Telephone: 020-8747 1836
Address: 5-7 Devonshire Road, London W4
Rating 16.5/20
Crisp pigs' ears and sweetbreads with trompettes and grain mustard. Hmmm... you don't often come across those on a menu; not since Richard Corrigan in his youth, anyway. I wonder how many they'll sell a week at La Trompette in Chiswick?
It is a well-known fact that most restaurant critics are absolute suckers for a spot of offal - given half a chance, some of us seem to exist on little else - but are we convinced that Chiswick is populated by lovers of those bits of the animal that most of eating Britain seems to reject? Pigs' ears are at the opposite end of the fashionable spectrum to seared tuna and Caesar salad, and grilled goats' cheese with roasted peppers, on which half the country seems to exist these days.
And what about these? Cassoulet toulousain and daube de boeuf. Not together, you ass. As separate dishes. Cassoulet, daube and pigs' ears, crisp or not, are something of a marker. This is the domain of hale and hearty regional French cooking.
Or is it? For here is the grilled goats' cheese, with artichokes, peppers and pesto this time, and roasted cod, the sea bass de nos jours (and so much nicer), with a sage and onion crust, and cured salmon with scallop ceviche, avocado and fennel - all smart variations on the canon of contemporary cooking. In short, there is something at La Trompette for everyone, not just the offal pariah.
But then, this should come as no surprise, because the muscle behind the restaurant is made up of Nigel Platts-Martin, quondam partner of Marco Pierre White in the halcyon days of Harvey's, and presently prop of The Square; and Bruce Poole of Chez Bruce, which, as the world knows, used to be Harvey's in the halcyon days of MPW; and they are both the brains behind the Glasshouse in Kew, a well-loved model of a modern brasserie in the form of a neighbourhood restaurant.
La Trompette is more along the lines of the Glasshouse, but is rather more senior. For the historians among you, it stands on the site of the long-serving and rather gloomy La Dordogne. Maybe the area induces inspiration of the crepuscular kind among restaurant designers, because La Trompette is not done up with the vulgar techni-colour of an African sunset, nor with the chill minimalism of the ever fashionable 51 shades of white. Mushroom and beige are La Trompette's favoured colours, cunningly textured to soften the rather squared-up lines of the place. Actually, it comes across as a smooth, sophisticated, Paris-suburb kind of place, an impression reinforced by the easy dispatch of the service. Given the fact that the place was only about four days old on the evening that Pic St Loup and I ate there, it ran with impressive smoothness. But then Nigel P-M and Bruce P are known to be sticklers for getting things right.
Sadly, I can't see the crisp pigs' ears lasting the course, or the daube and cassoulet, for that matter, but there is much else on the menu that exhibits an acute, not to say cute, sybaritic intelligence. The food isn't ground-breaking stuff, or even ground-shaking stuff. It's middle-ground stuff, with its roots firmly in the French regions and in a sense of pleasure. We didn't have the smoked haddock brandade with poached egg and hollandaise sauce, for example, or the thinly sliced rump of veal with green beans, meat juices and pecorino, or the deep-fried sole with tartare sauce, or the rump of lamb with couscous, merguez, hoummos and coriander, although, personally, I could have downed the lot.
I did, as perhaps you've guessed, dally with the pigs' ear and sweetbread combo, followed by roast guinea fowl with braised lettuce and potato galette, and rounded the proceedings off with chocolate profiteroles, which took me back, oooh, a decade or two. Pic St Loup was taken with the fish, starting with cured salmon with scallop ceviche, avo and fennel, before moving on to fillet of halibut with shellfish and saffron risotto, and then cantering past the finishing post with a crisp apple tart and caramel ice cream.
What was curious, given the robust impression given by the menu, was how restrained the dishes tasted. Pigs' ears have a delicious porcine delicacy about them that cohabits comfortably with the self-effacing quality of sweetbreads, so much so that the real delight of this dish lies in its subtlety of flavour and contrasting textures. But let's not get carried away, because the good manners exhibited here paid fewer dividends on other dishes. P St L's cured salmon was decent enough, but where was the sea-green sweetness of the really fresh scallop needed to make the ceviche sing? Pleasant enough though it was, the dish lacked focus of any kind. The same was true of my guinea fowl, which should have been a star dish. I love braised lettuce almost as much as I like pigs' ears, but while I scoffed all in front of me without any difficulty - helped along by an absolute stonking Italian red, Massetto Nero - I can't actually remember much about it. In fact, I remember thinking at the time, I can't actually remember much about this.
The fillet of halibut with shellfish and saffron risotto, on the other hand, showed the kitchen right back on course - splendid fish, crisp on top and fleshy beneath, risotto the colour of marigolds and reeking of marine life: it was just a humdinger of a dish. And the puds, too, are beautifully made and each one from my list of 50 all-time favourites. By and large, then, there's some tip-top cooking going on at La Trompette.
I have a small confession to make. We did get rather seriously stuck into the wine list. It's an easy and delightful pitfall into which to dive, partly because of the charm of the sommeli?re, and partly because there are many fine and unusual wines listed: among them, riesling from the peerless Laurence Faller by the glass, rogue Sancerres from Cotat, the epic Massetto Nero from Friuli, and a whole brigade of superior sherries. These wines don't come cheap, but nor are they expensive by restaurant standards. Anyway, the long and the short of it is that the bill came to £126.85, which is quite a lot, particularly when you consider that the food element was only £50. Ah, but, it was money well spent.
· Open Lunch, all week, Mon-Sat, 12 noon to 2.45pm, Sun, 12 noon-3pm; dinner, Mon-Sat, 6.30-10.30pm. Menus: Lunch, £17.50 for two courses, £19.50 for three; dinner, £25 for three courses. All major credit cards. Wheelchair access & WC.
