Sion
WHAT a dullard I am. How small-minded I have been, all this while, to have filled my restaurant columns with eateries and food. For years I've been plodding off to dinner, and then writing about what I've found. And not just here. It was the same on the Daily Express. All over the country. All man- ner of gaff from the grand to the grim. I gobbled for Britain, and put my impressions In the papers. What a prat! How pedantic. How terribly, well, literal. Just because all the other media dunderheads do it, because the theatre critics bang on about plays all the time, the opera boys keep writing about opera, the art ones about art, the car ones about cars, you know what they're like. Not to mention those book reviewers; they really are the worst. Read a book, then write a whole damn column about nothing but the book. Pathetic.
Well, anyway, that was the old me. Such pedantry is now in the past. Sort of. On the one hand, this is word 177 and I still haven't mentioned so much as a café. But in other respects 1 have failed. I'm so ashamed. I've fallen at the first, puny, post-modern hur- dle. I meant to review the foodstuffs which gather beneath the drain at the end of my road, my dreary north London terrace built for railway clerks in the days when we still had such things, now teeming with people Ile me, my wife and my two little daugh- ters. It was a toss-up between the bio- degradable filth in the drain and the crud in the tread of my trainers. Or, failing the courage for that, I was planning, at least, to go through the bins of the people next door. Dear reader, I owed you that much. But I have let you down (although we're now on word 316 and I still haven't con- veyed any information). As the deadline for copy approached, just as I was steeling myself to start licking the drains, I began to tremble and sweat and panic, and it all became too much for me. Sad, pathetic, bastard that I am, I started gnashing my teeth and pawing the ground and I just couldn't stand it any more. Dash it all, 1 thought, if I am going to write a restaurant column, I am jolly well going to a blooming restaurant. And if I am going to write a restaurant column in the most plutocratic Magazine in the Western world, I am jolly Well going to a decent blooming restaurant. I went to Spoon+ (ridiculous name, I know; the + is not pronounced) at Sander- Son, the new Ian-Schrager-owned, Philippe- Starck-designed hotel in Fitzrovia. I'm not a big fan of theirs, though I like the bar of the Royalton in New York. The interior of Sanderson is a dull round of visual clichés, which suggests that M. Starck would perhaps do better to concentrate on his line exten- sions for a while (I, for instance, have a nice pair of his spectacles. All way-out and wavy, they are. They're not actually his, you under- stand. They're mine. But he designed them. Or perhaps it was his 'studio'. Toodle-pip.) Spoon +'s main weakness is that it's stuck, rather unceremoniously, at the end of a long and very noisy bar. Others are that £9 is too much for a glass of cham- pagne, and that the clientele is not the longed-for gaggle of chic celebs, but a drear pile of City/media/advertising trash. This is a thematic Schrager-Starck problem.
The food, though (word 618 — not bad for an unapologetic gourmand), was excel- lent. Main Ducasse, the world's greatest chef, is the consultant, the restaurant being a posher sibling (hence the +) of his big Paris hit of two years ago. Unlike most 'con- sultancies' and imports, I think you can really sense the mind and the touch of Ducasse at the back of it all. Predictably, there is a 'new kind of dining' concept, the pretentiousness of which precludes me from explaining it, lest I end up (back) in Pseuds' Corner. Actually, if it weren't so absurdly expressed, it has the potential to be quite a good idea. At any rate, it need have no bearing on your meal unless you want it to.
The star dish was a main course of squid. Big slices were crusted with rock salt and sesame seeds, grilled and served with an unctuous rougaille of mango. It was the most succulent squid I have eaten; which is saying something, because I have eaten quite a lot. My only cavil is that the baby vegetables which accompanied it were too buttery. Otherwise, it was simple but superb.
The ceviche of sea bass with which I began had been equally subtle and sure. It was served with grains of hard-boiled egg, flakes of parsley and croutons in olive oil and butter. More lightly seasoned than the squid, and hardly cooked, the bass was pre- sented in long, quarter-inch slices studded with a delicate concasse of red tomatoes and green mango. Piling a little of each ingredient on to a ceramic oriental spoon made — in terms of both taste and texture — exquisite mouthfuls.
My wife's starter of steamed pork and shrimp ravioli was less startling. She described it as 'heavy-handed', particularly on the pepper, while the use of Italian-style pasta in an oriental dish seemed incongru- ous rather than clever. Nor was her big, fat veal steak as good as my squid. Itself under- seasoned, the spit-roasted chunk of calf was served with a black truffle sauce which was too salty; elsewhere one might have taken this to be deliberate, but not with a menu which encourages mixing and matching of sauces and serves them separately.
Puddings, like the fish, showed fantastic panache without being fiddly or flash. My baked apples came with the most stylish unadvertised cream. It was cooler and more sophisticated by far than your aver- age cream, without straying near to the too- hard, too-sweet unsubtlety of ice cream. Mrs Simon's bread-and-butter pudding was equally the product of a kitchen which knows that it knows how to cook, and feels that it has nothing to prove. This is cooking so assured that it is probably even worth braving the fools at the bar. The food, after all, is what matters.
Spoon+ at Sanderson, 50 Berners St, Lon- don Wl; tel: 020 73001400. £75 per head.
'That new fly-killer is starting to work'
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