London's Chinese restaurants are mostly Cantonese and some are very good indeed, but the near-monopoly of Cantonese cooking fails to represent the regional cooking of China. That's why it was such a delight to visit London’s first fully Sichuan restaurant, Bar Shu. I am no expert onn Sichuan food, but I have eaten it in China, and to me it tasted to me like the food I’ve eaten in Shanghai and Hong Kong, with that characteristic fieriness and complexity of flavour and texture. It stood out as the most interesting Chinese meal I’ve had since – well, since China. I’m already looking forward to the new branch, planned for spring.
With London currently the gourmet darling of the world, there have been many big-budget openings, all trying to schmooze and charm their way into the affections of London’s critics. The silly thing is, the really good places don’t need to. St Alban didn’t even send out press releases. They didn’t need to. When the owners of The Wolseley open a new place, the customers will come. And though I keep waiting for owners Chris Corbin and Jeremy King (who previously owned The Ivy) to make a wrong step, they just never do: St Alban was near-perfect. The only drawback is that everyone else who has been there thinks the same thing, so now it’s packed and hard to find a table.
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The other notable celebrity opening of 2006 was L’Atelier de Joël Robuchon, as you’d expect when the great chef’s Paris restaurant of the same name is widely regarded as one of the most influential in Paris today. I’ve eaten at both, and the Paris branch seems positively humble in comparison, not least with the pricing; for Euro prices in Paris, convert the same figures to Pounds here. However, it’s a cracker of a restaurant for the theatre of the place, and for outstanding food – from pig's trotter on little toasts, minced to maximise the gelatinous burst of fatty textures that explode in the mouth, to the soufflé dessert laced with Chartreuse – if you’ve got pockets deep enough.
Tom’s Kitchen, however, shot itself in the foot by creating high expectations of its quasi-celebrity chef Tom Aitkens, and thus goading many critics into cutting him and his restaurant down to size. Shame. I really liked it. Meanwhile, Primrose Hill residents were horrified when they discovered that Odette’s had been taken over by nightclub impressario Vince Power. But chef Bryn Williams displays real mastery of
French-based cookery techniques, used on mainly British ingredients, and roundly squashed their preconceptions.
Which brings us to Arbutus, winner of the 2006 Time Out Best New Restaurant of the Year Award. Its highly ambitious Modern European cooking and moderate pricing led to it picking up not just our award but just about every other major gong going too, and the result almost turned into a bigger mess than Gwyneth Paltrow’s make-up after an Oscar-acceptance speech. Arbutus appears to have struggled to keep up with the surge in demand, but bear with it, because London’s diners are notoriously fickle; give it another few months and the novelty-seekers will have moved on, leaving the staff to deliver chef Anthony Demetre’s dishes in a more timely and measured fashion.
So, another great year to be eating out in London. I’ve eaten more than my fair share of lazy catering pack food, been presented with dishes which looked like car crashes on a plate, travelled miles across town to find the staff had lost my reservation, and paid far too much for meals which make Gordon Ramsay's 'Kitchen Nightmares' look positively reasonable – but I don't write about those places. I weed out the real duds so that you don't have to. As I could have told the policeman, it’s a tough job but someone’s got to do it.
