Aquavit, 1 Carlton Street, London SW1Y 4QQ (020 7024 9848). Meal for two, including drinks and service: £150
Earlier this year I interviewed the New York-based chef Marcus Samuelsson about his London venture, due to open next spring. He promised not to stride into the capital like some conquering hero. This, he said, would be a “humble journey”. This is a sentiment we can all get behind. It doesn’t seem to be one shared by Aquavit, the Swedish-inspired restaurant also from New York where it happens that Samuelsson – Ethiopian born but adopted by a Swedish couple – first made his name. The award-garlanded Aquavit has now opened in London. And, oh boy, check out that swagger.
Courtesy of endless BBC4 subtitled dramas, we think of Scandi culture as hard-worn and rustic: all cable-knit, candle light and sweet melancholy. Aquavit is the antithesis of that. Like Veneta a week or two back, it’s located within the shiny St James’s Market development, just south of Piccadilly Circus. For a Manhattan import this is perfect. Many restaurants there carve their faux domestic spaces out of anonymous New York office blocks. Aquavit does the same here, with its huge double-floored vault. It’s altogether more Trump Tower than Wallander. Everything is shiny and golden and glossy and thinly varnished. The waiters are tailored. The glass is polished. The aquavit list is extensive.
All of that costs – and you’ll be paying. It’s £12 to £15 for a starter with mains coming in around the mid to high £20s and beyond. Curiously, the more expensive it is, the more disappointing it becomes. This may be some clever, arch expression of the depressive, pessimistic nature of the Swedes. We must all of us stagger through this miserable vale of tears, hoping for the best, but expecting to be offered the very worst. Or perhaps a main course at Aquavit, London.
As John Cleese’s character said so memorably in the movie Clockwise: “It’s not the despair… I can take the despair. It’s the hope I can’t stand.” Here, hope comes courtesy of the list of smörgåsbord – small dishes – which are reasonably priced at £6 or £7 and thoroughly encouraging. We choose five of these instead of starters. A tangle of lightly bitter shaved celeriac comes flavoured with a hit of mustard and the deep, earthy green of lovage with, on the top, an egg yolk, to be broken in and spun through.
There is a slab of highly seasoned and spiced blood pudding. It is finely ground, seared to crisp on the outside and pâté-smooth within. There is a bacon crumb to punch up the pigginess, a pile of sweet-sour lingonberries, and a gossamer-thin slice of lardo melting in the heat as if it simply can’t handle all this bliss.
There are crunchy pickles and, of course, there is gravadlax, the salmon boasting a balanced cure and a gloriously firm texture. There is nothing slippery or slimy here. The fish is so profoundly, indecently, lovely that I find myself wanting only to dab it in the mustard and dill sauce to bring the odd flash and sparkle to the proceedings. Happily there are very good breads to dredge through the remaining sauce, including a cracker heavy with fennel seed. If Ryvita had been like this when I was a kid in the 70s, Britain would have been a much better place, full of Nordic charm and viable social democracy.
Best of these dishes is a roughly chopped mackerel tartare, sweet and lightly salty, with a brilliant green sorrel purée with that citrus edge which makes it taste like newly mown grass smells in the spring. And then, to make the whole concoction go off with a bang, there is a scoop of shiny, black lumpfish roe, all salt and fish oils. It is utterly engrossing.
If Aquavit had continued like this, I would have come out whistling the bill and mortgaging myself to the hilt to buy property on East 55th Street, New York, just to be close to the mothership. Instead the main courses turn up. A fillet of halibut is slightly overcooked, no huge crime were it not for the £28 price tag. The accompanying Sandefjord sauce is a beurre blanc by any other name, flecked with chives and orange beads of trout roe. It’s solid bistro cooking, sold at gastro palace prices.
Beef Rydberg, at £29, doesn’t even make it to bistro cooking. It’s one of those farmhouse dishes, a protein and carb-heavy plateful of the sort an agricultural labourer might have been served when they came in from the fields, which has gone through a little refinement over the years. The refinement here is the use of beef fillet, though once they’ve diced it up and seared each cube to within an inch of its tolerances, they could have used rump or chuck or, perhaps, pony. There are some overly sweet, cooked-down onions, with another egg yolk, and a few dry cubed potatoes. It’s not horrid. It’s not especially clumsy. It’s just annoying. I feel like a knob for sitting here in this gilded room, paying £29 (plus 12.5% service) for gussied-up farmhouse food. I dream of mackerel tartare.
The nail is placed on the coffin, pointy end down, by a side dish of Jansson’s Temptation, a kind of Swedish dauphinoise given body and soul by the application of salted fish – originally salted herring, generally now salted anchovies – and a bit of onion, under a crust. It should be the perfect marriage of carbohydrate and natural MSG. This one is all sweet mushy onion. It’s a semi-savoury onion crumble. That’s a dish nobody needs.
That nail is finally driven into the coffin by the famed Aquavit “signature dessert” (as it’s described to us). The Arctic Bird’s Nest costs £12. There’s a knot of finely sliced sugar tuile to make the nest, some berries and chocolate twigs. At its heart is a little bit of whimsy in the shape of an egg made from a goat’s cheese ice cream with a curd centre for the yolk and a shell of white chocolate. It’s a dish made to be applauded for its cleverness rather than eaten. The moment you touch it with a spoon it falls apart. You end up chasing irritating debris round the plate. The Ivy’s dessert of frozen berries with a hot white chocolate sauce is the same idea, just so much better.
Aquavit loves itself. There is a hum and purr of self-satisfaction about the whole enterprise. It is polished, in places literally so. But polish and swagger and a few good smörgåsbord dishes do not a finished article make. This is very much a work in progress.
Jay’s news bites
■ I’ve got this far into writing about Scandi culture without mentioning the ‘H’ word and I refuse to give in now. That said Svea Café in Cheltenham is certainly more of a cable-knit sweater than Aquavit’s Chanel and Armani. All the Swedish chart-toppers are here including gravadlax, meatballs and cinnamon buns, served in a room that looks like your nan’s kitchen (sveacafe.co.uk).
■ Be afraid. Be very afraid. Subway has launched its 750th ‘non-traditional’ store in the UK and Ireland. Non-traditionals are stores that operate on forecourts and within other shops, rather than as stand-alones. Subway now has more than 2,300 outlets across the UK and Ireland. It’s like the invasion of the body snatchers – only with more indigestion.
■ Hard numbers that point up the challenge posed by Brexit to the restaurant business: according to Fourth Analytics, 57% of employees in British restaurants are foreign nationals. This jumps to 71% for kitchen and back of house.
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or follow him on Twitter @jayrayner1
