The Collection, Knightsbridge

There was a time a decade or two back, hard as it is to believe now, when The Collection was one of the hottest tables in town. Ideally located on the ever-desirable Brompton Road, it regularly played host to A-listers and assorted international glamour-pusses, the rest of the clientele carefully hand-picked out of the star struck hordes that would queue up every night. But yet, like the Met Bar before it or Mo*vida since, stars waned, times changed, and the Collection found itself out of favour. The George Michaels and Paris Hiltons began to book their parties elsewhere, the original owners lost interest and moved on, and by the time I first visited for a friend's birthday in 2006, the huge dining hall was half empty, and without the celebrity factor to support it the menu exposed as directionless and overpriced. I guess that's the problem with running a business aimed at fickle, fame-hungry poseurs - without anything substantial in terms of food or value to fall back on, it's all built on sand.


But now, in 2011, the Collection has been refurbished and relaunched, with a new menu, a new Italian head chef and apparently (though my memory isn't good enough to recall exactly what it was like pre-refurb) a new design inside and out. On the subject of that redesign though, I'm not sure how successful it's been. Whether or not you thought it was a good restaurant overall, one of the standout features of the old Collection was a long, underlit entrance hall which arced gently towards the glittering bar in the far distance. Last night, the underlighting had gone and the same journey felt rather less like a glamorous catwalk and a bit more like one of the pedestrianised subways under Elephant and Castle. The vast bar is still there, though, and I started the evening with something from the Chelsea-themed cocktail list, Granny Takes A Trip. It tasted a bit like mouthwash but I suppose mouthwash is refreshing.


You'll have to excuse the hideous photos which go nowhere near doing the food justice - it was so dark in there I would have nothing to show you if I didn't use the flash, but fortunately as one of only two tables taken last night (understandable I guess on a windy Monday night) I didn't think I'd be bothering anyone too much. Fresh house bread (I always like it when restaurants make their own bread) consisted of focaccia, a crunchy baguette and some kind of strange greasy parcel thing completely covered in salt but which I rather enjoyed in a heart-attackey sort of way. There were three different flavoured oils to dip them in, too, one of which was truffle. I like truffle.



At first I was pleasantly surprised that the "starters" all came in under £10 (this is Knightsbridge after all) but it turns out one of the concessions the New Collection has made to 2011 dining was the ubiquitous Small Plates concept, and we were advised to order at least three between two. Buffalo tartar was my favourite, cleverly hiding a quails egg within, although the accompanying crispbread was way too salty to eat - I scraped off a layer of the stuff so thick I could have seasoned an entire porterhouse with it. Burrata was very good (and very salty too) with more of that (very salty) crispbread, and a scallop carpaccio used good fresh ingredients and looked very pretty on the plate. Quite salty though.


Mains were, for various reasons that I think you may have picked up on by now, nearly right. A 250g sirloin steak, of good beef and cooked medium-rare, was so hugely oversalted I had to eat it between desperate gulps of tap water, and the weirdly bland tomato purée it was served with (not to mention the deathly unimaginative - ugh - rocket and tomato salad) didn't do anything for it. But, it was charred nicely, smelled of lovely barbeque smoke and the chips were very good if a bit-, oh, you get the picture. Barbequed grouper, coated in a thick, treacly marinade although cooked to flaky perfection, was served on top of a mound of crunchy samphire. And the thing about samphire is, it's quite salty.


One of the desserts, a pineapple carpaccio with chilli jelly, was lovely. A good mixture of flavours and very well presented, the chilli wasn't too strong and just got the tastebuds tingling alongside blobs of sharp lemon sorbet. The other, a warm pistachio tartlet, wasn't so enjoyable - the tart itself was fine, but it was served under a huge, thick ring of solid chocolate which rather put the whole thing off-balance. We still finished it off though, probably because it was one of only a couple of dishes all evening that hadn't been caked in sodium.


There will be plenty of people out there, I'm sure, who will thoroughly enjoy an evening at Collection. Just as I would never have been found in the queue out on Brompton Road hoping to catch a glimpse of Prince Harry tucking into his veal chop in the early noughties, I am certainly not now, with my shallow pockets and natural aversion to superficial Sloaney glamour, anything approaching Collection's target audience. All I can really safely comment on is whether the food and drink is worth the money, and I'm afraid it's not, at least not quite. A meal in Knightsbridge is always going to cost more than one in Whitechapel but with the unhinged approach to seasoning and the fact that most of the dishes on the overlong, geographically vague menu were if not exactly wrong then at the very least unadventurous, there's still better to be had elsewhere, even round these parts. The Collection has its place perhaps, but it's not for me.

5/10



I was invited to review The Collection

Dinner by Heston Blumenthal, Knightsbridge

If there existed a movie that all your best friends loved, had received rave reviews from every movie critic on the planet, and had smashed all box-office records, would you be interested in seeing it?

The answer seems obvious - of course you would, even out of sheer curiosity, and although there would be a risk your inflated expectations didn't quite match up to the reality, you wouldn't blame anyone but yourself, you'd probably still have a good time, and anyway what do you have to lose?


And yet for some reason, when a restaurant receives similarly universal praise, there are certain parties who, instead of wanting to see what all the fuss is about, instinctively brace to the opposite position, desperate to not debase themselves by accidentally having anything so trivial as a popular opinion. I find the psychology of this quite hard to fathom - why would you deny yourself the pleasure of a fantastic meal just to mark yourself as separate from the herd? There's no shame in liking somewhere good, even if everyone else likes it too. I can understand why you may get bored by the reams of gushing text on Twitter and press and food blogs of course, but to deliberately avoid somewhere just because it's popular, or - even worse - to set out determined to hate a place before you've taken your first bite in order to position yourself as the sole arbiter of "reason" and "perspective", seems incredibly arrogant. To repeat: there's no shame in liking somewhere good.

Sorry to start off this post on such a belligerent tone, but I promise my motives are benign - I just want to persuade as many people as possible, including - and in particular - all the nay-sayers and hype-averse and deliberate contrarians, to book a table at Dinner by Heston Blumenthal. I don't care if you're bored senseless with the coverage, if the merest mention of "meat fruit" turns your stomach or if you want to gouge your eyes out whenever you see the phrase "spit-roasted pineapple" - everyone should have a meal at this dazzling, spectacular, wonderful new restaurant.


We may as well start with the meat fruit - if I'm going to provoke the anti-hypists, I probably can't do much better than with this, the most exhaustively investigated dish. Looking for all the world like a slightly saggy but authentically textured tangerine, the fruit "skin" contains a subtly alcoholic, deliriously light and rich chicken and foie gras parfait, which spread easily on the crunchy rustic loaf provided. The orange wasn't just a visual trick either - the citrusy casing added a sharper note to the rich filling and made the whole that much more enjoyable. Unique and tasty and very impressive indeed.


Another starter of Hay Smoked Mackerel was no less accomplished. Some moist and fresh slices of delicately smoked mackerel fillets came nestled in a salty anchovy sauce and dressed with some bitter endive leaves and thinly-sliced pickled lemon. It was a combination of flavours and textures that showed a masterful technique but also, even more importantly, real imagination - a memorable and hugely enjoyable dish.


I don't know what strange alchemy Professor Heston had used to get these strips of pigeon breast so unbelievably tender and tasty, but the results were truly spectacular. With a rich ale sauce complimented with some sharp (and neatly carved) artichoke hearts, this was another completely stunning, expertly crafted dish.


This generously proportioned pork chop was grilled over charcoal to get a lovely smoky, crispy char and served over buttered cabbage. A much simpler dish than the others perhaps but no less tasty - I can't think of any restaurant other than London's top two steakhouses (Hawksmoor and Goodman) to use flame-grilling to such good effect - the fat was crisp and salty, the flesh tender and barely pink. Perfect.


If the starters and mains were impressive, desserts were out of this world. Taffetty Tart was a dish I'd been served in a slightly modified format at that Fat Duck last year, but here it was even better than I remembered, the carefully constructed layers of caramel and fruit paste served with a truly incredible blackberry sorbet. And yes, the spit-roast pineapple tasted every bit as good as its 30 minute cooking time would suggest (we had to order it along with the savoury courses to give them enough time to prepare), served alongside a heavenly alcoholic brioche "tipsy cake".


We never wanted it to end. In an effort to delay the inevitable, we dragged our heels with a very good British & Irish cheese board, and once that was polished off were pleasantly surprised with a final petit for of Earl Grey caramel with caraway seed shortbread to dip in it. Like everything else, it was carefully considered, artfully prepared and brimming with fun and invention.



There was, of course, the final matter of the bill. With only one glass of wine each it came to just short of £160 for two, which of course is not a cheap lunch, not by a long way. But it is no word of an exaggeration that the food at Dinner, while perhaps not as mind-bogglingly intricate and theatrical as the multi-course tasting menu at the Fat Duck, comes from the same wonderful place creatively and still felt like the bargain of the century once we'd paid up and rolled happily home. The sheer effort, attention to detail and astonishing skill that went into every single element of the dishes we ate on Saturday, as well as service from a front of house team that were as attentive and knowledgable as you could ever hope for, made the whole experience a complete joy from start to finish. It may be irritatingly over-exposed, it may be depressingly over-subscribed, but it's both those things for a very good reason. Believe the hype.

10/10

Bar Boulud, Knightsbridge

"Have you ever heard of Daniel Boulud?" I naively asked my friend, a New Yorker. Her snort of disbelief could have been heard across the Atlantic.

"Of course! Daniel Boulud is famous!" she replied, "He's one of the best."


She's right, of course - even his Wikipedia entry describes him as a "famous French chef" - but in that curious way in which the United Kingdom and the US seem to share obsessions with musicians and movie stars but very rarely chefs, he's barely known over here. Despite all the fuss over Jamie Oliver's America in the UK press, I have it on good authority that your average American wouldn't know him from Adam. I kind of envy them.


But if you don't know who Daniel Boulud is yet, you will soon. The opening of Bar Boulud, tucked neatly underneath the grand pile that is the Mandarin Oriental Knightsbridge, is Boulud's first UK restaurant, and has been greeted with the biggest fanfare and whirlwind of frantic blogging since, well the last big new mid-range bistro opening (Bruno Loubet in Clerkenwell). First impressions of the room are pretty good - a faint whiff of new paint still lingers but the low ceilings and open kitchen create an informal and attractive space, and the staff - present in huge numbers - are friendly and eager to please. That is, until they caught sight of a camera.

"Excuse me, sir, are you from a magazine?"

This question wasn't directed at me - I had my usual iPhone. If attractive, properly composed shots of food started appearing on this blog I'd probably give half my readership a coronary. The offending camera, an impressive looking digital SLR, belonged to a friend of mine and had provoked the attention of a nervous senior waiter.

"I will just go and have a word with chef and make sure it's OK for you to take photos."

And so he scurried off. Moments later, he was back.

"It is fine as long as you don't take any pictures of peoples faces."

Not even our own? Anyway, that was that. I suppose it makes sense that the only restaurant in years to raise the taking of photos as an issue was one that was not only based very much on an American model, but has also brought a number of its employees over from New York to handle the launch. Blogging is, in common with most things internet-related, far more established and commonplace in the States and the backlash against uppity amateurs arranging complex and time-consuming shots and annoying other diners with powerful flash photography has - quite rightly - begun in earnest. I've done various bits of press defending bloggers' (and diners') rights to take photos of the food that they've paid for, but I think using flash and tripods and demanding special privileges is not only unacceptable but potentially damaging to the currently fairly good relationship between us and restaurants.


There, I've said my bit - now to the food. To share between the three of us we had a small portion of the famous Boulud charcuterie board, containing slices of a number of different terrines and hams, and a boudin blanc on truffled potato. The charcuterie was excellent value, containing premium meats of all kinds and a liberal application of foie gras, and it was hard to fault any of it. Highlights were a herby "pulled rabbit" terrine which had a lovely rosemary hit, and a lamb "tagine" containing a complex spice mix that Tayyabs would have been proud of. The boudin blanc was soft and rich (although I didn't detect much truffle in the truffled potatoes) and even the pickles stood out thanks to their strength of flavour and sweet/vinegar balance.


Three pieces of glistening pork belly arrived "compliments of the chef" while we were tucking into our charcuterie. At first I assumed this was some kind of opening week promotion or it was simply an extra handed out to all diners, but it very soon transpired that someone front of house had Googled my name, found the blog, and now Daniel Boulud himself was sending out dishes he felt we should try. All very flattering of course, but I mention it only as a kind of disclaimer - the service we received is probably not the norm. That said, I'm buggered if I'm going to start booking under a pseudonym.


My main was a roasted chicken breast with wild garlic and artichokes. With great crispy skin and nicely seasonal, this was a comforting and rustic dish of classic French bistro food - the kind you really don't see very much of in London at all. A friend's burger, the Piggie (containing pulled pork), was perfectly proportioned and - take note Grand Union - an ideal size for eating with your hands. The Frenchie burger, though, was on another level. The use of strong Morbier cheese, not an idea I would normally entertain in any burger, actually enhanced the flavour of the aged beef, and wonderful crispy confit pork belly stood in for a bacon slice. It was brilliant, but - full disclosure again - it was on the house, as was another plate of sausage, this time a rich boudin noir. And there's nothing like a freebie to enhance your dining experience.


Boulud himself is, as you might imagine for a man who made his living out of hospitality, charm itself. Appearing at our table a couple of times during the meal, he mentioned he was having "forty or so" chefs over that evening for an opening week party.


"We have quite a guest list. Would you like to see?"

He wasn't kidding. Joel Robuchon, Pierre Hermé, Shane Osborn, Claude Bosi - almost literally every top chef in London and most of Paris. If a bomb had been dropped on Bar Boulud last night we would all be eating Pret sandwiches and McDonalds for the next few years. Heston Blumenthal and Jamie Oliver weren't on the list but were apparently "expected", and although Jason Atherton, Marcus Wareing and Angela Hartnett were coming, there was no sign of Big Sweary himself. I can kind of see why. I briefly thought about sitting out the next couple of hours at the bar to watch the procession of food celebrities arrive, before scaring myself with the realisation I'd even considered it.

We finished with a couple of nice macaroons each (presumably Hermé's work) and asked for the bill. It came to £170 for three, which was pretty good value considering the location and pedigree (we'd had a couple of bottles of wine and some of us had coffee) - Bar Boulud is hardly a budget option but is not charging anywhere near as much as it could for cooking of this standard. The big question mark hanging over the whole evening, though, is would I have felt the same if the eager front of house hadn't Googled me and given us the whole VIP treatment? I'm not delusional enough to think that one bad review on one blog out of hundreds is going to make much of a difference to their bottom line, but clearly someone somewhere thinks its worth their while to 'research' their guests and tailor service accordingly. Last night, I was flattered and pathetically grateful. Once the novelty wears off, I'm not so sure. And how does it reflect on a restaurant if they aren't treating everyone the same?


I suppose the most important thing is the food, and if I was to judge the place just on the quality of the product coming out of their kitchens, then I'd still recommend it. I can try and tell myself I imagined that awkward transition between the suspicious attitude of the staff pre-Googling and the transformation post-Googling, ignore the free dishes and the attentions of the head chef, and after all that the burger and charcuterie selection is still up there with the best of them. Boulud has brought a welcome slice of New York generosity to London, and if that comes with a side order of Yankee-style internet media acumen then perhaps it's just something we'll have to get used to. You certainly won't find many bloggers complaining.

8/10

One-O-One, Knightsbridge

Never has the phrase "don't judge a book by its cover" been more appropriate than when applied to One-O-One seafood restaurant in Knightsbridge. In this genteel part of town, over the road from the stately, baroque Mandarin Oriental and next door to the clean bright lines of Harvey Nichols department store, squats the ugly grey edifice of the Sheraton Park Tower hotel, its mould-stained pods stacked up like breeze blocks, blocking out the sun and casting a depressing dirty shadow over Hyde Park. It is largely this reason that I've taken so long to visit, because despite various excellent reviews by people who eat out much more than I do, it requires quite a leap of faith that anywhere could serve anything worth eating in such a hideous building. But if anyone can, self-confessed seafood obsessive and head chef Pascal Proyart can. Amazingly, Proyart joined One-O-One a full nine years ago, and yet it seems to be only very recently that the restaurant is being spoken about as a destination. And ever on the cutting edge of restaurant trends in London, I visited last Friday.



It is a blessed relief, not to mention more or less a requirement, that One-O-One is much, much prettier inside than out. You enter into a large, crescent-shaped bar with a fancy glass table centrepiece. To the right of the bar, containing plush comfy chairs and attractive spot lit wood-panelled walls, is the restaurant itself - by no means a large room but with well-spaced tables and the atmosphere of a luxury cruise liner. Service is almost perfect - friendly without being obsequious, efficient without being snooty. Our party, as is often the case due to a combination of the London traffic and London weather, arrived in drips and drabs before 7pm but this didn't faze the staff at all and everyone's food arrived at once despite the orders being staggered somewhat.

One-O-One does have a traditional 3-course A La Carte menu, but the done thing is to go for their 'Petits Plats' selection - you choose from 3 to 6 small courses (no prizes for guessing how many I went for) and, in a clever bit of organisation, it's possible for each person on the table to have a different number of courses. This is quite unusual for what amounts to a tasting menu, and yet I don't remember anyone ever obviously "sitting out" a course despite everyone ordering different numbers. Full marks to the front of house on this one.

House bread is served with a choice of normal unsalted butter and an extraordinary salty seaweed-infused butter that looked like a Walnut Whip. It seemed to split the diners on our table down the middle, with some people relishing in the fishy flavours and others being not so sure. I loved it.


Amuse was a rather forgettable fish mousse of some sort topped with salmon roe. Fine, but considering this is the only dish of the entire evening that the kitchen is pushing onto you without you asking for it, you'd think they'd have free reign to do something a bit experimental - after all if you don't like it you can hardly ask for your money back. As it turns out I need not have worried that chef Proyart was playing it safe, judging by what was to follow.


First of my selected petit plats was three cute little columns of the most unbelievably sweet and silky King Crab leg meat, served alongside a perfectly judged sharp hit of pickled winkles to cut through the crab. It was everything you'd want from a dish - honest, strong flavours from premium ingredients, cooked sensitively and with skill, and with a master's sense of balance of flavour. Full marks.



Next up, a little stack of lobster meat and celeriac (a great combination), a couple of presentations of apple, and a samosa (they called it a "pastilla") containing more of that gorgeous sweet crab meat. Amusingly, they first served this dish without the sorbet, and after I pointed it out whipped it away and brought it back con sorbet and rotated 180 degrees to try and make it look like a new plate of food. I didn't mind though, as the samosa was still hot and the service otherwise had been so superb. There were others who had this dish that evening who thought there was a bit too much going on here, what with the sorbet AND the jelly AND the hot samosa AND the lobster salad. But I thought it was just ambitious enough, and a very attractive plate of food to boot.


Pan-Fried Scottish Scallops were unfortunately slightly disappointing. The scallops themselves were tiny and although of high quality and sweet, there wasn't enough of them to cut through the big slabs of oily preserved truffle they were lumped with. Also the foie gras was quite dry and "liver-y", and although it may seem odd to criticize liver for being too "liver-y", proper seared foie should be buttery and sweet and rich and not taste like one half of liver and onions. A good dish conceptually, let down by ingredients and execution I think.


Slow Roasted Pheasant with (more) Foie Gras & Pancetta was much better. The pheasant had amazing texture, melt-in-your-mouth buttery-ness and great, deep flavour. A little accompanying endive charlotte topped with trompette mushrooms was slightly tough but had been cooked just enough to rid it of the bitterness without it turning into sludge, and a chestnut purée offset the whole thing quite nicely. A little messy in presentation perhaps but otherwise top notch Michelin cooking.


The last of the savoury courses, a medallion of beef fillet steak with a burgundy sauce, was again very good. The beef was clearly of very high quality and tasted strongly of cow (amazing how many don't), the rich sauce guiding and complimenting the meat instead of smothering it. More of those trompette mushrooms and a couple of cubes of roast potato provided vegetation. As with the King Crab and the pheasant, One-O-One knows when to let the superb ingredients shine through, and the star of the show in this dish was the meat.


Dessert was a very attractive bowl of day-glo apple sorbet and chunks of apple, served in a light pink blackberry froth. It tasted how you'd imagine apple and blackberry to taste - nice enough but little more than a glorified fruit salad. Very pretty though, isn't it?


A few very pleasant petit fours arrived to offset the shock of the bill. One-O-One is a proper haute-cuisine restaurant, and despite the 50% off the food offer (thank you Topable), I still managed to get through the best part of £100 just on my own. Having said that, we had plenty of very nice wine (the list is pretty eclectic), a glass of champagne to start and a lovely peaty Lagavullin 16 to finish, and I can honestly say that I felt the price I paid was very fair. Good food very rarely comes cheap, and these ingredients in particular - King Crab, lobster, black truffle (albeit preserved), foie gras - never do. And on top of these flashy ingredients you get sparkling service, glamorous surroundings and seven or eight superbly constructed courses of probably the best seafood in London. All you need to do is ignore the concrete monstrosity outside on top of it, and you'll have yourself a wonderful evening.

9/10