Restaurants

By Guy Dimond

Our dishes had been savaged by the four food stylists of the apocalypse: the drizzler, the dicer, the oven-crisper, and the plate-smearer. We were left guessing whether we'd eaten animal, vegetable, or leftovers from a nursery school art class - and the comedic accent of our utterly charming French waiter didn't help. 'And 'ere eez your amuse of unicorn cream weez candied airball and penzeel shavings,' he said - or at least, I think he did.

Texture prepares the sort of food that is easier to admire than enjoy. It's pretty as a picture, inventive, and all done with tremendous precision and expertise. Good ingredients are used, but then they're fiddled about with to create artworks. For some people, this is what fine dining is about. For others, the results can look like a plane crash.

Take, for example, my Anjou pigeon. I knew it was pigeon because I could recognise the dismembered leg and claw, but the dish was presented like the debris from a crop-duster that had hit the bird then plunged into a field of corn. Tiny slivers of pink meat were jumbled with oddly-cut shards of sweetcorn, with the bird's singed appendage sticking akimbo.

A starter of tomato prepared in several ways was better composed: roasted, raw, dried, 'confit', served with olives. The name of the restaurant starts to make sense: texture is the forgotten sensation in so much modern food, where every process conspires to make what we eat into invalid food, and the chef likes to play with texture in a way that's reminiscent of Chinese gastronomy, but using European flavours.

Such creativity in the kitchen makes sense when you realise that the chef-owner, Agnar Sverisson, was head chef at Le Manoir aux Quat'Saisons, Raymond Blanc's acclaimed country pile for the super rich. It was Le Manoir, you may recall, that created a £600 salad, the diamond-studded skull of the culinary world. I preferred Sverisson's simpler treatments: some perfectly pan-fried cod from his native Iceland, for example, or the curiously bland Icelandic lamb that was slow-cooked using the trendy sous-vide method. But by the time a dessert of 'coconut different textures' - those textures including Bounty bar, ice cream, and toothpaste, the latter actually served in a tiny toothpaste tube - we had given up all pretence of keeping straight faces.
Now don't get me wrong. Sverisson's cooking is technically brilliant; I'd say near-faultless. These dishes were from the cheapest set menu, at £45 per head; the mind boggles at how complex the £55 or £59 tasting menus must be.

The spectacular cooking is only half of Texture's double-act. Sverisson's business partner is Xavier Rousset, the former sommelier at Le Manoir. As such, he's probably used to dealing with customers who don't bat an eyelid at the prices on Texture's wine list. I had trouble finding a bottle that cost under £30, but there are, in fact, quite a few - though these are easily outnumbered by bottles costing three figures. It's a list for serious cork dorks, with good-to-great bottles from every important wine-producing region covered. Wine mark-ups are roughly three-fold; the wonderfully toasty English Nyetimber Blanc de Blancs 1996 costs £11.50 per 125ml glass, while you can buy a whole bottle retail for around £23. Ditto our Languedoc white: £27 here, £9.49 in off-licences. This kind of mark-up isn't unusual in smart restaurants; although the wines may seem expensive, that's only because they're expensive to start with.

The best thing about Texture was the lounge bar, or 'Champagne bar' as they prefer to call it: calm, airy, and quite Nordic in feel and look, and the staff were absolutely charming. It's worth coming here just to try the crisps. Not so good? Being told we could only dine at 7pm or 9pm, then discovering we were one of only four tables occupied that evening. Still, you've got to take the rough with the smooth.

Time Out Issue 1936: September 26-October 2 2007