Alexanders at Limpsfield
The Old Lodge, High Street, Limpsfield, Surrey
Tel: 01883 714 365
Price: Meal for two including wine, £150
Alexanders at Limpsfield in Surrey wants a Michelin star like adolescent girls want to snog Johnny Depp. It is gagging for it. Look! They have four kinds of bread and a French maitre d' called Bruno. They do amuse bouche and pre-dessert, and between courses a nice lass scrapes at the table for crumbs that aren't there. But mostly what Alexanders has are prices, big fat ones, of the sort that make the wallet recoil like a small lad's testes on hitting icy water.
Mind you, I knew the prices were there. A few weeks ago the new chef at Alexanders, which recently reopened after a major renovation and name change, turned up on the food website egullet.com asking for advice on how to attract restaurant critics. (The answer, obviously, is to turn up on egullet asking how to attract restaurant critics.) The chef, Simon Attridge, had a star at a previous restaurant, has spent time with both Gordon Ramsay and Heston Blumenthal and, after a stint in China, is determined to make a mark.
The members of egullet had a look at the restaurant's website and, after pointing out that the prose amounted to actual bodily harm upon the English language, told him to drop his prices. Alexanders, they said, was charging as if it were a big, famous London joint. Think £9 to £17 for starters and £17 to £28 for mains. Attridge muttered about ingredient costs and said that, in any case, they also had a cheaper brasserie so it shouldn't be a problem. I thought he was wrong and told him so. I said he should drop those prices by 30 per cent, until he had built a loyal clientele and a reputation. Then slowly prices could build.
I wanted to know whether he had listened to us. The answer is no. Alexanders is certainly an attractive building. It is a hunk of Victoriana with mullioned windows and, inside, a big airy dining room with wood-panelled walls and, to lighten the load, blond-wood floors. And on a weekday lunchtime, just five punters. And no wonder: all they serve is the eviscerating a la carte. No set lunch. Just bankruptcy written up on heavyweight paper. It felt like one of Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares in waiting. A bit of big sweary talk in the kitchen to ram some sense into these people certainly wouldn't hurt.
The first thing I ate was an amuse of Jerusalem artichoke veloute with a slick of truffle oil. For an ambitious chef this was a desperate lurch into cliche. I know you will want to punch me for saying this, but I spent the entirety of 2002 eating pale veloutes dressed with truffled grease. And this one wasn't bold enough to make the argument for revisiting them.
After that, the £17 starter, which bawled 'look at me!' Around the plate a Jackson Pollock nose bleed of reduced red wine, a heap of pain d'epice - crunchy, spiced biscuit crumb - slices of poached pear, a bit of pea shoot salad, and some curls of uncooked celery. Oh yes, and four seared scallops. It speaks volumes that I almost forgot about them. The scallops were cooked perfectly well but were completely overwhelmed by everything else. Curiously though, the soft pear and the crunchy spiced crumb went together beautifully. In short, somewhere in this starter was a lovely dessert struggling to get out. This can never be a good thing.
My main course had similar problems. Venison, apple sauce and black pudding makes sense. Together they shout forest and hill. So what were chunks of chorizo doing in there? I have no idea. But I do know that, at £25, it was a lot of money for not enough. I was asked how I would like the venison served. I said I would leave it to the kitchen. Apparently the kitchen likes its venison a uniform grey.
Things picked up considerably at the sweet end of the meal. A pre-dessert of rhubarb compote with a slightly heavy ginger foam, all sprinkled with space dust and served in a dinky Kilner jar, may have felt like a self-conscious stab at modernism - why the jar? And why the space dust? - but the flavours worked. And, at the end, a Valrhona chocolate fondant, with a tumescent outer shell, hiding a centre of pure liquid, was beyond reproach. I liked the caramel ice cream it came with and the smear of salted caramel sauce across the plate.
The point is that Attridge and his team can, for the most part, cook. They know what they are doing with individual ingredients. But the end result feels contrived and unbalanced and, at the risk of sounding like a stuck record, crushingly, unreasonably expensive. I touched not a drop of alcohol and my bill for one came to £63. Split a bottle of wine and splash out on pre- and post-dinner drinks and you are looking at north of £150 for two. For a restaurant you have never heard of.
At the moment, Alexanders is pricing itself as if it were a destination restaurant. And that, I'm afraid, is not the way to make people go there.
