Maison Bleue, 31 Churchgate Street, Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk (01284 760 623). Meal for two including wine and service, £100
Sitting at a table by herself in Maison Bleue's tidy dining room in Bury St Edmunds was a little old lady in a fine hat eating oysters off the half shell. She deposited drops of shallot vinegar on the bivalves with the precision of a biologist placing samples on to slides for study, and seemed deeply contented in her labours. I can see why. Maison Bleue describes itself as "the unconventional fish restaurant", which must be more of a reflection on what the others round these parts are like, for there is nothing terribly unconventional about it. The menu is full of things such as moules marinières, fish soup, Dover sole, and those oysters. Unless, of course, the general convention in this corner of Suffolk where restaurants are concerned is for the decor to be a visual car crash, the food an abomination and the service an afterthought. Maison Bleue boasts none of these things. It is a rather lovely little business, serving smart but unshowy food with a minimum of fuss and bother to a clearly discerning crowd.
Almost all of them would, like the solo diner, fit a demographic that might involve the word senior. As one of my companions put it: "There's an awful lot of mail-order cashmere in this room." Around us sat various elders of the tribe carefully eating their way through their children's legacy in a very agreeable manner. Then again, with three courses on the lunch menu priced at £18.95, there might just be a little left over for the kids. Yes, the starters on that menu included the bargain-basement mackerel, but it was prepared with uncommon care. Usually kitchens like to spank this fish within an inch of its life by the application of fierce heat. It's meant to be the only language mackerel understands. Here the rolled fillet had been slow cooked, lending this king of cheap oily fish a distinctly regal depth. It came on spinach and a pitch-perfect beurre blanc, a boilerplate sauce any piscine restaurant ought to be able to ace, and which this one did.
A crisp galette of minced pig trotter crusted with hazelnuts, a starter from the main menu, proved this was a kitchen which could do land as well as sea, even allowing for the inclusion of a tiny bit of bone. Sensitively cooked seared scallops with a single rustic gnocchi (or gnoccho, there being only one of them) were only diminished by a slightly overseasoned seafood sauce.
Main courses came down to bits of impeccably cooked fresh fish on purées of things, and while it's tempting to make some cheap gag about this suiting the dental condition of the clientele, I shall resist. King among these was a whole gilt-head bream, expertly trimmed of the bits you didn't want – sans eyes, sans head, sans everything – seared with enough garlic, ginger and chilli to remind you there is a whole world beyond the confines of Suffolk, though not ostentatiously so. I'm sure even our lady in the hat would have found this appealing. With our mains came an absurdly buttery purée of swede that was so soft and whipped and silky I could imagine amorous types finding outré uses for it, although that probably tells you more about how my fetid mind works than it does the blissfully innocent swede. Certainly it takes a French kitchen to do something so indecent to such a gnarly English root.
Desserts were a step up in presentation, but a slight step down in execution. The plates came piped with the thin outlines of petals or dragonfly wings realised in chocolate, the spaces in between filled with crème anglaise as a setting for perfect rectangles of a milk-chocolate mousse topped with a fine layer of jelly or another of apple. Both looked delicious but had been made with a heavy hand on the setting agents. Far better was a still-warm ring of caramelised pineapple with other supporting bits and bobs.
No matter. This is judging a far better-than-average local restaurant by its own high standards. That is carried on into the service, which is performed with the minimum of fuss by a selection of pretty young things, the chaps in waistcoats, the gals in A-line skirts, all of them with the sort of precise wiggle and walk that adds a certain theatre. And so we sipped our coffees and ate the sugar-crusted fruit jellies that came with them and concluded that, all things considered, Bury St Edmunds – or at least this part of it – was a very nice place to be.
Side order: The odd couple
Let's give up a big warm Oy vey! to welcome the opening of The Gorbals, a new restaurant in Los Angeles which specialises in Jewish-Glaswegian cuisine, a sadly overlooked gastronomic genre, if the menu is anything to go by: bacon-wrapped matzoh balls, chicken thighs stuffed with haggis, and pork belly braised in kosher wine. What do you mean it's a cultural non-sequiteur? LA is a very secular town, and this may be exactly what it needs. Indeed, according to Jonathan Gold, the rather marvellous restaurant critic of LA Weekly, it's actually rather good. Albeit a little bit silly.
