Rhodes W1
Great Cumberland Place, London W1 (020 74793737)
Meal for two, including wine and service, £150
Gary Rhodes is back. You may not be aware he ever went away. He's had a restaurant halfway up Tower 42 in the City of London since 2003, and 18 months ago he opened a brasserie at the Cumberland Hotel by Marble Arch, to decidedly mixed reviews. But compared with the days of his two Michelin-starred restaurants - Rhodes in the Square and City Rhodes - both of which closed four years ago, things have been quiet of late: no big terrestrial TV shows, no restaurants worthy of his name.
That has been a shame. There was a moment not long back when he finally cut that ludicrous erectile hair of his and calmed his TV persona, and it was at last possible to focus on the cooking. For me his Cookery Year was one of the best food shows on British TV, mostly because there was no compromise. If it required salt and lashings of butter to get the desired effect, he used salt and lashings of butter. It was up to you whether you followed suit. Around the same time I ate at City Rhodes and the meal summed up his love of solid British produce and his expert execution.
Now he has opened a high-end restaurant in the same hotel that houses the brasserie, and once again the best of Rhodes is on show. The food is less British than French - only a fine braised faggot recalls the repertoire that made him famous - but it is nevertheless marked by the man's acute good taste and instinctive understanding of the word 'enough'.
His head chef, Brian Hughson - for of course the man himself is not always on site - clearly knows how to do what Rhodes wants. I should say I am not a massive fan of the restaurant itself. Why in God's name hotels think people want to eat in a windowless room escapes me. The ceilings are hung with huge, round diamante chandelier-type things, which scatter fragments of light through the gloom and give the place a sepulchral rather than glamorous air. And then there is all the flounce of 'faine daining' that you know drives me nuts: the adolescent waiter ferreting about in your lap with a napkin, the topping up of glasses, the scraping of nonexistent crumbs from the tablecloth.
Put up with this for the food, and do so soon, for I suspect they will quickly raise the price from the current £45 for three courses. Take the canapes, a heart-stopping burst of richness in the shape of a deep-fried croquette of smoked eel with a cooling horseradish cream, or two slivers of crisp puff pastry sandwiching some truffled gruyere cheese. If that doesn't get you going you are either a vegan, lacking a pulse, or both.
Very nice indeed, but it was my companion's starter which convinced us this was something special: in a bowl, three lozenges of steamed smoked salmon, on to which was poured a salmon soup of uncommon depth. This was a dish which gave you more to think about the more you ate, the soft and perfectly cooked fish finding its mirror in the furthest reaches of the fish stock. My suckling pig ravioli arrived looking like an illustration from that fine Seventies book Rude Food, the two pert, mammary pasta parcels sitting side by side with a little deep-fried porker for nipples. Here, the admittedly fine pasta was more a pig delivery system, yielding up a great tangle of meat, softened by the bramley apple puree on the side.
One of the pleasures here is a longish menu of tasting-sized dishes which can be inserted as a midcourse, and we inserted like our lives depended on it. Best of the two was a simple white asparagus risotto with, on the side, some green asparagus under a light goat's cheese hollandaise. The power of this meal lay in the precise execution. It said goat's cheese hollandaise, and that was what you got. Likewise my main of salt-roasted pigeon, served as pink as a tart's knickers, was advertised as coming with a lemon and cumin gravy. And indeed the pigeon jus tasted lightly and very pleasingly of both lemon and cumin. And then there was that dear braised faggot, which came with sticky onion marmalade, and a pink fillet of beef that did the cow justice. We finished with an impeccable raspberry souffle devoid of eggyness, and a millefeuille made of thin, crisp, shiny sheets of dark chocolate and a lighter chocolate mousse.
There were stumbles: an underwhelming taster of crab with avocado; a double oyster dish which paired the mollusc with 'chicken oysters', to little effect. Ignore these. This is serious stuff, which deserves to be enjoyed by more than just the four tables that were there the night I was in. One of those tables was occupied by another restaurant critic, and he too was cooing. Of course, the opinions of a so-called rival generally count for nothing, but he did use the word 'spectacular' and I think I have to agree. Welcome back, Gary.
