Bistro Bruno Loubet, Zetter Hotel, 86-88 Clerkenwell Rd, London EC1, 020 7324 4455. Meal for two, including wine and service, £90
Bruno Loubet is a defibrillator made cheffly flesh. For many years, despite the efforts of skilled restaurateurs, the dining room of the Zetter Hotel in Clerkenwell looked like the kind of place where polite conversation went to die. I drove past it many evenings and was struck by the empty back-lit silhouettes of hard tables and hard chairs. It was flatlining. Go have a look now. Sure, they've done stuff with the lighting, added a few vases of flowers, but the decor has one other vital ingredient that has made a difference: people. The place finally has a beating heart.
Loubet may not have cooked in London for a long time – what the hell was he doing with himself in Australia? – but it seems there is some rigid collective memory of his cooking, that sweet marriage of exquisite technique and huge, robust flavours, which has brought the crowds back. He cooks like a man determined to make you remember: not just his particular dishes, but what ingredients can taste like, why everybody has spent so bloody long sucking up to French chefs, why we bother going out to restaurants at all.
Sometimes, just the sound of dishes should do the job of explaining: guinea fowl boudin blanc with peas, ham and barley; snails and meatballs with royale de champignons; confit lamb shoulder, white bean and preserved lemon purée with green harissa; Valrhona chocolate tartlet, caramel and salted butter ice cream. Doesn't that tell you enough? Doesn't it? What, you want describing words, too? Oh, very well then.
That first dish summed up everything about the food here. The fresh, spring-like stew of peas, ham and barley was rich and comforting and savoury. But what really made it was the boudin, the guinea fowl turned into the very lightest of mousses before being poached and caramelised. Bloody hell, but it was good. And close to miraculous for £7 in London.
A similar trick was present in a dish of snails and tiny meatballs surrounding a warm set mousse heavy with essence of mushroom, the whole bound in a dark sauce. Loubet likes his sauces dark. A disc of braised hare, the very darkest and densest of meats, came with a sauce so black it sucked the light out of the room. On top of the hare, a pert ravioli of puréed onion; around its edges a swirl of soft pumpkin purée punched with mandarin. Gosh.
The nearest I can come to a criticism is that the caramel and salted butter ice cream with the unctuous (dark) chocolate tart was a little over salted – though only when tasted against my crisp-leaved millefeuille of quince and apple, with its cooling drift of chilled orange blossom sabayon. And as you are not meant to taste desserts against each other, it's not much in the way of a negative.
There's a strong wine list, with lots of choice under £30, plus selections by the carafe, a smart front of house operation and, at the end, a bill that doesn't make you feel you've been violated. It's what restaurants are meant to be like.
