Restaurants

By Guy Dimond

This restaurant was hugger-mugger with Hartnett groupies, restaurant critics, PRs and food bloggers on our visit – and such is its instant popularity, we were lucky to be slotted into the only spare table they could find in Murano’s opening week. The reason? Angela Hartnett is behind it, and behind her is Gordon Ramsay’s PR machine.

Anything from the Ramsay stable – good or bad – gets the kind of uncritical hype normally reserved for new Harry Potter novels and ‘sightings’ of Maddie. So I won’t bore you with: Angela Hartnett’s ‘Italian heritage’; that she’s been on telly; or that she’s that rare thing – a successful and high-profile female chef (this last fact responsible for many column inches) – because you know all this already.

What is surprising is how understated Hartnett’s
new restaurant is, after the pomp of The Connaught. Despite the Murano name, there are no bold glass chandeliers of Murano glass, no outward signs of palazzo opulence; instead, a bland palette of what the designers call ‘cream pearl and pastel celadon’ (and most people call ‘magnolia’). It’s a biggish room of widely spaced tables which is refreshingly hushed and as still as the Venetian lagoon. Neither Hartnett nor her head chef, Diego Cardoso, were parading the room on our visit. Instead, the service was urbane and restrained – we witnessed staff dealing with a whingeing drunk at the next table with utter professionalism.

Hartnett’s menu while she was at The Connaught was, at times, overwrought. Not here, where simplicity is made a virtue. The food is sensational from the first nibble: translucent slices of a cured ham were more sumptuous than the Doge’s Palace, served with grassy Planeta olive oil, focaccia and carta di musica. The ingredients continued to steal the show in a dish of lozenge-shaped San Marzano plum tomatoes, simply roasted and served with chunks of burrata cheese which oozed from the centre like runny mozzarella. Halibut is a fish which needs to be served sashimi-fresh to really shine, as it did when served just-cooked with slicks of apple purée, braised fennel and a red wine sauce: another triumph of substance over artifice.

There’s a strong representation of vegetarian dishes at Murano, and a vegetarian menu (like the regular menu, £55). From this, the potato gnocchi were so light you half expected cherubs to be nesting among them. These were mixed up with diced globe artichoke and two types of cheese – perhaps one cheese too many, but the goat’s cheese sauce, spooned from a copper saucepan by a waitress, was sublime.

Our appetites were already sated by the time an unbidden cake-rack of tiny scoops of fruit-flavoured sorbets and ice-creams arrived. Then this was followed by spectacular desserts: a warm, marsala-infused zabaglione, spooned over wine-infused fresh figs, and a black cherry foam, theatrically spooned over chunks of frozen panna cotta (pictured above left). Oh, and then some beautifully crafted chocolates, which we had to take away.

The prices are the sting in the tail – £55 for a three-course menu of essentially simple Italian food is roughly double what you’d pay in Italy, but this is the most expensive city in Europe, not some Umbrian backwater. If you live in London, you can pay a lot more for a lot less. At Murano, less is more. But worse, much worse than the Mayfair prices, will be the difficulty of booking a table – it can be easier to flag down a gondola at Piccadilly Circus than get the time and date of your choice.

PS In January 2009 the UK Michelin Guide awarded this restaurant a Michelin star.

Time Out Issue 1985: September 4-10