Restaurants

By Guy Dimond

While the rest of us move house from time to time, husband and wife team Claude and Claire Bosi moved their restaurant. Hibiscus used to reside in Ludlow, Shropshire, where it earned great critical acclaim. After seven years in a small market town, they thought it was time to for a change – and so they’ve relocated to London, complete with most of their staff. The result is a perfectly formed restaurant from a French-born chef who isn’t that well known in London – or at least, he isn’t yet. That’s about to change.

The new, transplanted Hibiscus looks similar to the Ludlow original; an understated little place,with tables for around 45 diners and a basement room for private hire. Claire Bosi, who runs the front-of-house, has kept the same natural tones and materials they used in the previous place; a carpet with the mossy colours of the Welsh Marches, oak walls coloured the pale green of lichen, little black slates to present chilled slabs of butter. Claude pops out from the kitchen to say hello from time to time, but mostly he’s busy on the other side of the pass.

Temples of gastronomy are not everyone’s idea of fun. They can be suffocatingly bourgeois in clientele, atmosphere and pricing; the banter around tables is more subdued, and diners below the age of 40 stand out as looking youthful. However, exceptional cooking will transcend such drawbacks – and this is where Hibiscus stands apart from the score of other expensive, exclusive restaurants in Mayfair.This was the most thrilling meal I’ve eaten in a long time.

A starter of carpaccio of pollack was the first dish to seduce the palate. Thin sashimi slivers of translucent fish are arranged around the plate like pallid petals, with little blobs of brown jelly speckle the dish. But what are they? Little explosions of flavour, that’s what – bombs of the savoury hit that the Japanese call umami. Bosi surprises again in the next dish, roast suckling pig with the wake-up call of raw Irish sea urchin which add sudden rushes of seaside aromas and over-ripe flavours to a dish that is an unusual, but very inspired pairing.

The kitchen’s magic went on (so did the delays for our food, but I’ll forgive them that: it was the first week). Suckling pig arrived in two steps: the first like a chop with perfectly crisp crackling and hollow puffs of fried potato that resembled giant bhel poori; then, part two is a sausage roll. That’s right, a regular-looking sausage roll, with delicate glazed pastry, a herbed pork sausage inside, and a jokey dab of sauce that looked like HP but tasted like Marmite. It’s there as a bit of fun, but it’s also the paragon of sausage rolls, a guilty pleasure of a dish that combines the gluttony of late-night fast food with the euphoria of a first kiss.

Fancy meals like this tend to be punctuated with so many appetisers, amuses, intercourses and post-coital nibbles that you can feel like a fifteen-year-old who’s just discovered a lingerie catalogue, but this overstimulation didn’t diminish the delight created by a pre-dessert: a wine glass filled with layers of apple purée, celeriac purée and chestnut purée, garnished with puffed rice. It was a triple-whammy of taste sensations.

The dessert that followed was a true taste of old England, served in a tiny tea cup: a cream flavoured with Earl Grey tea with some blackberry crumble, served with a little pastry tart of sabayon peppered with the tiny native bilberries they call whimberries on this menu. Like everything else on the menu we tried, we were gently challenged and surprised by this dish; the flavours and textures were assured,but not predictable.

Hibiscus is that rare thing, an epicurean restaurant that takes a very serious interest in flavour, texture, appearance and ingredient quality, without being completely up itself. The wine list gives plenty of scope for people who feel the need to splurge or show off however, with up to 550 wines to choose from across a wide price range. We greatly enjoyed our choices from the 16 wines by the glass,which should be enough choice for anyone. The list is strongest on Burgundy, but the Italian and Rhône wines offer the best value.

Of course, a restaurant like this doesn’t come cheap – we had the cheapest set-dinner menus, but you can pay even more for the fancier menus. The set lunches sound like a good deal, assuming you’re able to get a table. But to dwell on the cost misses the point – even at £160 for two this is worth it, because I can count on one hand the number of restaurants in London producing dishes of this ingenuity, originality and restraint. Apparently the Michelin Guide's inspectors thought the same thing, bestowing a coveted Michelin star on it in January 2008.

Time Out London Issue 1941: October 31-November 6 2007