Texture, 34 Portman Street, London W1, (020 7224 0028)
Meal for two, including wine and service, £110
There is a famous restaurant just outside Nairobi called Carnivore. Can you guess what it serves? That's right. It's not exactly the place for a bowl of hummus. At Carnivore they serve zebra and antelope, wildebeest, and anything else with a pulse. The clue is in the restaurant's name.
And so to a new restaurant called Texture. It's a tricky word, texture. All food has it, even the slipperiest bits, so putting that above the door is risky. There is the temptation to examine every dish simply on the grounds of how it feels in the mouth rather than how it tastes. If it doesn't feel interesting it can be dismissed as a failure. It's not that the texture of the food here isn't interesting; some of it really is. But that isn't the thing you will recall as you leave. Its appeal is much broader.
Texture is curious because restaurants of this ambition and self-confidence rarely just appear out of nowhere, as this one has done. I had never heard of the chef before, for example, an Icelandic chap called Aggi Sverrisson, who was apparently head chef at Raymond Blanc's Le Manoir. That said, Texture is nothing like the cutesy, gussied-up English country house that is Le Manoir. This is a smart, urban and urbane modern restaurant. The spacious Georgian room has been given a sharp makeover, updating all the original features, and the occasional gashes of colour in the modern art against the snowfields of white save it from sterility.
The food is complex without losing sight of the imperative of the central ingredient. It is also well priced. At lunchtime, which is the time to go, there is a list of 11 starter-sized dishes all costing £8.50. (In the evening there is a more conventional menu at £45 for three courses.) A slow-poached egg, the white just set, comes surrounded by a broth flavoured with salty Parmesan and a tidy heap of nutty-tasting barley. A dish of French Jerusalem artichokes delivers them pickled, roasted, raw and in a puree. Skate wing, accurately cooked, is provided with a fine acidulated fennel salad and a tiny dice of citrus fruit, the squares bursting on the roof of the mouth around the fragile strands of fish.
Most intriguing of all was smoked tuna loin. It arrived under a white porcelain dome. As the dome was lifted, there was a puff of grey smoke and with it the scent not of curing kippers, but something closer to the bonfire. That same charcoal tinge was in the fish, too. It was clever and diverting.
There are, though, a few affectations. That Jerusalem artichoke dish was served with an 'artichoke tea' flavoured with lemon verbena, poured tableside into what looked like a test tube. And the lemon verbena merely gave the liquor the tinge of domestic cleaning fluid. Suddenly I was no longer at a flash London restaurant; I was at the local GP's surgery having a rash treated. Likewise, with the tuna I was given a metal tube, with a pointed nozzle, containing soy sauce. I didn't know whether to eat it or apply it.
Sanity was restored with the two meat dishes: a fabulous piece of roast Icelandic lamb with, on the side, a bowl of a homely lamb broth, and a dish of long-braised pork partnered with squid. There were also some pork scratchings on the side. No dish that includes pork scratchings can be bad.
Of our two desserts, a poached pear with fragments of biscuit and a musky five-spice ice cream was the best. Did it have texture? Oh yes, lots of it. Did it taste nice? Yes, and that's what I really look for in food.
