Telephone: 01539 536 362
Address: Cavendish Street, Cartmel, Cumbria
Open: Tues-Sun, lunch 12 noon-1.45pm, dinner 7-9.30pm
Price: Around £95 a head for 20-course. Gourmand menu (£50 for the Introduction menu)
Disabled facilities
Never mind about xylitol, tartrazineand monosodium glutamate. No additives are less palatable than the linguistic adulterants with which certain chefs pepper their every utterance.
At a recent gastronomic demonstration, I heard these nonsensical phrasal verbs - "caramelise out", "bake down", "purée up", "steam off ", "reduce down" and "plate up" - terms exceeded in their absurdity only by "stale up" (as in "I've staled this up overnight"). As for "cook off " and "cook out", they remind me of an unfortunate misprint that once appeared in the TV listings of my local paper.
Suffice to say, it should have read "Ainsley's Big Cook Out." Poor Ainsley can't even peel an onion without simultaneously conducting a phantom orchestra, but after soldiering through the Gourmand menu at L'Enclume I'd have begged him to plate up one of his unpretentious Meals In Minutes.
Because although chef Simon Rogan describes his £95 menu as "a culinary adventure" with "20 courses of innovation and stretching boundaries", I left feeling burnt out, melted down and ripped off. Although the restaurant insists its cuisine is "not science but nature", comparisons with the so-called molecular gastronomy of Heston Blumenthal were inevitable- and those comparisons were not favourable, because the net effect of all the novelty on offer was a depressing, debilitating sameness.
So much so that one of the courses should have been a course of antibiotics, because by dish number seven I could feel the blood draining from me. The menu began with "Lakeland slate - five contrasts to get you going", and going might have been the wisest idea. The four gustatory receptors in the tongue (sweet, salt, sour, bitter) were supposed to be collectively stimulated by a salty brandade of cod, a sharp black Pontefract cake made from balsamic jelly and a bit of mango, but neither my companion nor I noticed any effect, and how the little meatball fitted into the scheme remains a mystery.
Then came "Perilla and parsley broth, lipsmacking crispy pizza", presented bya waitress who declared, "It's do it yourself ", and wandered off. But do what? The tiny shard of pastry had no more to do with a genuine pizza than a Pizza Hut Thin And Crusty Supreme has to do with Diana Ross.
"Gorgonzola french fries, lovage and apple dipper" was a success, with crackly polenta fries combining perfectly with hints of celery, anise, lemon and yeast in the dip. "Cubism in foie gras, two cold, one hot, cantaloupe, fragrant myrrh, almond cake and fois gras ice cream" was also tantalisingly good, but the dishes' repetitive design was becoming increasingly irritating, like an IQ test based on Paul Klee's Twittering Machine.
"Tadpole of myrrh" was less resinous than expected, but things went seriously downhill with "Half soft and scrambled eggs, soy, wasabi, smoked cod froth". This wasn't innovative food, this was an egg laid by a cancerous chicken, then covered with shaving foam and stubble. It resembled nothing so much as a putrefied head wound.
If you're starting to flag, then think how I felt when the "Flaky crab, curried avocado, Parmesan yogurt sorbet" arrived. "Is there asafoetidain this?" I asked the waitress, who said she'd ask in the kitchen. The kitchen was mute. "Three tomato types, solid oil, virtual, juice" had a (pleasant) texture somewhere between ectoplasm and cardboard. "White truffle custard Chinese-style" came in a takeaway container with a thin spring roll and greasy duck, and was described as "a little sarcastic" (a little sarcastically, I thought).
There was some logic to "Turbot, bacon polenta, cauliflower crunch, passion fruit, hibiscus sweet passions, fruit dots and hibiscus streaks", but "Cubes from land and sea, eucalyptus hollandaise" was seriously taking the piss, and looked like the inside of a Dalek, or theGourmet Gold cat food favoured bymy obese moggy, Sparky.
That's less than half the courses I sampled, each one announced at each table by the waitress, so descriptions were constantly ricocheting around the smallish room like a performance of a process music work. The low point was probably the "Brill fillet cooked in clay, girolles, wild coltsfoot milk", partly because the milk looked like a sperm sample, but mainly because at that point I realised that (in the wrong hands) you can simply have too many girolles and too much truffle.
Never mind all the talk of inventiveness and variety, the result was as formulaic as McDonald's, all served on the same quenelle-sized dishes with the same splatter of technicolour bird shit on every plate. Courses described as "wondrous fizz from nature" didn't fizz at all, they were served out of sync and, despite an excellent wine list, the experience seemed exhausting, erratic, vulgar and pretentious. Extravagant folly and erratic behaviour are sure symptoms of madness, I've read, and the final course - "Chocolate mayhem, no more voices" - surely gives us a clue as to what's wrong here (aural hallucinations never being a good sign).
If you need further proof of lurking insanity, I went to the lavatory for a leg stretch (after sitting so long that I feared I'd contracted deep-vein thrombosis), and found that the lavatory rolls had all been obsessively folded into triangles. I rest my case.
