47-48 St John Square, London EC1 (020 7553 9210). Meal for two, including wine and service: £95
The menu at the Modern Pantry in London's Clerkenwell could, depending upon your point of view, be taken as the city's unselfconscious cosmopolitan, postmodern zest and brio realised in 20 or so dishes, or merely be seen as proof that we're so sated and pandered to that the collapse of western civilisation is now not far away. Anna Hansen's menu barrels across the globe like an imperial army bundling up the loot to take home: here a Middle Eastern influence, there something from Japan. There's a touch of Turkey and a quick fondle down under before it skips gaily across the dew-dampened pastures of temperate Europe.
This outbreak of novelty is, of course, nothing new. Hansen worked alongside fellow Kiwi Peter Gordon for a long while, and there is a clear and direct line between his brand of fusion cooking and hers. These are treacherous waters. Once one smart chef, blessed with good taste and cojones, starts throwing za'tar at the scallops or combining smoked chilli with sashimi, lots of wet-lipped young cooks think they can do it, too. The result is usually a culinary disaster: or, dishes which deserve to go straight from plate to bin without ever troubling the diner's colon.
I once claimed there was nothing wrong with fusion cooking… as long as Peter Gordon was doing it. There is no doubt that Hansen deserves to be co-opted into that thought. She can cook. The restaurant, which occupies a cleanly modernised space amid Clerkenwell's Georgian clutter, is very much a chunk of now. It is hard surfaces and sunlight and slabs of glass. There is also something very contemporary about the way the menu descriptions are realised on the plates. They are calm and unshowy.
This makes a kind of sense. When Peter Gordon first started doing his thing at the Sugar Club in the 1990s, the culinary kaleidoscope had just been shaken. It was a time of froth and drama. We were open to someone who could execute ludicrous ideas well. But time passes. Look across the capital now and it is as though the pieces of glittering confetti in that kaleidoscope are settling. We now understand that there is no such thing as "Indian" food, but many different regional culinary traditions from the subcontinent; we are au fait with the strands that pull through Japanese food, with the provinces of China, with the things that distinguish, say, Vietnamese from Thai. We have also discovered a pronounced taste for the uncomplicated. Ponce has (for the moment) had its day. There is less money to be made from laundering restaurant tablecloths than once there was.
In short, to pull off this kind of fusion cooking right now requires poise. For the most part it is there. A perfectly made omelette of sugar-cured prawns, spring onions and coriander comes with a scoop of sweet smoked chilli sambal which is more a tickle than a punch. A crab salad with sugar snap peas and shaved turnip declares a yuzu soy dressing, but is more about the quality of the ingredients than the wanderlust of the chef. A grilled onglet, marinated in miso and tamarind, is a proper piece of beef with a fine smear of aioli on the side, alongside some crisp cassava chips. It is steak frites by any other name.
The only question mark for me is over a dish of roast cod with rings of cuttlefish sitting atop a thick sauce described as a turmeric laksa, in which lay leaves of Little Gem lettuce, the whole scattered with a breadcrumb and chorizo mix. Even allowing for my pathological laksa fetish, it felt like an opportunity missed. Or, to put it another way, if a plate of food merely makes me dream about the root version from which it is drawn then something is wrong. I tried Hansen's low-key, over-muted laksa and immediately wanted to be eating the echt laksa from Noodle Express down the road.
Things picked up again at dessert. We had a scoop of their gooey cinder-toffee ice cream, which had just the right bitter-caramel edge. A dessert listed as, deep breath, "frozen liquorice hot chocolate, plum, pistachio marshmallow and macadamia rocky road, crème fraîche sorbet" was a glass full of deep, dark grown-up things; a trifle with lime curd, sponge, blackcurrant custard and beads of mint tapioca was its sunny, light-hearted cousin. None of this is everyday food. It is too restless for that, too knowing. But in a town like London, which is nothing like the country in which it sits, it makes a twisted kind of sense.
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or visit theguardian.com/profile/jayrayner for all his reviews in one place
