There is a small moment towards the end of my meal at the restaurant voted the best in the country by the readers of OFM that sums up the whole experience. Darren McHugh, the restaurant manager, places a bowl containing two little orbs of sugar-dusted loveliness on the table. “I could call them beignet if I wanted to sound clever,” he says in his soft Irish lilt. “But we all know they’re donuts.” And off he floats to attend to the next happy table. The donuts, back filled with their own silky fig jam, manage the difficult trick of being both comfort food and technically thrilling at the same time. That sums up the Ledbury. It’s an ambitious gastronomic restaurant with ideas well below its station. Sure, it has Michelin stars; two of them as it happens. Though, uniquely, chef and co-owner Brett Graham has to think very hard to recall which years they were acquired. It has been garlanded with numerous other awards. And no, it is not cheap. The evening à la carte is £90. (Lunch set menus are cheaper at £45.)
But none of that buys you pointless flash, heel-clicking or outbreaks of gold leaf. “The food’s got to be real,” Graham says, over a coffee before evening service, in the relaxed dining room, with its shades of olive and deep polished wood. “We have to walk the tightrope of deliciousness with a modernist touch. I want people to feel they could eat here once a month, not feel that it’s too full-on for that.”
It’s there in a menu of the plumpest langoustine, wrapped in slivers of shitake, alongside the light pungency of cauliflower. It’s there in a bowl of silky buffalo milk curd beneath a ripe, clear broth of grilled onions chased down by truffled sourdough toast. It’s there in the very best of British game, be it grouse or snipe or venison, given the gentlest of attentions, so they taste most acutely of themselves. It’s a menu of earthy British ingredients, treated with respect and imagination rather than processed to within an inch of their lives. “I love the English countryside,” says Australian-born Graham. “There’s just so much good stuff out there.”
Graham admits now that the Ledbury was neither his plan nor ambition. He arrived in the UK from Australia at the turn of the millennium, courtesy of a bursary for young chefs and went to work for Phil Howard at the highly regarded Square in Mayfair. By the age of 22 he was a junior sous chef. “One day Phil said to me that he’d never come across anybody he wanted to open a restaurant with,” Graham recalls. “But I was different.” With backing from Nigel Platts-Martin, Howard’s business partner at the Square (and now at the Ledbury) they went searching for a site. In 2005 they opened for business. Not that Graham thinks he was ready. “I’d never written my own menu,” he admits now. “At that age you think you’ve worked it all out. The first one I wrote was impractical and fussy. I couldn’t find a voice.” Some critics agreed. “I remember Michael Winner saying the site would be far more useful as a car park.”
So what, I ask, was the turning point? “I sat down one day when we weren’t very busy in 2007 and I asked myself what are we doing wrong? And I realised it was stuffy service. We treated everybody the same. I wanted people to think the Ledbury was a reliable place for a fabulous time.” And so he started from the grass roots. The front of house staff were told their job was no longer to follow rules and regulations but to adjust to everybody’s needs. “If a waiter wants to give an extra – another course, a complimentary glass of champagne – which will enhance the experience they’re told just to do it. No need to ask my permission.” Likewise, the artificial divide between dining room and basement kitchen came down. “I started inviting diners into the kitchen, feeding them extras there.”
And what about the food? “It’s got a lot lighter over the years. We never cook meat in butter for example.” I ask what the light-bulb moment with that was, and he launches into a long explanation of how they worked out the perfect way to cook grouse, how it should be poached first in seasoned chicken stock, and then served with lots of bright fresh vegetables. Or, as he says simply, “no dairy, no carbs”.
He talks about his love affair with the most humble of ingredients, the way he likes to bake celeriac and beetroot in clay or salt bake turnips “until they reach an internal temperature of 47C.” James “Jocky” Petrie, who for many years was head of creative development at Heston Blumenthal’s Fat Duck in Bray, recently joined the Ledbury in a similar role to help develop all aspects of the restaurant. “Brett’s a real obsessive,” Petrie says. “He absolutely loves the detail.” One of those is the carbon footprint of the restaurants. “I’ve banned mineral water,” Graham says. “And we’re looking at installing composters.”
Graham is all but unique among top-flight chefs in not popping up repeatedly on food TV; if he has free time, he says, he prefers going to Richmond Park with his wife Natalie to walk their pug Winston. “If you do all those outside commitments you’re not going to be here cooking,” he says. And cooking is what drives him. “I love service. It’s what I’m made for.”
So does it matter to him that this award is voted for by the readers? “It’s amazing,” he says. “Customers are my priority. As I get older I’m driven less by a desire to be famous or make money. I’m driven by pleasing my customers. We’re many things, but not an overnight success.” Clearly, the OFM readers’ restaurant of 2014 is a work in progress. And probably always will be.
