The Test Kitchen, 54 Frith Street, London W1D 4SL (020 7734 8487). Meal for two, including drinks and service: £130. Maison Bertaux, 28 Greek Street, London W1D 5DQ (020 7437 6007). Strawberry tart: £4.80
The strawberry tart at Maison Bertaux in London’s Soho should be available on prescription as an effective treatment for post-traumatic stress. The sweet pastry shell is crisp. There is a modest layer of crème pâtissière topped by nubile strawberries, in turn topped by Chantilly cream and then more strawberries. The £4.80 price tag is modest given that it really does make everything better.
I retreated there after a joyless lunch at the Test Kitchen, which occupies the site that was until recently the original Barrafina tapas restaurant on Frith Street. As Barrafina it was a place of noise and clatter, where the sight of cooks searing and grilling and shouting was enough to entertain not just the diners but the hour-long queue. Now the counter-only restaurant is about as entertaining as a colonoscopy, only more uncomfortable.
The approach is also just as clinical. Its defenders will point out that the clue is in the name. The Test Kitchen is an extended pop-up in which multi-award-winning chef Adam Simmonds will trial ideas. You are presented on arrival with a mission statement. Apparently, it is the start of his “gastronomic food journey”. There’s a lot about his journey; it’s like The X Factor without the power ballads and weeping. “Your reactions will ensure evolutions over the coming months,” he says, “and keep us challenged.” That, my friend, is something I can help you with.
I get the importance of experimentation. I understand development. What I don’t get is the bill for £132 at the end. Surely being the chef’s guinea pigs should come at a discount, until they know they’ve got it right. Or there should be other compensations: a sense of seat-of-the-pants fun, at least. Instead, the narrow space behind the counter is patrolled by heavy-browed, unsmiling cooks looking like they’re preparing to go over the top at Mons. At the centre is Simmonds barking “Flowers!” at his underlings. The drawer filled with boxes of those edible blooms, which bring nothing to the dishes, is just 2ft away from him.
There is a manager of sorts, who attempts hospitality, but behind the smile even he seems to recognise he’s charged with managing death’s waiting room. He has nothing to give us: no bread, no canapés, no hope. There is just the mission statement, a glass of prosecco mixed with blood orange and bitters – the best thing we consume at lunch – and the menu. Meat dishes are at the top, followed by fish, then vegetables. I give him my choices. He suggests sending them out in precisely the reverse order. I point this out. He admits it looks a bit odd. It’s irrelevant anyway, because the kitchen ignores his meal plan.
In the absence of many other customers, the cooks are underworked. They stare at us, examine us for reactions. We are the lab rats in this sanitised test kitchen. It does not smell of food. It smells of intensity and nerd. Two long pieces of red mullet appear on a plate in the prep area in front of us, surrounded by offcuts. The cooks keep touching them, pressing them with their finger-tips, eating pieces off the plate, throwing some away. I suspect I’ve seen rugby balls in the Six Nations get less contact. My companion announces she won’t now be eating it. Behind the counter pheasant eggs bounce around inside a sous vide machine. They’re having more fun than we are.
The first dish arrives: almond milk tofu, peas, morels, thyme oil. Simmonds’s mission statement says he wants to get “maximum flavour out of the ingredients”. If so, this dish is an utter failure, the first of many. It’s a salt hit. The tofu has the texture of phlegm, sticky and gelatinous, forming dribbly strings from lifted spoon to plate. I look up. Simmonds is watching me. “It’s not right, is it?” he says. “No,” I say. He still charges me £7 not to eat most of it.
White asparagus comes with potatoes, a thin white liquor listed as whey, which looks like the leakage from a bag of halloumi, and dots of caviar. It’s another salt hit. The asparagus is overcooked. More pleasing, as in pleasant to eat, is salt-baked swede, topped with grated goat’s cheese, though how they justify the £7 price tag for this is a mystery. The ingredients will cost buttons. Next up it’s one of those slow-cooked pheasant eggs. A cook shells it. We can see it has not reached the jellied state he presumably was looking for. The white is undercooked, like the flobby stuff you get on a fried egg that hasn’t spent long enough in the pan. No matter. It’s still served. There’s a crunchy ribbon of pickled kohlrabi which is nice enough, but otherwise the plate is dominated by translucent runny egg white.
Next, the over-fingered cured red mullet, with a whole bunch of sour things – green tomatoes, green strawberries, a flap of agar jelly made with green tomato juice – and a price tag of £16.50. I am moving gently from curiosity through bafflement to outright anger. The cooks stand behind the counter bending over these prissy little plates of nothingness, these dribbles and smears, slippery and briny, as if they are creating masterpieces demanding our applause. There is no instinct to feed or delight here. It is just a miserable succession of good ingredients, violated. Mr Simmonds, they do not taste of themselves.
Halibut has been bouncing around, bagged, in the sous vide machine. They might claim it’s cooked, but at its centre it is floppy and, like the egg white, translucent. It, too, is mostly salty. It is £18.50. Only the final dish works, as it should for £19.50: a sautéed veal sweetbread, a small piece of veal loin, again cooked in the bag with a raw internal texture, but all of it saved by a veal jus of depth.
Forgive me, but I do not want dessert. I do not want a yeast parfait with lychee or melon with black olive or strawberries with red pepper. This is just ingredients bingo. I don’t want to be a restaurant lab rat any more. I want nice things to eat. We pay the shocking bill, stomp out the door, link arms and make for Maison Bertaux and a bit of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. If I was you, I’d miss out the first bit of our lunch and head straight for the cake.
Jay’s news bites
• More pop-up news. From 29 June to 1 July, American chef Wolfgang Puck is installing a pop-up version of his iconic Hollywood restaurant, Spago, at his steakhouse, Cut, inside the 45 Park Lane hotel. I once ate at the original, expecting mediocre food and top celebrities. Instead I got superb Cal-Ital food and C-listers. Go for squid ink garganelli with Maine lobster, veal tartare with smoked mascarpone and a huge bill.
• The latest trend in new product development, according to the Grocer magazine: products utilising food that would otherwise be wasted. Think Toast Ale, which ferments beer from discarded bread, or Hellmann’s Red & Green Ketchup, which uses green tomatoes that wouldn’t normally make the grade.
• Stephen Harris, of the Sportsman in Seasalter, a place of pilgrimage for greedy people from all over the world since it opened in 1999, is to release a book of the pub’s recipes. The Sportsman will be published by Phaidon in September at £29.95.
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or follow him on Twitter @jayrayner1
