Angelus
Address: 4 Bathurst Street, London W2
Telephone: 020 7402 0083
Meal For Two, including wine and service, £110
It was when he started talking about the gradient of the vineyard and the average evening temperature over the slopes that I finally got a sense of how big a part of the deal the wine list was at Angelus. I will be honest: given the option, I would usually rather chew my own arms off than listen to a sommelier launch into a lecture. Although I have always loudly proclaimed my sparse wine knowledge, this has nothing to do with a lack of interest. If knowing that the ham tastes the way it does because the pigs were fed on a particular kind of acorn is interesting, then so should the gradient of the vineyard matter to the wine I drink.
It's just that almost all sommeliers are - and I've thought long and hard about this - complete tossers who couldn't communicate their enthusiasm in an accessible manner if retaining their testicles depended upon it.
Thierry Thomasin is different, though I hadn't expected him to be so. For 10 years he was chief sommelier at Le Gavroche, home to a wine list which is to the big bottle brigade what Lourdes is to Catholics, only slightly more holy. Now, after five years as the general manager of Aubergine, he has his own place in London's Bayswater, and he is determined to have fun. Thierry wants you to try. He wants you to taste. He wants to help ease you from your comfort zone, with the help of a wine list packed with bargains and intrigue.
And yes, there are bottles in the three figures but they are lower three figures than elsewhere. Sure, the higher altitudes are irrelevant to me, too. I'd have to own some truly compromising pictures of the gal who puts through my expenses if I were to indulge myself in those. And that does make me wish the list here was arranged by price so I could more readily find the stuff in my range than have to hunt it down through the more logical arrangement of winery and vintage. Still, Thomasin is at hand to lead the search.
The list is predominantly French, which is right, because so is the restaurant. It even looks the part, the conversion from a pub arriving at something like a French country inn, with dark wood panelling, red leather banquettes and big mirrors with curling Art Nouveau frames. (Though only at the front. Do not go and look at the brassy, over-lit lounge at the back until you have finished the first bottle and fancy a laugh.)
Paris is littered with bistros like this, small places of quiet ambition turning out food which soothes rather than thrills by only just elbowing its way out of the narrow confines of the staples. Not that the menu reads that way. This, after all, is London, and here to grab attention demands a bit of display on the menu, some high kicks and cartwheels, perhaps to justify prices for main courses in the mid to high teens. So a dish of beef fillet, with a simple but rich galette of potatoes, artichokes and cheese - protein one side, carbs the other - reads as: 'beef fillet with penja peppers, artichoke and vieux comte cheese pancake with red wine jus'. (The pancake is a mis-translation for a cake cooked in a pan and nothing to do with a crepe.)
The other main, of pigeon - as pink as a schoolboy's cheeks on a winter's morning, complete with wonderfully knobbly claws at the end of the legs - came with earthy stalks of salsify seasoned with young garlic and bacon. The sauces here are the clearest declaration of intent. There's nothing light or modern about these. They are dark, sticky and intense. You could taste them for a week.
The showiest of the dishes we tried was a 'foie gras creme brulee', the very softest and lightest of parfaits topped with a crisp shell of burnt sugar and poppy seeds. It is a stellar dish, the sweet nuttiness of the topping cutting through the richness of the liver. Lots of lesser kitchens will attempt to copy this dish. Almost all of them will screw it up, and then charge a lot more than the £7 here. Alongside that, a duck terrine of different textures was the sort of classic example of the charcutiere's craft, for which we usually take the Eurostar.
And to finish this disjointed journey, at the other end of the meal came a light and fragrant almond panna cotta, with the perfect, fleshy wobble, and a Martini glass full of something made densely of nut, chocolate and biscuit, which accelerated the heart just as it gladdened it.
Angelus is a very new restaurant with its own peculiarities, not least a sound system loudly playing the worst sort of French Europop, which manages to make even Johnny Hallyday sound like Joe Strummer. Every time it came on Thomasin pulled a face like someone had wheeled a bin of rotting entrails through his restaurant.
The music, I suspect, will go. The restaurant, however, has lots of good reasons to hang around.
Word of Mouth, The Observer's food blog, is at observer.co.uk/foodblog
