I have trouble with the full name of this restaurant - Oak Room Marco Pierre White. I know that the great man owns the leasehold, and presumably pays the salaries and bills, but it's slightly unfair on a seriously talented young chef, Robert Reid, that the long shadow of the former incumbent of the kitchen should fall quite so heavily across the progress of the new. As we all know, Marco gave up cooking last year to devote himself full time to empire building and to fulfil the quote of Salvador Dalí that is still reproduced on the menu: "At six I wanted to be a chef, at seven Napoleon, and my ambitions have been growing ever since."
The Oak Room is a dining room of hallowed memory for me. I have reviewed it twice before, when different chefs were using it as a showcase for their talents. Each time, I have loved its Edwardian grandiosity, the scrolled, bleached, oak panelling, the soaring ceilings, the curlicues of the Venetian glass chandeliers that are the size of a cruise ship's propellers, the plush and the hush and the inherent drama of it all. This is not a restaurant where design takes precedence over substance, where the distractions of fashion rule over the realities of luxury. It is grand, and you know that it's going to be expensive, although now the bill won't hit the heart-stopping heights of MPW's day, unless you get stuck into the wine list in a serious way. There's a three-course lunch menu at £27.50, which represents pretty good value. Or you can eat three courses à la carte for £38. And then there's a menu gourmand, a snip at £48.
Sigurd and I passed on the gourmand line-up, stuffed, as it was, with MPW classics. We were in search of the real Robert Reid, which is not as easy as it should be. There seems far too much of MPW all over this menu, and not nearly enough RR, which seems a pity, as RR is more than able to compose his own twinkling dishes. I was first alerted to this fact some months back by a fabulously good dish of rabbit in its own jelly and loads of baby veg that managed to roll out the flavour of the rabbit without killing the flavour of the vegetables (not always an easy thing). It was a dish of a sophisticatedly sunny aspect, something you can't carry off without care, thought and talent.
For this lunch, I decided on a panaché of langoustines and pork belly with a purée of celeriac and a sauce made from the langoustines, grilled sea bass with fennel and beurre noisette, and le flottante with custard. Sigurd was taken by caramelised scallops and calamari with sauce nero from the daily menu, then tranche of salt cod with smoked salmon and sauce "Reputation", whatever that might be, and finally the toothsome quiddities of tarte Tatin of pears, a longtime MPW classic, the virtues of which need no extolling here. Actually, the same could be said of the le flottante, which looked as if part of the massive iceberg that recently broke off Antarctica had floated into the Oak Room on a sea of custard.
Unless I am much mistaken, however, the langoustine and belly pork duo is very much RR, an apparently simple dish made remarkable by the quality of the ingredients and the assurance of the cooking, which produced the intense, superbly spiced langoustine juice to balance the sweet plumpness of the shellfish and the mild richness of the pork, which had been rendered to a succulent crispness. The sea bass wasn't in the same league, partly because the sauce was built to a similar intensity as the preceding dish, with an over-emphasis on tomato and none of the same energetic spicing.
Sigurd's expectations of the scallop and calamari dish were rewarded - it was a distillation of marine life, both sweet and salty, dramatic and simple. As for his main dish, we may not see a piece of cod the size and shape of Ayers Rock again, so it's as well that we took a last look upon the marvel of the mature fish and despaired, but there was no need to despair about its treatment - a light salting had tightened the flesh, adding a notch or two more flavour, with the salmon bringing a drift of smokiness, and the sauce washing all with a velvet smoothness. It was, in short, a classy number.
The final damage totted up to £121.50. This included a bottle of rather uninspired Sancerre at £30.30 from a list as rococo as the chandeliers and on which there aren't too many bargains. There was water and coffee, naturally, and these added another £16 (how much!), so the main event came to £76, or £38 a head, roughly half that when MPW manned the stoves. I'd say that the standard of cooking and service showed no such slippage, so on that basis the Oak Room must now be seen to be something of a bargain.
