Rating: 9.75/10
Telephone 020-7495 7309.
Address 20 Mount Street, London W1.
Open All week, lunch noon-3pm (3.30pm Sun), dinner 5.30-11pm (10.30pm Sun).
Price £70-£90 a head for three courses with wine.
Very, very rarely does one come across a new restaurant so beguilingly good that it turns you into a proselytising dullard who buttonholes ostentatiously bored victims and pleads with them to go. And thank the Lord for that - there's little more embarrassing than having the words, "Of course £80 a head is a ridiculous amount for a meal, but ..." interrupted by a brusque, "This is all very interesting, sir, but do you want a copy of the Big Issue or not?" In fact, looking back over a decade, I can think of only two such restaurants (Nahm and Amaya), until the completion of the hat-trick by Scott's of Mayfair.
Technically speaking, "new" is an inexact choice of adjective for a restaurant that opened in 1851. However, the owners of the Ivy, Le Caprice and J Sheekey have spent such a lavish fortune (I'd guess at least £5m) on recreating it that it now bears no relation to the dusty, crusty fossil Scott's had long since become. They've done it brilliantly, too, building the room around a huge and lavish oyster bar, bedecking the dark wood walls with impressive modern art, and tiling the pillars with colourful panels to create such a luxuriant flavour of the Edwardian ocean liner that my friend had to be dissuaded from asking for seasickness pills along with the dazzlingly fresh oysters we shared before the starters.
Mind you, even if he had, they would unquestionably have been provided, because the service is sensational. So relentlessly do the eyes of smartly suited manager types and long-aproned waiters scan the room in search of work that within 1.5 seconds of my friend starting to make a note on the back of his hand, someone had gently pushed a notepad between his fingers.
It is at moments such as this that your reviewer, aware how tedious an unbroken eulogy is to read, casts his net wide in the search for facetious complaints. Here I could find only two: the presence at a neighbouring table of that arch New Labour hanger-on and Murdochian son-in-law Matthew Freud, whom I hadn't sat next to at lunch since we were at the same north London prep school some 30 years ago, offered a chance for earwigging cruelly denied by the noise in a room still bustling beyond belief well after 3pm; and the tiger prawns I had to start came in a piri-piri sauce that was a shade bland for my taste.
That apart, every morsel we ordered, from an enticing, Ivy-style menu dominated by seafood and crustacea, but offering a decent choice of meat and game as well, was immaculate. My friend's dressed crab, a generous serving of white meat served with a gutsy, anchovy-based sauce, was "wonderful ... it might have been caught this morning", while his grilled dover sole, presented for inspection before being removed for deboning and plating up, was "beautifully cooked" and as delectable an example of this regal fish as you will find. My pan-fried skate looked wonderful - all browned and inviting, and topped with periwinkles as well as the traditional nut butter and capers - and tasted better still.
Chips were "crisp, greaseless and exemplary", and two side dishes - braised fennel with olive oil and mashed Jerusalem artichoke hearts - were imaginative and delicious. "They've done it again, they've just gone and done it again!" squealed my friend, sounding uncannily like Barry Davies describing a legendary Francis Lee goal in the 70s ("Look at his face, just look his face!") as he tasted our shared pud, an unbelievably light and springy steamed plum sponge pudding with fantastic custard.
"This is an absolutely tiptop dining experience, and no mistake," he said as we finished coffee, and he was right. Such is the attention to detail that it was no surprise to learn that all the senior staff were trained by those fabled perfectionists Chris Corbin and Jeremy King, the outstanding restaurateurs of the age whose own excellent newcomer St Alban is a few minutes' walk away. The highest compliment I can pay the resurrectors of Scott's is that King and Corbin could have done it little better themselves, and while it is expensive even by seafood standards, I urge you to give it a go.
