5 St James's Street, London SW1 (020 7930 2030). Meal for two, including drinks and service: £130
Boulestin, being a big, sloppy wallow in culinary nostalgia, is bang on trend. If anyone had attempted to open this in the 90s, when it was illegal to launch a restaurant which wasn't gargantuan, white-walled and chrome accessorised or that didn't serve food in hoity-toity towers, everybody would have pointed and laughed. But we are grown-ups now. We value the classics, or at least our version of them.
The curious thing is that the man behind Boulestin, Joel Kissin, is one of those most responsible for infesting London with white-walled, chromium dining rooms. For more than a decade he was a partner with Sir Terence in Conran Restaurants. He opened Quaglinos, Bluebird, Mezzo and a bunch of others. What he didn't know about serving towers of food on big white plates wasn't worth knowing.
And now? Now, after a long absence, he is indulging in an act of culinary homage. His new restaurant, at the quiet end of St James's Street, revives the name of another. It was originally opened in Covent Garden in 1926 by Marcel Boulestin, the great anglophile French cookery writer who died in the 1940s leaving behind his restaurant. It closed in 1994.
Boulestin was the sort of man London had a lot of time for in the 1920s: a taste maker who turned his hand to everything from interior design to writing fiction. From photographs he looks like a chap who could do serious damage to a good bottle of cognac; he was all brilliantined hair and Homburg at a jaunty angle. One day, short on money, he suggested to a friend that he wrote a cookbook, eventually published in 1923 as Simple French Cooking for English Homes. It was a success and others followed; in 1937 he became the first chef to appear on British television. He was a huge influence on the writer Elizabeth David. His is a name we should take care to remember, to which matter Kissin has attended.
The original Boulestin, the celeb-infested Wolseley of its day, was said to be the most expensive restaurant in London. The New York Times described it as the place to get "the most perfect and recherché dinner to be found in all London". There were circus-themed murals, carpets the colour of spilt claret and curtains of yellow brocade. Camp at all? Heaven forfend, darling. It sounds to me as butch and manly as a legion of well-oiled Roman soldiers.
So what, apart from the name, does the new Boulestin share with its predecessor? Right now, not a whole lot, save a certain spirit. It's not yet full of famous faces, or any faces for that matter. We arrive to find the dining room completely empty; by the end of the evening only four tables will be occupied, one in each corner, so that we all feel like chess pieces in retreat across the black and white chequered floor.
Nor is the decor anybody's definition of outrageous. The space, for many years the restaurant L'Oranger, is by darkness dressed in achingly tasteful shades of caramel and butterscotch. There are oatmeal-coloured leather banquettes, and frosted glass screens and the amber glow of downlighters over classy bits of period art – the period being somewhere louche and pre-Second World War, before the darkness came.
And yet, for all its emptiness, it's easy to see how this place will work; how, with the tables filled, the room will bubble with chatter. It all depends on the food, which in some ways also departs from what interested Boulestin. He lived in London for a reason, partly it seems to escape the petty chauvinism of his countrymen, especially where food was concerned; as Elizabeth David pointed out, he showed an early interest in the occasional curry, and dishes both from the Basque country and Ireland.
The new Boulestin menu does not. It couldn't be more knowingly French if you slapped a beret on its head and a Gauloise between its lips. It's all rillettes de Tours and oeuf en gelée. Any canard here will end up well and truly confited; all coqs deep in the vin. At first, it's not entirely convincing.
I order the ceps Bordelaise. The waiter tells me that, while the menu was printed only two hours ago – weirdly it's exactly the same as the one that's been online for weeks – they may have run out of ceps. Why? Who ate them? The kitchen porter? The waiter runs off to the kitchen and returns, hands wringing like a washing machine on a spin cycle, to declare they have indeed gone. Instead, I have the soused herring with potato salad and it is fine, though not a patch on the voluminous portion I served myself from the pot at Chez Georges in Paris. An artichoke salad is merely an assemblage.
After that things cheer up hugely. The dish of the day is tête de veau, one of those absurdly difficult items that should be left to the pros: there's the butchery to get the skin and fat off the baby cow's bonce, then the binding of the head meat around the tongue before the slow rolling simmer for up to seven hours. This was the very thing done brilliantly: lots of meaty bits, and soft jellied bits and a broth that was the essence of animal. Oh, stop scowling. It's what nose-to-tail eating means. A brace of perfectly roast quail, with a puddle of braised lentils flavoured with sorrel, came with a finger bowl to prove intent. Cooking quail so the skin is crisp and salty and the meat still moist isn't easy. This kitchen knows how.
Desserts were, if anything, better: a smear-it-all-over-me-now set custard flavoured with glugs of Sauternes alongside some boozy Agen prunes, just in case you missed the point. There were crisp, caramel-topped profiteroles which crunched beneath your teeth before the thick whorls of cream exploded outwards. My companion accurately described the wine list as "spendy"; it's one of those where getting a bargain requires forking out more than you intended.
Indeed, that describes the whole operation. There is a cheaper café area at the front, and a fixed-price menu for early evening and late night which is "just" £24.50 for three courses. But that's not where their heart is. Marcel Boulestin was clearly a man who believed life is for pleasure, which happens to be a pleasure afforded only those with the dosh. In that sense the new Boulestin hits the mark.
News bites
If you like your restaurants with a bit of history try Rules, which opened in 1798. It's an English Victorian fantasy of velvet, shiny brass and sporting print. Yet, for all that, it has never been a prisoner to its history. The menu may be famed for its suet puddings and game – much of it from its Teesdale estate – but there's also a modern light touch. It does dinner properly. Rules, 35 Maiden Lane, London WC2 (020 7836 5314).
A moment's silence: this weekend sees the closure of Rhodes 24 at Tower 42 in London, the last Gary Rhodes restaurant in the capital. However his TV persona was viewed his food was terrific; long before the hipster British renaissance, Rhodes (right) was getting serious about our native culinary traditions. Apart from one in Plymouth his restaurants are now all in the United Arab Emirates. A great shame.
Rhodes 24 will be replaced by the most obtusely named pop-up of the year: AD12 at T42. Or Anthony Demetre (of Soho's Arbutus) for 12 weeks at Tower 42. Why didn't they just say that? ad12.co.uk
