101 New Bond Street, London W1 (020 7468 5868). Meal for two, including drinks and service: £130
A restaurant of quiet ambition, located within a fancy auction house, is a whole bunch of dreadful, overwrought analogies just waiting to happen. It didn’t help that, on the day we visited the restaurant inside Bonhams on London’s New Bond Street, the galleries were filled with glorious works. There were Hockneys and Auerbachs, Rileys and Hodgkins. Another room displayed sleek Art Deco pieces all of which I coveted. In the long dirty fight to find ways by which fragile words might be bent to the service of robust flavours, ignoring the possibilities of the language of art when it is so plainly offered really is tough. How easy to talk of “provenance” and the “masterpiece” and of the “acutely composed”. Still I’ll do my best, even though Tom Kemble’s cooking is about as good a candidate for this sort of guff as I’ve come across in a long while.
The six-month-old restaurant at Bonhams, which is open for breakfast and lunch and for a set menu on Thursday nights only, is literally one of London’s hidden gems. You have to know it’s there to know it’s there. Step through the small street entrance into the airy galleries beyond. Take the lift down a couple of floors, go through the bar, and back up the staircase at the end to find yourself in a small white box of a room with 20 seats and a view of a bland Mayfair courtyard. The walls are hung with prints of food-heavy still lifes of the sort wealthy men used to commission in the 16th century merely to prove they could afford the newfangled pigments needed to portray red, bleeding meat.
The paintings are misdirection. Kemble’s food is in no way heavy or burdened by luxury for its own sake. It is calm and thoughtful and precise and really quite startlingly beautiful. It’s serious cooking of the best sort, which is to say the kind that makes you giggle with pleasure.
Prior to a stint at a Chiswick restaurant, Kemble worked for Magnus Nilsson at Fäviken in Sweden and brings back with him less a Scandinavian agenda – in our meal the mood was lighter and sunnier and altogether more Francophile – but an obsessive’s commitment to quality raw materials. The cooking served some of the finest ingredients I have come across in a long while. Plus, he has all the skills. At the beginning there is some of the very best bread, a crunchy crusted sour dough with an addictively chewy crumb, served with the sort of yellow Normandy butter you could smear on a close friend. At the end there are liquid salt caramels that will give any of the chocolate specialists at work today a serious case of envy.
In between there is a thoughtful menu with just three choices at each course, which changes gradually, week by week and day by day, depending on what’s good. Starters are around £10, mains in the mid-20s with desserts at £8. Or think of it as £45 for three courses if that helps (which is the price for the supper club). Bargains are relative. For cooking of this quality in London right now, that’s a bargain. We begin with a gazpacho with mustard ice cream. It’s not an original idea. Both Alain Passard at L’Arpège in Paris and Heston Blumenthal at the Fat Duck have done versions. This one has a lightness of touch, the glossy cold soup having a power and intensity that forces you to stare into the bowl and think only of sunshine and languor. Crisp garlicky croutons bob at the surface and in the depths are pieces of smoked eel lending a hit of the docks. And then, in the middle, is a quenelle of just-set mustard ice cream, providing less heat than a potent savoury grounding.
Steamed courgette flowers, as delicate as a dandelion head ready to blow away on the breeze, come filled with white crab meat. There are slices of bull’s heart tomato, confited to make them more themselves, a tiny dice of crunchy courgette and a puddle of warm, foamy crab bisque, which is where the intense throb of the brown meat has gone to live out its days.
There is the same intensity to the frothy, brassic green beurre blanc with a slab of turbot, cooked to an acutely timed mother-of-pearl. A heap of wilted spinach underneath, a length of charred cucumber alongside, a few peeled and smoked Jersey Royals for company and the job is done. Likewise, with slices of duck breast, and a boned-out confit leg, with crisped skin, made shameless by the fat it has been long-cooked in. They share a plate with baby beets, halved cherries, the crack of fresh almonds and an underlying sauce of all these things. There is nothing attention-seeking about this food; it is just great ingredients given a seeing to by a chap who cares.
To finish there is raspberry millefeuille, the delicate wafers dusted with ground down, freeze-dried fruit, enclosing layers of a loose crème Chantilly and a bright elderflower sorbet. All around are perfect raspberries the colour of opera plush. A floating island is a thick disc of lightly set meringue under a sim card-thin disc of chocolate with, on the top, a mound of pistachio ice cream and all around a moat of crème anglaise.
By this point I am all but lost. London may be a feverish restaurant city right now, but there is very little of true brilliance. Last week at the Marksman was one kind; this is quite another. It helps that Bonhams is a serious wine dealership and has used that expertise to pull together a clever list. Given what passes through the building they could have built some thumping, tiresome bible. Instead this is a measured selection. At the top end I’m told some of the bottles are cheaper than retail. More relevant is the ever-changing list of wines by the glass, allowing you to try big Burgundies and Bordeaux you might not otherwise be able to afford.
At the end of a lunch of hushed brilliance my companion implores me not to write anything. Let it stay a hidden gem, this back London room, bathed in a sunlight that drifts across the room and reaches the plate. I shake my head. It’s not what I do. I always share the good news. That’s how it is. She understands. And with that we slip from the table and return to the galleries to browse all the beautiful things we cannot afford to buy.
Jay’s news bites
■ For another food experience in a retail environment, try The Man Behind The Curtain, located inside Flannels department store in Leeds. According to my Guardian colleague Marina O’Loughlin, chef Michael O’Hare does bonkers things involving, say, long-cooked pork jowl with dehydrated squid ink, or pot-sticker chicken and blackcurrant dumplings, which shouldn’t work but do. Not one for the timid (themanbehindthecurtain.co.uk).
■ Hello to Uncover, a new app which lists available tables in big-name London restaurants, on the day – recent offers include Kitty Fishers and the River Café – complete with one-click booking. One unintended consequence: it reveals that certain restaurants presumed to be so hot you have to book weeks in advance, actually have free tables (uncover.london).
■ On the subject of new apps, hurrah for Good Food Talks, which uses text-to-speech software to make menus accessible to the visually impaired. more than 750 restaurants are now using the app including Nando’s, Ed’s Easy Diner and Carluccio’s (goodfoodtalks.com)
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk. Follow Jay on Twitter @jayrayner1
