The Silver Birch, Chiswick

It's a pleasant novelty to, for once, not be opening a post about an excellent neighbourhood restaurant without a resigned grump about the lack of such places in my own particular neighbourhood. Until recently, my fellow SW11 residents had very little to be proud of (and even less so since the wonderful Mien Tay changed ownership, although mercifully so far this doesn't seem to have knocked standards too much), but with the arrival of Ploussard we have been gifted the holy grail of local dining - affordable, seasonal, consistent, and fun. I booked a return more or less as soon as I'd finished my first meal there.

And so to Chiswick, where the lucky locals of this leafy (and commendably cyclist-friendly) part of town have a genuine gem on their hands. The Silver Birch is not brand new, but had the awful initial bad luck of opening between Covid lockdowns in 2020, and by all accounts struggled to find an audience in a time when most people were afraid to leave their front doors never mind sit indoors in a small high street restaurant. But now, with a new head chef (Nathan Cornwall, ex- of the Barn at Moor Hall), a superb new front of house (our waitress introduced herself as Yas) and an ambitious (and yes, slightly more expensive) menu, this is a restaurant supremely confident of its place in the world.

Given that all the items that caught our eye from the a la carte made up the tasting menu, the tasting menu seemed the obvious choice. A few years ago £90 would have marked you out as being at the finer end of fine dining, but these days, just as Thursday is the new Friday, £90 is the new £50. It began with "snacks", cured trout and seaweed tart which had a lovely balance between the seafood and earthy vegetal pureé underneath (plus topped with salmon roe, which I always love), a cute little blue cheese paste sandwiched between delicate parmesan crackers, and my personal favourite pig's head fritters, joyous little parcels of soft, rich pork inside crisp fried breadcrumbs.

The focal point of the next course was some quite excellent sourdough focaccia, with a delightful delicate salty crust and gently sticky crumb. With that, whipped lovage butter provided in such generous amounts that required you put a quite thick layer on the bread to use it up. And you won't hear anyone complaining about that. But the fun didn't end there - there was also a cute little bowl of smoked bacon mousse with pea veloute, colourful and exquisitely constructed. None of the above would look out of place in a restaurant with multiple Michelin stars.

If you look closely at this tartare you may notice that the beef itself is quite light thanks to quite extensive marbling. This is ex-dairy cattle beef, full of flavour and full of yielding, luscious fat, and complimented perfectly by crunchy fresh discs of kohlrabi, cournichon, wee little nasturtium leaves and little blobs of mustard and vegetable pureé of some kind, maybe the advertised sea herbs. For more texture, there was a few shards of house cracker which had herbs baked into them. Every inch of this dish, indeed everything up to this point as well, was considered and carefully crafted, with a strong set of cooking skills put to great use.

Isle of Wight tomatoes, beautifully presented, skinless and sweet and perfectly seasoned, came with a tomato consommé so good it was worth the trip to Chiswick all by itself. If I'm going to be brutally honest it didn't need the pickled artichoke, which was perfectly nice but a bit of a distraction from the tomatoes, and I'm pretty sure I didn't detect any of the advertised pickled cucumber, but what the hell - that wonderful consommé, and the tomatoes, were all I needed.

A huge, bright chunk of Shetland cod came next, expertly cooked (as you might hope and expect) and breaking into nice defined flakes. But we've all had nice cod before, and you may have even had a courgette flower stuffed with scallop mousse, which came alongside it. What really set this dish apart was a thing called "tartare roe sauce", which was a kind of vinaigrette studded with two different types of roe, which sang with seafood and summer flavours. It was one of those sauces that tasted effortlessly good, and yet you know it took a lot of skill to get right.

There are two types of people, one that can read "Cornish lamb, wild garlic, crispy sweetbread, girolles" and think they want to eat that more than anything else in the world right now, and those that don't. I'm one of the former. The lamb was cooked to pink, the sweetbread was coated in another delicate breadcrumb crust (see also: the pig's head snack), and between them nestled girolles, braised shallot, peas and leaves of wild garlic. And of course, it was all soaked in one of those salty, meaty lamb reductions that only the very best places do well. As a climax to the savoury courses, you could not have asked for more.

But even after all that, the desserts still wowed. I'm slightly allergic to raw cherries, so Silver Birch very kindly subsituted that dish out for some equally wonderful (I'm sure) strawberries, with a rich and zingy strawberry sorbet and bound together with "elderflower cream cheese", a very nice invention.

The final dessert was a brown butter chocolate delice, with milk sorbet and caramelised white chocolate, and despite having polished off seven courses by this point, and fed 6 very generously portioned matching wines, it's still burned into my memory as the most beguiling balance of chocolate and dairy, with texture provided both by a lovely fresh milk sorbet and a quiff of spun sugar on top. It, too, was demolished.

What's interesting about tastings like this, and the Silver Birch in particular, is that you could, at first glance, think that you've seen this kind of thing before. Looking at just the basics of the menu - canapes, bread, snack, veg course, fish course, meat course, dessert 1, dessert 2 - it's a structure that informs more or less any modern British tasting menu, a format repeated up and down the country.

What sets the Silver Birch apart from the 2023 restaurant pack isn't that they're revolutionising the way we eat out, or inventing challenging new flavour pairings or wacky techniques, but instead carefully examining every element of what makes a menu like this work, from the choice of ingredients to the accessible presentation to the skill and detail in all of the sauces and dressings and elements, and making each one absolutely the best it can possibly be. It's an obvious way to win the game, and yet one that very few places have the intelligence and skill to pull off.

So yes, the Silver Birch is quite brilliant. The point off full marks is just for the slightly less than exciting choice of fish (I'd seen John Dory and Dover Sole served in that same dish on social media that same week, but maybe that just serves me right for setting my expectations based on social media), but really there was very little else to complain about. As neighbourhood restaurants go, in fact as any restaurants go, it's right up with the best of them. I'm sure it will do very well indeed.

9/10

The food at the Silver Birch was comped, but we paid for our wines.

La Trompette, Chiswick

For all the stick Twitter gets, quite rightly in some cases, it does occasionally provide some genuinely heartwarming and valuable moments. "If you could go to one London restaurant before you emigrated," asked the food writer Kay Plunkett-Hogge, "which one would it be?". The replies from the London food world are a list of some of the very finest restaurants in town, a timely reminder that whatever the world throws at us, this city really does know how to eat.

Before lockdown, my own answer to that question could have been the Ledbury, a world-class fine dining place that has given countless showstopping moments over the years but sadly couldn't survive the pandemic. Its memory will live on, though. Or perhaps as so many others have replied, Quality Chop House, whose unpretentious approach to bistro food belies a genius-level mastery of technique and relentless search for premium ingredients. Or even Tayyabs, whose trays of mixed grills are tied up with so many happy memories now that eating there is now an exercise in ghee-soaked nostalgia. These, and many other restaurants I have been lucky enough to visit over the years, could be my definitive, final London meal. They'd all live up to the moment, I'm sure.

Following a languid, boozy reunion with old friends in Chiswick last week, I've decided to add La Trompette to that list. Now, full disclosure time, for various reasons this was not a rack-rate La Trompette experience, lovely though I'm sure that is. One of said friends' boyfriend was serving our table, and thanks to a list of special occasions that had built up during lockdown (two birthdays, the completion of a PhD) and general glee at being able to do normal things again, we were treated to a somewhat "mates rates" pricing structure that didn't quite reflect the amount of food we managed to plough through, or indeed the number of glasses of wine. But at the same time, operations like this can't be faked or feigned - you can't just conjure up food this good only when you happen to know who you're serving, or spot a blogger's camera. La Trompette is, genuinely, a world class restaurant. Be absolutely sure of that.

Part of my enthusiasm is pure selfishness - the menu at La Trompette is like someone's found a list of all my favourite things to eat and written them down for safekeeping. So there's game, of course, not just the more obvious things like quail and venison (though they are they too) but guinea fowl and grouse and even hare which I think I can count on one hand the number I've times I've ever spotted on a menu. For seafood there's oysters and scallops but also cockles and turbot, ingredients that require a bit of thought and effort and intelligence to make the most of. It's a restaurant-lover's menu, created by people who love restaurants.

Anyway enough waffling; to the food. Oysters came dressed with tosazu, apparently a sauce made of vinegar, soy, mirin and - most interestingly - bonito stock, which added a sweet umaminess to go alongside the briney shellfish. I've been eating a lot of oysters recently. I like oysters.

This was the aformentioned hare dish, all pink and tender and lovely. It was amazing how they'd managed to cook this tiny fillet as you would a rare sirloin, with just a touch of raw in the middle of each slice and yet still with a nice dark char on the edge. They came with a little pile of soft grains soaked in a completely knockout game jus which obviously won yet more points, and then as if that wasn't enough the whole lot was showered in truffle. Oh, and that on the side is a little cluster of hen of the woods mushroom, crisp on the edges and with a firm, meaty texture in the frods which helpfully soaked up more of that sauce.

Venison - sorry, "fallow deer" tartare came with an interesting twist on the classic recipe, using elderberries and pickled walnuts instead of the usual capers and cornichon. Also, full marks for using straw potatoes on top, a trend I'm still patiently waiting to catch on in London's burger bars. Everything is better with straw potatoes, but particularly burgers, trust me.

The difference between a merely good restaurant and a great one is its ability to both suprise you with something new but also make that experience enjoyable and rewarding. I'd never come across the combination of sweetcorn and cockles anywhere before - I suppose the nearest equivalent is a Southern USA seafood boil which involves corn on the cob and seafood in the form of crayfish - but this was something genuinely new, the dairy of the velouté, smooth and rich and buttery, studded with little sweet, bouncy cockles. Very clever stuff.

Before the mains, a little extra course of giant Cornish (of course it had to be Cornish) scallop with kohlrabi and a frothy miso butter. This was an exercise in presenting this fantastic bit of seafood in a way that merely enhanced its inherent loveliness without confusing or overshadowing it, and the miso butter was a perfect way of doing that.

Now obviously I went for the grouse, and it was literally perfect. Just funky enough, cooked pink and tender, with a little dollop of bread sauce as a nod to tradition, and a dressing of elderberries for a taste of the hedgerows. In place of game chips, smoked potatoes, which were incredible things, crisp outside and creamy within, with a subtle smokiness and just as addictive in their own way as the straw potatoes.

The other main was turbot, a huge, meaty chunk of it, with fluffy gnocchi and a kind of herby sauce spiked with marjoram which again was one of those flavour combinations I've rarely if ever seen before but worked very well indeed. To be honest, I was still a bit distracted by my grouse, but I didn't hear any complaints from the other side of the table.

We had four desserts. Look, if you can't finish a 5-course lunch with matching wines on a random Friday in September by ordering all the desserts from the menu at once, then when can you, in all honesty? They were all great, but particular mention should go to the apple crumble soufflé and buttermilk ice cream, which was a perfect texture (not too eggy, or dense) and the muscovado custard tart which right up there with the Marksman's brown butter and honey tart, which anyone who's ever tried it will tell you, is quite the compliment. The fourth dessert, by the way, was a bitter chocolate pave with raisin and milk ice cream. All the ice creams were smooth and creamy and light, a masterclass in the form.

I was always likely to enjoy La Trompette, being from the same stable as Wandsworth's Chez Bruce, Kew's the Glasshouse and yes, the Ledbury, and also given that anywhere with a fondness for unusual game and modern British cooking is going to tickle quite a few of my personal fancies. It is, as I've said, a restaurant-lover's restaurant, with a solid pedigree and years of practice in capable and friendly service, a polished, happy operation that you'd have to have a piece of your soul missing not to appreciate. If the food had been merely decent, we still would have had a whale of a time that afternoon, because in places like this, it's practically impossible not to.

But add into that alchemy some of the very best food I've been served in the capital, well then you have the makings of something truly special. Experimental when it wants to be, using unusual ingredients and fancy techniques always in a way that delights rather than confuses, that surprises rather than shocks, it is a friendly neighbourhood restaurant to those who want it to be no more than that, but it is also, crucially, a special-occasion destination for the food-obsessed (guilty) where you can indulge your craving for game or seafood or and be absolutely reassured that what you'll be served will be the absolute best it can be. And I intend to do just that, as often as I possibly can.

10/10

The above bill doesn't include some of the wines, including an introductory round of champagne, or the scallops, or the extra dessert, but probably isn't a million miles off a realistic bill if you read it upside down and squint.

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)

Villa di Geggiano, Chiswick

There's usually a point during a meal when you know whether things are going to end well, or if you're going to regret ever setting foot in a place. Usually that point occurs at the first bite of a starter; it is mainly about the food, after all, and if anywhere can't get that right, they may as well not bother. Sometimes you know even before you arrive; if you're being dragged to Las Iguanas on a Christmas Party for example, or (less commonly) if your blog readership votes you to a West-end themed restaurant.

On Friday, having stupidly done no research online and having allowed myself (against my better judgment) to be persuaded to deepest Chiswick to try a newish Italian restaurant, I knew as soon as I was presented with the menu. But before that, things were looking up. A lot of money has been spent converting what was once a recording studio, then a short-lived New York Italian grill, into a remarkably authentic sprawling Tuscan estate, with a large patio out front, a shop, a cosy front room with sofas and a fireplace and (most importantly) a large sky-lit restaurant stretching far, far away to yet another garden out back. It really does feel like the whole place has been lifted from the hills outside Siena, it's impressive stuff.

It's a shame, then, that the menu doesn't have a hundredth as much ambition as the décor. Essentially just a list of clichés at stinging markups, it's the kind of thing you will have seen before countless times in Italian restaurants around the country. Beef carpaccio with rocket and parmesan, burrata with tomato, spinach & ricotta ravioli, tiramisu, it's cookie-cutter stuff of the most unbelievably familiar kind.

True, there's nothing wrong with beef carpaccio or spinach and ricotta ravioli or any of those things, but to be charging these prices for something your customers will (even if they're not hopeless restaurant addicts like me) have had a million times before they will have to be very good indeed. And I'm afraid the food at Villa di Geggiano was anything but.

Four crostini with different toppings here, the best of which a sirloin tartare and the least impressive some chopped tomato and basil, but none of them inedible really. Chicken liver was a bit dense and cheap tasting, and the sirloin tartare needed more salt, but I did eat them. The bread itself tasted stale though, chewy and weak rather than delicate and brittle.

Grilled calamari was at least not chewy like it so often can be, but would have been better with a bit more aggressive crunch and colour from the grill; as it was this was just a couple of bits of oily squid, a fairly ordinary starter at a main course price of £13.

Pasta you'd hope would be a speciality of a Tuscan restaurant but was hugely disappointing. Both were rather clumsily thick, meaning to get al-dente in the middle they'd had to be still quite hard around the edges. My own prawn and spring onion ravioli contained a dry, mealy filling of indistinct flavour, in an underpowered seafood sauce. Spinach & ricotta had a similarly distressing, crumbly mouthfeel, though sage & butter is at least a more comfortable mix of ingredients than whatever was mixed with the prawn. Both came offered with a bowl of dry parmesan powder, like the 90s had never happened - if I'm paying £15 for six pieces of pasta, do you think it would be too much to expect Parmesan to be grated on from a block? Never mind taste of something?

I liked the ice cream desserts, particularly a hazelnut one and a lovely zingy citrus sorbet. The Tiramisu was far less impressive, not really any better than the one from Pizza Express but around the same price. But each were ordered mainly to fill our stomachs since what came before had been so underwhelming.

So it's not just the lack of ambition that hurt at Villa di Geggiano. Not every new Italian restaurant needs to have the innovation and fireworks of Zucca, Trullo, Artusi and the like, where Italian ingredients and methods are paired with cutting-edge London style and - crucially - a very modest asking price. For example, Bibo, not a million miles away in Putney, also serve a few classics such as buffalo mozarella and indeed spinach and ricotta ravioli, but they do it with such extraordinary skill and at such reasonable prices (their ravioli is £9, not £12) that you can't help being charmed by the whole affair.

No, I mainly didn't like Villa di Geggiano because they're serving food that isn't very good, and they're charging way too much for it. And they may have lovely staff and be blessed with one of the most handsome dining rooms in West London but that's hardly going to make up for it. Sorry.

4/10

If you stand outside Villa di Geggiano and fire up my app, it tells you to go to Bibo. You should.