find. Like the salmon starter, it was a dish that fitted the name of the restaurant.
Puddings - one of banana half a dozen ways with a little space dust in the base to add pep, and a white-chocolate bavarois with a hint of Indian spicing - were executed with appropriate indulgence. The only thing that didn't work came among the petits fours: a cube of apple speared on a plastic pipette of cinnamon syrup. Slip cube into mouth, squeeze syrup in behind.
But my main question mark over Midsummer House hangs above cost. Cambridge is a fine cosmopolitan town; what it isn't is London. It doesn't have London rents or London staff costs. Yet £48.50 for three courses is London pricing. It's good, in places very good, but it ain't £48.50 good, however often you intone Ferran Adria's name in support of your cooking. Particularly when that grandstanding isn't reflected where it counts - on the plate.
