La Petite Maison
54 Brooks Mews, London W1 (020 7495 4774)
Meal for two, including wine and service, £110
With certain restaurants you need to know more than what they serve and whether it's any good. You need a user's manual, a little advice to help you get the best out of it. La Petite Maison is such a place. If you choose to go, and I think you should, here's what you do: before drinks, menus or even the word 'hello' has been offered, tell your waiter that you want the whole Blackleg chicken and that it should go in the oven now. Why? First, the poulet de noir au foie gras, to give the dish its full menu name, is a whole chicken and it takes at least an hour to roast one of those properly, and you don't want to be twiddling your thumbs between starter and main course. And secondly, it is the most thrilling dish to arrive on a London menu in years.
This was unexpected, at least to me. Generally I go to restaurants so people with taste and training can cook for me things I can't be fagged or don't know how to do. Roast chicken is neither of those. At home I do a mean roast chicken, cooked in the French style, hot and fast and turned regularly.
In all the years I have been doing this job, I have found only one other place that could send me out a chicken that was better than mine. That restaurant is L'Ami Louis, but eating theirs on a regular basis is impractical, not least because it's in Paris and reservations are harder to find than an elegant sentence in a Jeffrey Archer novel. Oh yes, and the L'Ami Louis chicken - a stunning poulet de Bresse of crisp skin and flavourful meat, which Simon Hopkinson cites as the inspiration for the title dish in his book Roast Chicken and Other Stories - costs around £65. I had to wait for my 40th birthday before I was willing to spend that slab of my own cash on it.
By contrast, the Blackleg at La Petite Maison costs £35. It's not exactly cheap, but for that you get more than enough bird for two (enough for three, if you work the starters carefully). It is, I would say, as good as the L'Ami Louis version, plus it comes with a sizeable lobe of soft-centred roast foie gras and a chunky fried crouton with which to mop up the rich, garlicky juices. I will be eating it again. And again.
I have now told you the most important thing about La Petite Maison - what you must order - but I suppose I should fill you in on the other stuff. It is the London outpost of a decades-old restaurant in Nice, famously overseen by a grumpy French gal called Nicole Ruby who likes to bark at the customers, but who will not be here barking at anyone. La Petite Maison has been brought to London by the team behind the modern Japanese restaurants Roka and Zuma, though there is, thank God, no attempt to bring the flavours of Japan to the culinary traditions of Provence. This is Nicoise food from first to last. It is housed in a rather pretty cream-coloured dining room, which is noisy, large and triangular shaped and will, I think, become a favourite with those who like to see and be seen. Because it is in Mayfair it is, sadly, overpopulated by the sort of crowd whose favoured cologne is eau de money. Perhaps an assault by The Observer readership can balance things out.
Certainly it is not priced according to the neighbourhood. While it is hardly a bargain, I think it represents value for money, with precise renditions of classic dishes using top ingredients. The portion of Nicoise salad for £7.50 is a good size and assembled from the best gear - from the sweet tomatoes through to the tuna and the anchovies. That classic Provencal tart, pissaladiere, brought five rectangles of crisp pastry and sweet onions with a perfect balance of anchovy. We also loved the sweet baby broad beans, with not a hint of flouriness, dressed with pecorino and olive oil of uncommon depth and fragrance.
The main courses are all advertised for sharing and include a large veal chop, an equally grown-up rib-eye and turbot with a sauce of artichokes, white wine and olive oil. But try the chicken first. (Or did I say that already?) It comes with a good, if unremarkable, dauphinoise. Another self-declared speciality is their macaroni with truffles sold at the market price, which the night we went was £22. It was nice but not £22 nice. Order the green beans for £3.50 instead. At the end we had a perfect creme brulee, in a portion big enough for two, and with all this we drank a reasonably priced Provencal rosé from a page-long list entirely dedicated to these great wines. In a city which appears to have skipped a season and moved straight from spring to autumn, La Petite Maison offered a wonderful blush of summer.
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