North Road, 69-73 St John Street, London EC1 (020 3217 0033). Meal for two, including wine and service: £110
There were good reasons for choosing North Road as my last restaurant to review before Christmas. With the first heavy snowfalls clogging the capital's streets, and a sky the colour of gunmetal, it made a kind of sense to eat somewhere that takes its cues from Scandinavia. Inside it is all clean lines and blonde wood and a cool, steady light. Danish chef Christoffer Hruskova trained at some of the same restaurants in Copenhagen as the much-lauded René Redzepi of Noma, this year declared the best restaurant in the world in the annual rankings of these things, and he wears that heritage about as lightly as Scandinavians tend to, which is to say not lightly at all.
Which is the second reason for choosing North Road, because if anything came to define 2010 it was the way in which Noma, with its die-hard commitment to Nordic food, set the agenda for everyone else. Chefs who used to get their ingredients merely by standing at the kitchen door and waving in the deliveries this year got down on their knees in the hedgerows for a good old forage. Then they told you all about the foraging they'd been doing so you knew just how much they cared. They banged on about bitter herbs plucked from little-known roundabouts on the A327, and extolled the virtues of bulbs and berries which we used to leave to the birds. It was both rather refreshing and, in the way of hot trends, mildly irritating, too.
Hruskova's cooking is about as close as you'll get to Redzepi's without buying a plane ticket, though to be honest it's still some way off the precision and acute sense of balance. It's good without having Redzepi's brilliance. Being in London he cannot raid the Nordic larder, for that would be against doctrine. Heaven forfend. Instead, the ingredients are distinctly British: think elderberries and salsify, celery and Dorset shrimp. But what he does do, pace Noma, is reject those French or Mediterranean foodstuffs which would make his dishes something other. So no olive oil or olives. No tomatoes or bulb garlic. No chocolate in the desserts. He is more likely to season with vinegars than salts, to rely on smoking and pickling and leave ingredients raw where possible. The result is subtle and, for being unusual, intriguing. Smoked scallops, only just cooked through, come with a julienne of apple and a leaf of bright apple jelly; glazed sweetbreads are paired with lightly pickled onions and hidden under a sheet of crinkly milk skin – the thin solid you get when you boil up milk.
It was a good start. And so, courtesy of a segue worthy of a hairy 1970s Radio One DJ, to my first award, Starter of the Year 2010, which has to go to Eddie Gilbert's in Ramsgate and their beautifully simple, exquisitely executed soft duck egg with crisp breaded and deep-fried smoked eel soldiers. It was, as the best food often is, both supremely adult and curiously infantilising. In a year in which, despite the recession, big-name openings kept coming, finding such a good but low-key operation as Eddie Gilbert's was a joy.
At the other end of the spectrum it seems a little mean to kick a man when he's down, though when that man is Gordon Ramsay it doesn't seem mean enough to stop. Because of all those big openings, the one that wins the Why Did the Annoying Schmucks Even Bother? Award has to be his Petrus. It was dull, expensive and, like the man himself these days, tiresome. The determination to hold on to the Petrus name, given that it a) isn't his and b) had been built up in London by his erstwhile protégé Marcus Wareing, just looked childish. Much like… oh, never mind.
Far better was Bar Boulud at London's Mandarin Oriental Hotel, a Frenchman's smart take on a Manhattan brasserie, which arrived fully formed and quickly stole the Best Burger in Town Award. Dense, flavourful juicy meat; proper bun; good but not silly accompaniments. Less pleasing was their insistence that you could only have the table for two hours. If I'm going to drop £100 on dinner I'll take as a long as I like, thank you very much. In the same vein the Most Profoundly Irritating Trend of 2010 goes to the arrival of computerised reservation books, which require robotic front-of-house staff to demand not just a surname for the booking but a first name, too. I don't want to be on first-name terms with restaurants. I don't want to be on their Christmas-card list. It was never necessary before, and it shouldn't be necessary now.
The person who took my booking at North Road, which uses just such a system, got quite stroppy with me when I said they could put Mister as my first name. Thankfully their cooking made it worthwhile. We very much liked a main course of monkfish with bitter sea beets and sweet pickled clams. Best of all, though, was my loin of venison served very rare and with beetroot, which made the whole plate look like it had been devised courtesy of an industrial accident in an abattoir. In a good way. The slices of venison had been rolled in burnt hay ash, which gave it a fabulous savoury kick, and laid on top were jewels of smoked bone marrow. An impressive dish. But not quite the winner of my award for Main Course of the Year, which has to go to Bistro Bruno Loubet, and the chef's dark, unctuous hare royale, topped by a ravioli of puréed onion and surrounded by a silky pumpkin purée punched up with mandarin. The return of Loubet to London, along with the likes of Joel Antunes and others, is a sign of just how much of a draw the British capital has become. And if that feels terribly London-centric, you'll just have to live with it. Because London is where they're coming to cook, not Droitwich.
Mind you, we do have to take the rough with the smooth, because we also get the real stinkers. Back in January I described dinner at the Criterion in Piccadilly as a serious contender for the title of Worst Restaurant Experience of the Year, despite that year being only three weeks old. We have reached December and nothing came close in gut-twisting, why-did-they-do-it?, someone-must-be-punished awfulness. A violation of the good name of bouillabaisse, a crab risotto which left me needing therapy for which I'm still paying, and a member of staff who kept crossing the restaurant wearing black elbow-length rubber gloves, as though he was helping a cow with an especially tricky breach birth. All in all a terrible waste of a truly beautiful room.
As ever this year, English was treated to cruel and unusual punishment by chefs and restaurateurs whose menu-writing skills suggested it was their second language. The absurdly pretentious paragraph-long menu descriptions at Cabbage Hall in Cheshire were only the very worst examples. But let's accentuate the positive with the Best Menu Description Award, which goes to the Curlew in East Sussex for its fabulously named chops and chips: beef short rib slow-cooked over two days, with a side of chips cooked in dripping. I adored it, even if my cardiologist was less impressed.
In brief: Most Welcome Arrival Award, for being so simple and yet so good, was the Italian Trullo at Highbury Corner, which delivered on almost every level and made it look easy. Most Cynical Opening is still Tom's Terrace at London's Somerset House. A dull menu, which read like it had been phoned in by Tom Aikens, and stupid prices combined to make this a masterclass in how not to do it.
Which leaves only Best Dessert. It has to be said North Road is a serious competitor here, not for its riff on Jerusalem artichokes, which was interesting without being lovable, but for a plate of caramel creams and mousses, the flavours punched through with liquorice. Of all the things we ate here this is the one for which I would return. It was the sort of dish whose end you mourn. But the winner of the title, by a dribble of syrup and a side order of insulin, was the sticky toffee brioche pudding at the Kingham Plough in the Cotswolds. It tasted like it sounds, and looked like a slab of pork belly. If you've been reading this column closely over the past year you'll know that this would do it for me. And if you have been reading with such attention to detail, well then, thank you. I'm touched, in that very special adult way. Have a great Christmas.
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or visit theguardian.com/profile/jayrayner
