Restaurants

By Guy Dimond

I suppose he just couldn’t help himself. After years spent creating elegant landmark restaurants, what’s he going to do instead? Play Lotto? So three years after selling off Conran Restaurants (now called ‘D&D London’), Terence Conran’s back at it yet again. He seems to be building up another restaurant empire, this time with his wife Vicki Conran and business partner Peter Prescott. Boundary Project in Shoreditch was their first; Lutyens on the edge of the City is the follow-up.

What Lutyens lacks though is the surprise factor. If you’ve been to other Conran establishments, Lutyens will feel immediately familiar; it’s a formula restaurant. The former Reuters building on Fleet Street, designed by architect Edwin Lutyens, is classically proportioned beauty that works well with the Conran look: high windows, stone pillars, a sturdy bar. Intricate tiling. Good lighting. And of course, sharp-suited staff keeping a close eye on things.

The bar’s the first space you enter. It’s buzzy, loud even, and filled with off-duty lawyers and bankers. The barmen make good cocktails, and there’s a chap manning a little charcuterie counter in case you fancy some nibbles.
Walk through to the main dining room – or be escorted there, as it’s that sort of place – and the atmosphere is altogether more hushed, despite the open kitchen with its polished copper pans. The crustacea bar is reassuringly Conran – as is the sommelier Andrew Connor, who quickly and correctly assessed our level of interest in wine and likely budget, and did so with considerable charm. (Bye bye £36, one glass at a time.)

To head up the kitchen, Lutyens has recruited a safe pair of hands in David Burke, once of Pont de la Tour. The cooking’s bedded in classical French dishes, with a few nods to Burke’s Irish heritage. A starter of lobster mousse is firmly in the classical camp, and resembled a very rich custard, moulded then garnished with a creamy sauce and slivers of lobster meat and tomato. It looked, and tasted, like something from a bygone age, but was beautifully made.

At last, the surprise factor came in the form of the ‘bourride’. This wasn’t the sloppy fish stew we now associate with the name, but the deconstructed version that you might find around Sète (near Montpellier) – that is, with monkfish served as one intact piece virtually ‘dry’, the shellfish and sauce as accompaniments. This Lutyens take is tamer and less garlicky than the Languedoc version.

Being a formula Conran joint, the rôtisserie is of course there, put to good use with our suckling pig – moist, but with long strips of crisp crackling. The Irish touch in our meal was a side order of champ. In this case, the potato mash was so rich we wondered if there was more butter than spuds.

The homage to repasts past was completed by a good peach melba. Although created by Escoffier more than a century ago, the melba seemed to reach its peak of popularity in the 1970s, appearing on every cafeteria menu. The best formulas you don’t need to tamper with – something Terence Conran understands very well.

Time Out London July 2009