Hedone (revisited), Chiswick

For this blog to be any use to anybody - in fact for any restaurant critic, or guide, or Buzzfeed Top Ten Lobster Mac & Cheese list to be even the least bit useful - then we have to assume that there is such thing as an objectively nice place to eat. If we can all agree that eating soil is not fun, and that eating chocolate is, then surely we should also be able, as a species, to draw a fairly solid conclusion about the land inbetween these extremes; we are, after all, most of us after more or less the same thing - a good dinner.

Sometimes, though, I am baffled by restaurants that polarise opinion, both those that I think everyone should love but they don't, and equally those that people fall over themselves to lavish with praise and which leave me completely cold.

Take Hedone, for example, in Chiswick. I first visited five years ago, shortly after it opened, and suffered through an emotionally vacant precession of beige dishes, ostensibly using the finest produce Western Europe can provide and yet each so wanting of texture, colour and fun that I felt my soul shrinking with every passing minute. And yet in the subsequent years a certain devoted subset of Foodie Internet have repeatedly and sincerely praised the food at Hedone as being not just amongst the best in the country but genuinely world class.

They say that chef Mikael Jonsson goes to greater lengths than any other individual to find the very finest ingredients for his menus. They say said ingredients are treated to techniques that both compliment and amplify specific flavour profiles to the greatest possible effect. And they say, over and over again, that if you can't appreciate that this corner of West London is redifining modern gastronomy, that his towering achievement belongs in the history books, then you don't deserve to enjoy eating out at all and you should just stay at home with a Findus pancake thinking very hard about your life. OK, to be fair, they've never actually said anything about Findus pancakes, but the inference is pretty clear.

It's enough to leave a man who spends a good proportion of his time looking for the next big gastronomic high (me) with a severe case of the FOMOs, and so five years almost to the day I made another booking at Hedone, determined - desperate, in fact - to figure out if I really was a hopeless pleb or instead have some kind of tasting menu-based Damascene conversion.

Long story short, turns out I'm still very much a resident of Plebsville; a 2nd meal at Hedone was every bit as bewilderingly dull as the first. An amuse of tomato jelly tasted of... well, tomato jelly on a little biscuit; no more, no less. A dish of scallops and truffles - despite containing two of my favourite ingredients - conspired to be wobbly and thin, like eating something that needed finishing off on the grill. A slab of foie - again, usually something that couldn't fail to lift my spirits - was a big, boring, fatty chore. Nothing was hideous or even that wrong, it was just empty, cold, devoid of form and fun. It was, in short, the very opposite of why I eat out at all; if the best restaurants are life-affirming and generous of soul and spirit, this was dining by numbers, technically correct but emotionally bereft.

I'm not about to tread on the opinions of so many people who clearly - and for their own very good reasons - consider Hedone their Ultimate Restaurant. But it is odd, not to mention deeply frustrating, that I so obviously couldn't get out of Hedone the transcandental experience so many others had, people who I know for a fact have a huge deal of overlap with my own tastes when it comes to most other restaurants in town. In my original review I made the comparison with modern jazz; that somewhere at the back of my mind I knew there must be something in it, but that thing, whatever it was, will likely be forever out of my grasp. To some, John Coltrane's "A Love Supreme" is a breathtaking work of staggering genius; to the rest of us it is just arrythmic, dischordant nonsense. I wish I understood it, but I don't.

In many ways of course, whether or not I or anyone else appreciates Hedone is a matter of supreme unimportance. They won't miss me (or many like me) as a customer and I won't miss them. I only mention any of it as a kind of thought experiment - that if it's possible for people to have such wildly different experiences of the same restaurant, in fact even of the same meal (my first visit was on the same table as one of the Hedone superfans I mentioned earlier), what use is restaurant criticism at all? Should I find something else to do with my spare time? In fact, don't answer that.

Anyway, excuse my existential wobble; normal service will be resumed in due course. Perhaps we should take some comfort from the fact that we as people, as diverse and difficult as we are, can find anything in common at all, and that the occasional blip like Hedone is proof of nothing more than our diversity. I will leave the Pride of Chiswick to those better placed to enjoy it, and, as one anonymous commenter on my original review put it, "stick to searching for the perfect burger... and leave [the] real food to the adults". For now, I'll agree to disagree. But by God if anyone starts having a go at Tayyabs, there'll be hell to pay.

6/10 (again)