Glas, 3 Park Street, London SE1 (020 7357 6060). Dinner for two, including wine and service, £70
This being a modern, forward-thinking sort of newspaper, and Glas being a modern, forward-thinking sort of Swedish restaurant, you might well expect this review to begin with some smart-arsed way of saying, ooh, it's not all herring, you know. Except that of the first seven dishes on the grazing menu, four of them involve herring. There's glasmaster herring and matjes herring and herring with vodka and lime. Booze also pops up on the menu rather randomly like this, as if it has been put together by a dipsomaniac aunt trying to hide her habit: vodka with the herring, Riesling with the monkfish, Cabernet Sauvignon with the reindeer, gin in the mousse, cider in the ice cream... What's that about the Swedes being a nation of depressed alcoholics? I won't hear a word of it.
Yes, I know. I've only mentioned three herring dishes. The fourth is a selection of the first three, which is what we choose, and very good it was, too. For some reason - probably to do with that Woody Allen movie in which a Swedish herring salesman is conducting a torrid affair with a member of his inventory - I've always thought of the herring as a comedy fish.
Here at Glas (which means 'glass' in Swedish) it gets to do serious drama. These are slices of thick, dense, succulent fish, cuts from the kind of herring that could beat up all the other herring on the street, whether marinated in sweet vinegar or in a more spiced cure or in the creamy vodka and lime marinade.
Glas sits in a narrow street in London's Borough and is the property of one Anna Mosesson who, for a number of years, has run the Scandalicious stall just across the way in Borough market.
Her stand has long been famous for its gravad lax and rightly so: served here they are silky, sexy slices, echoing with the flavour of the dill and salt with which they have been cured, but without the usual safety net of the seasoned outside being left on to ram home the point. You don't see the dill. You taste it. Likewise, the mustard sauce is a smear rather than a lake.
By the time we got to the tian of salmon tartar with salmon roe and a crisp lemony asparagus salad, I was starting to make baroque comparisons with the best of Japanese food: superb fish, treated with the utmost sympathy, complemented with, but never overwhelmed by its accompaniments. Except this is an awful lot cheaper than high-end Japanese. The herring dishes are £3.95 and nothing on the menu costs more than £7.95.
Those early fish dishes were so good, the others had a tough act to follow, but I liked the gamey slices of reindeer with a red wine reduction, and the spiced venison in a punchy liquorice jus that wasn't afraid to speak its name. Roast monkfish was, to my taste, a little over done, and the creamy sauce and claggy mashed potatoes alongside did it no favours. Honour was saved by some outrageously moreish, irregularly shaped parsley and garlic 'noodles' with sauteed mushrooms.
The room, which used to house the lovable if ragtail bistro called Petit Robert, has been given an elegant, pale-and-cream makeover. Lit by candlelight, it summons up the atmosphere of perpetual Scandinavian summer twilight - it looks like the set for a bit of Strindberg or Ibsen, which isn't a bad thing, though it is staffed by much more cheerful and unsuicidal Swedish women than this suggests.
One of them directed us away from the 'egg cheese' for pudding because 'it isn't very nice'. Bravo! Instead, we had the lightly caramelised lingonberry and gin mousse, the appealing sour edge of which was offset by a scoop of thick, soft butterscotch sauce on the side. An excellent pudding and a great way to make the point that, while it is a lot about herring, Swedish food is also about a bunch of other things, too.
