Some restaurants just make it look so easy, don't they? The menu at Camille is so enticing, with unusual eye-catching ingredients prepared in exciting and distinctive ways, that it's almost enough to spoil any other dining experience by default, and it makes you wonder if they can do it, why can't everyone else? I thought I might as well lead with this spoiler (yes, Camille is every bit as good as everyone keeps saying it is) because after all that is the most important point to get across in this post - Camille is great, and you should go immediately. But if you want a bit more detail, then here goes.
The operation is so practised and settled you'd be forgiven for thinking it had been going for years, but the site has swapped hands so many times over the last decade or so it feels like it's been something different every time I'd been to Borough Market. Google Streetview tells me that since 2009 it's been a butchers, a chocolate shop, a wine seller, a florist, a Bill's style brunchy/breakfast place and, most recently, a branch of Kings Cross sandwich specialist Sons & Daughters, run by the guys behind Pidgin. Let's hope Camille will stick around a bit longer, because it really deserves to.
I started with pastis (never thought it would come to this), which I only mention because it caused the only minor service niggle of the evening. I'd decided to pay £5 for the Henri Bardouin variety instead of the familiar Ricard variety which was £4 because what the hell, you only live once, but couldn't help noticing that the person behind the bar poured a glass of the more prosaic pastis. If I hadn't been facing the bar I almost certainly wouldn't have noticed the inferior product being used as, well, I don't drink pastis very often and they do tend to taste rather similar (regular pastis-fanciers may disagree), and I'm 100% sure it was a genuine mistake not some kind of costcutting swindle, but it did make me wonder how often this happens - especially with glasses of wine, about which I know even less.
Anyway, who cares. First bit of food to arrive were these oysters with verjus, which (I found out from Google) is a juice made from unripe grapes, crab apples or other sour fruit. It seems they'd turned it into a nice sharp granita, which made a very clever and enjoyable foil for the oysters. Having spent the best part of the last 20 years or so ordering oysters whenever I see them on a menu, it's incredible people are still finding inventive and surprising ways of serving the things.
And Camille, it turns out, specialises in finding ways of serving food that surprise and delight. You may have heard of John Dory - a rarely seen (at least in the UK) and so usually fairly expensive fish known in various different languages on the continent as St. Peter's fish, as the distinctive dark spot on its side is supposed to be the apostle's thumb print (the fact that the fish appears, spot and all, in various pre-Christian Roman and Greek mosaics hasn't prompted a change of name at time of print).
This is a whole, deep-fried young John Dory and it's genuinely one of the most revelatory and brilliant bits of fish I've eaten all year. With a stripped-back St. John aesthetic - just the animal, ugly-beautiful and served on the bone with saffron mayonnaise - it looks at first, spiky and angular, like it might be a bit of a challenge to eat. So it's a joy to discover that actually the flesh from the body pulls away in satisfying chunks and tastes, with an incredible depth of flavour, every bit the premium product. But then you discover that even many of the bones themselves, treated to God knows what kind of clever technique, or maybe just because the animal is young, are edible too - sort of like crunchy fish crackers - leaving you able to strip the thing right down to the backbone. And all this for just £10. This has to be one of the great seafood bargains of London.
Devilled eggs - something you only ever used to see in Anglo-aligned restaurants in the US but have, I have noticed, started creeping onto trendy menus in the UK recently, would have been decent enough even without - a touch of genius - a little cross-fillet of smoked eel on top. So you have that earthy, smoky, seafood flavour paired with rich, creamy, paprika-spiked egg. Incredibly enjoyable stuff.
Next, another unbelievably successful fish course. A whole, beautifully char-grilled red mullet would, much like the John Dory, been more than enough to appreciate by itself, but came in a completely wonderful crab-butter sauce which we attempted to soak up and polish off with every bit of bread and/or potato pave (not pictured, but think Quality Chop House confit potato) that came to hand. And like the John Dory it was enough to make you look out for red mullet on every restaurant menu in the future - a dish good enough to redefine how you think about a fish.
We have nobody to blame other than ourselves for deciding to round out a fish-heavy dinner with a giant whole grilled megrim sole, which was far too much and completely unnecessary and although perfectly decent, definitely not on the same level as the John Dory or the mullet. I think my problem with megrim sole is that it looks so much like Dover sole that you're expecting the same kind of meaty, luxurious, firm flesh, but megrim is (at least the times I've had it) less full of flavour and more, well, mushy. But as I say, I won't score them down on this as we willingly ordered it and it was exactly as ordered.
There was also a grilled sweetcorn with smoked hay butter which had a fantastic mix of textures, with lots of little crispy corn bits - Camille certainly know how to use a grill - and chewy wild mushrooms.
If you hadn't noticed already thanks to my murky photos, the lighting in Camille is very, er, "romantic" - so a few things we ordered the photos didn't come out very well, not both desserts, a chocolate thing with "beef fat caramel" which obviously we had to order, and a mushroom ice cream. Both were, needless to say, great, but as I have a particular fondness for "weird" gelato (I still look back fondly on the pig's blood and chocolate ice cream that Gelupo did for Halloween one year) the umami-packed pied do mouton ice cream was my favourite.
If you're thinking £85pp for all of the above is a bit of a bargain, well I agree with you - but it doesn't quite tell the full story. Either thanks to "blogger's bonus" or genuine mistake, Camille didn't charge us for our wine, so a more realistic price per person would be about £100. Still perfectly acceptable for one is unquestionably one of the best restaurants in central London, but not quite a bargain. So either thank you Camille, or apologies for not noticing the missing items until now, but if it helps I'll definitely be back and I'll settle up then.
It's a curse of visiting restaurants quite as much as I do that you're constantly on the lookout for the fresh and the new, and although it pains me to admit it, for better or worse the "dynamic, experimental and occasional noble failure" will generally win over the "safe and familiar and consistent" every time. But occasionally, a restaurant comes along that is not only approaching the business of serving dinner in vibrant and intelligent new ways, but does so with such confidence and ability that it immediately becomes the new standard. And so it is with Camille, a tour-de-force of modern British/French bistro cooking that has single-handedly just made eating out in London an even more enticing prospect.
9/10
