9/10
Telephone 020-8742 7474
Address 162-164 Chiswick Road, London W4
Open All week, Mon-Thurs, 7am-midnight; Fri, 7am-1am; Sat, 8am-1am; Sun, 8am-11pm
Price Three courses à la carte with wine, £35-45 a head
Whether David Gest, Jan Leeming and the rest of the I'm A Celebrity ... Get Me Out Of Here! crew would appreciate the irony I'm not sure but, shortly before this year's show began, its hosts became investors in a new restaurant in which no part of a kangaroo - not its eyes, not its testes, not even the anus Leeming so peremptorily rejected in one of her Bushtucker Trials - is served.
Presumably struggling with the problem of where to go out in their home suburb of Chiswick, west London, without being driven mad by fans, the adorable Geordie duo did the obvious thing and stuck some fraction of their ITV income into a private members' club opened by Nick Jones, the chap behind Soho House, on whose missus Kirsty Young's Desert Island Discs Ant and Dec will doubtless soon appear.
Beneath that club, and available to all, is the High Road Brasserie, and while (given the mildly nauseating nature of any liaison between media plutocrats) it would be comforting to report that it is a disaster, in fact it's among the best new restaurants I've come across in ages. Even after several meals (including an excellent cooked breakfast), it remains, like A'n'D themselves, impossible not to like. A friend we bumped into there said the food can be patchy, and there are moans about service on punters' websites, but apart from a faint dusting of supercilious self-importance from the smartly-aproned French staff, we could find little fault ... and "we" includes my mother, the world's most demanding restaurant diner, who once sent back a Scotch on the grounds that "this ice is too cold".
A large, rectangular building with an awning at the front to enable alfresco eating, the place looks great inside in a modern brasserie sort of way, with squishy banquettes, antique mirrors, globe hanging lamps and, the pièce de résistance, a pretty, mosaic-style tiled floor that looks as if plucked from a medieval church, but feels like some form of lino.
The menu is even better looking than the room, being one of those lists from which you want everything - little tasting dishes to go with drinks ("Scotch'd quails eggs" sound intriguing), seafood platters, fancy sandwiches, brasserie classics and such hearty winter warmers as pork chops and lamb casserole.
There is an amazingly cheap set menu, at £15 for three courses, which my wife and mother both raved about on a previous visit but, loth to insult the credo of the expense-account diner, the four of us went à la carte and, tiresomely enough, raved about almost everything. One slightly weak spot was a fish soup so thick and potent that it needed diluting. But Coquille St Jacques, served with chunks of mushroom, were superb, as was foie gras pan-fried with a semi-caramelised sauce of raisins and balsamic vinegar, while my cream of artichoke soup was startlingly good - thick, creamy, delicate and full of garlicky croutons.
All four main courses were outstanding. The lamb casserole turned out to be three cutlets, correctly cooked to a sort of russety pink and falling off the bone, served from their own metal dish with nice, fluffy mash. The mixed grilled fish was a lovely, simple mixture of ultra-fresh tuna, scallops and halibut, the latter appearing in another piscine collation alongside clams, mussels and a healthy dash of saffron. My roast duck was perfectly crispy on the outside, pink and full of flavour within, and came in a rich wine gravy and prettily served on top of beds of spinach and potato rosti.
Puddings, ordered from an appealingly old-fashioned list, took too long to arrive, but were excellent when they did, most notably a sherry trifle and a cinnamony baked Alaska. Overall we couldn't have been much more impressed. Evidently Nick Jones has the same Midas touch in his work as Ant'n'Dec have in theirs, and I'm sure you'll want to join me at this time of year, when our thoughts turn to those in need, in rejoicing at the triumphant and vastly lucrative alliance between these two nascent media dynasties.
