Scully, 4 St James’s Market, London SW1Y 4AH (020 3911 6840). Snacks and small plates £8-£14. Large plates £28-£36. Desserts £8-£10. Wines from £32
Last week I reviewed a tiny restaurant in Manchester where a bowl of Tyrolean pasta costs £6 and will sustain you through an Alpine winter. The week before I was banging on about a trattoria in Bristol knocking out three courses for £17. I remind you of these things because, unlike those places, this week’s restaurant will require a chunk of your sterling. It is a fancy place in a fancy development of cream-coloured stone that will never be allowed to discolour. The cheapest bottle of wine this week is £32. The only way you can get out of there for less than £100 at dinner is by not doing it properly. It’s all fur coat and mink-lined knickers.
But oh my, it’s good. For a time, as I worked my way from one of Ramael Scully’s ravishing dishes to another, I imagined wistfully that I wrote for another newspaper; one read solely by plutocrats, so I could wallow in the aesthetics, rather than banging on apologetically about pounds and pence. Then I decided to stop apologising. Regularly, I get emails from people wanting recommendations for a must-go place in London. Scully, for the moment at least, will be the answer. Moan and complain, or save up. Your call.
The eponymous chef is a citizen of everywhere. He was born in Malaysia to a mother of Chinese and Indian heritage and an Irish-Balinese father. He grew up in Sydney. Like so many of the most interesting chefs in London today, he cut his culinary teeth working for Yotam Ottolenghi, notably at Nopi. Accordingly, he cooks from the broadest of larders. There is no doubting the shine and polish on this venture. The space in St James’s Market off Regent Street is a riot of greys, downlighters and clean lines. It looks like those pictures of hot-right-now restaurants in Tallinn or Helsinki slapped across the glossy pages of inflight magazines. All the chefs on show in the open kitchen have the same hair combo: manicured stubble beard, shading into a crew cut. The crockery is in artful shades that should have names like October Leaf Fall or Bruised Cloud.
It’s all very tasteful and relaxed, but what matters is the food on that crockery. It’s with the first proper snack that the fireworks go bang. We receive a bowl of crackers made from the long-cooked collagen of beef tendon, presumably then dehydrated before being thrown into the deep-fat fryer. They look like the undulations of a rocky mountainside. With them is a bowl filled with a white foamy pillow of oyster cream. Dig through that and you reach a mess of slow-cooked tomatoes and lardons. It’s umami squared. It’s also misdirection. This is a very meaty dish. They’ve made crackers out of the connective tissue that makes big bovine legs work. And yet the menu at Scully is more interested in non-meat cookery than anything with a pulse.
I do order both a fish and a meat dish, because I am dutiful and committed. Both are impressive. But in retrospect I would have been happier exploring the vegetable side of proceedings here in more depth. Aubergine is slow-roasted and spiced then served with the salty-sour punch of preserved lemons. To soften the acidity, there’s a dollop of soft curd. Scattered across all this are handfuls of peppery leaves and the fresh pop and squeak of new season peas.
A dish of “forbidden rice” with a “vegetable XO” demands a lot of inverted commas. XO sauce without the quote marks gets its familiar oomph from dried seafood. I’m not sure how they’re doing it here, but there is a rich and compelling nuttiness. It’s topped by discs of daikon, first dehydrated and rehydrated. Is life too short to dehydrate and rehydrate a root vegetable? Apparently not at Scully, where they adore a process. It gives the daikon a pleasing crunch and bite.
The most exquisite of these dishes is a salad of yellow and red tomatoes, with green strawberries, shaved young coconut and sprigs of edible flowers, arranged in a crescent. Alongside is a jug of a vivid sweet-sour dressing in shades of red and rust and green. It is that very rare thing: a beautiful dish that is both worth looking at and worth eating. It would also have been fun to investigate the promise of chargrilled broccoli with chinkiang vinegar and salted egg yolk, or dates with smoked pear, maple shitake, hazelnuts and bitter greens.
Instead it was a plate of flaked sea trout with Jersey royals and brown shrimps, and a butch, buttery dressing. There’s no doubting the skill of its execution. That moment in the year when Jersey royals first appear is always lovely. But it simply pointed up the fact that animal protein in the centre of the plate gives the kitchen a more straightforward ride. That became more obvious with a terrific dish of slow-cooked goat, marinated in a pulverised mess of chillies and served with black barley and smoked labneh. I wouldn’t ever turn it down. Look at my lovely life: being served roasted goat, smeared in a chilli paste of the gods. But it felt weirdly familiar, compared to the exoticism and invention of the tomato and coconut salad or the aubergine dish.
The only real misstep comes with a preserved lemon and tahini brûlée tart. Structurally it is a wonder. There is the crispest of pastry shells and a bronzed glow to the blowtorched surface, one you could almost warm your hands on. The problem is that while a sly edge of salt in a sweet dessert is so very much the thing these days, here it’s a distracting and uncomfortable whack. The yogurt sorbet on the side is spooned away for relief. Pleasingly, the meal is book-ended by another foamy white pillow, this time of iced marshmallow, with roasted rhubarb and a walnut streusel, which is a good word to use instead of granola. It’s the fanciest, smartest version imaginable of the sort of breakfast eaten every morning in a middle-class redoubt like Godalming.
Too often in spendy Mayfair restaurants, the expense buys you an amorphous thing called an “experience”. You leave having been indulged by the staff. Scully feels like a rarity, because here it is the cooking – vivid, inventive, idiosyncratic – that is front and centre. A smart restaurant that’s all about food: it could just catch on.
News bites
Just as at Scully, you could plot a glorious non-meat route through the menu at Shoreditch restaurant St Leonards, led by chefs Jackson Boxer and Andrew Clarke, and be fed very well indeed. Come for burnt leek with almond cream and summer truffle, or their beetroot with black garlic, walnut and crème fraîche. Move on to the hearth-roasted vegetable plate (stleonards.london).
The company behind Seedlip, the distilled non-alcoholic spirit cleverly engineered for those who want a proper grown-up drink without hitting the booze, has now launched a sister range of grape juice-based non-alcoholic aperitifs. Aecorn Aperitifs come in dry, bitter and aromatic and are inspired by old English herbal remedies (aecornaperitifs.com).
The boom in restaurant-food delivery companies has resulted in an explosion in the use of plastic takeaway boxes, many of which are of non-recyclable. Deliveroo has now announced a clean and re-use service, starting in Cambridge and Oxford, with the expectation it will be rolled out in 2020. Bravo.
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or follow him on Twitter @jayrayner1
