Restaurants

By Guy Dimond

They'd lost our booking. Not the most auspicious start to a meal out, especially when a restaurant's heaving with people and you've been eagerly awaiting your table for days. But the measure of a good restaurant isn't just how well they function on top form, it's also how they cope with disasters. After some deliberation, the manager - David Moore, who normally runs the front of house at sibling Pied à Terre, we later discovered - sorted out a table for us with minimal fuss, before going back to marshalling his troops and attending to the critics on the other side of the dining room. As cock-ups go, it was handled with panache.

The lines must have been red hot that week; the receptionist had sounded harassed, and we had trouble getting a table at all. The reason for the instant popularity of L'Autre Pied isn't immediately obvious. It's a good-looking restaurant, for sure, with an Oriental theme running through the hand-painted walls and screens: the jade greens, lacquer reds and cloister-like layout of small rooms evoke the East. But the unclothed wooden tables feel as close-packed and dimly lit as eating at Busaba Eathai. The noise levels of the revellers around us was more reminiscent of a Wagamama than a special occasion restaurant. The reason it's a hot spot? Pedigree.

Marcus Eaves was one of the up-and-coming chefs we featured in Time Out a couple of years ago, when he was sous chef at Pied à Terre. He told us then, 'Every young chef dreams of opening their own restaurant, but I just want to be able to cook the best I can.' Which is exactly what he's been doing at Pied à Terre under Shane Osborn - with one of London's best haute cuisine restaurants, and best chefs. After biding his time there for the last two years, 26-year-old Eaves has learned his craft well but is not attempting to emulate older sibling Pied à Terre; he has taken some haute cuisine techniques and scaled them back for a more affordable, convivial kind of place.

The current menu is very autumnal, and richly-flavoured. The dish pictured above is wild hare, at its best from now until January. Eaves wraps the deboned saddle in chicken mousse, then steams it for a few minutes before wrapping it in pancetta to keep it moist durting roasting. The cross-sections of perfectly rare, moist meat are served with dollops of onion purée and the pretty garnishes of caramelised duck you see here . A good dish, but not as impressively rich and layered as the slow-cooked pig's head. This was pale, soft and gelatinous, served with the dense meat of braised cheeks, in a bowl of spiced broth with aromas of star anise and cinnamon, scented like a Chinese-Malaysian dish.

The above dishes were main courses, but would be starter-sized in many other restaurants - and therefore expensive for the portion size. Our actual starters were nearly the same size. Slow-cooked cod cheeks was a good dish, though we were puzzled by the addition of deep-fried cauliflower; why would you want to do that? Mallard breast was another richly flavoured dish, and we were again unsure that adding vanilla to a turnip purée enhanced the dish in any way; it was a peculiar combination.

Desserts are the sort of elaborate art-on-a-plate that, to me at least, suggests a kitchen that's trying too hard: thin wafers balanced on end, and too many drizzles and dabs. The wines by the glass are very good, covering a range of styles at prices which aren't greedy.

L'Autre Pied is a rewarding restaurant with excellent cooking, though we couldn't help feeling the kitchen is currently striving too much to be different; not all the flavour pairings worked. But this is something we don't doubt the kitchen will sort out. Eaves is a one-time winner of a Gordon Ramsay Scholarship, and an alumnus of Hibiscus in Ludlow; that's quite a track record. If he were a racing driver he would be Lewis Hamilton, so the occasional skid off the track early in the season is to be expected.

Time Out London Issue 1944: November 21-27 2007