RESTAURANT AS THEATRE
IT STARTED with souffles. Petronella is obsessed by these dainty creations which puff up like Ascot hats. Caramel, prune and Armagnac, orange zest and quark, chocolate and raspberry: she eats them all, starting at the edge and nibbling around until the centre collapses in a heap in the sauce. The deputy editor of The Spectator eats savoury souffles too. At home it's a simple spinach souff16. In restaurants she orders goat's cheese and dill. It's the moment of delivery which makes a soufflé worthwhile. Roulades, mousses and mous- selines aren't such drama queens. They sit placidly on their plates, while a soufflé shimmies across the floor. Petronella is such a souffleteuse that she can tell imme- diately if a cook has cheated by using bicar- bonate of soda, or has adulterated the egg white with yolk.
The only soufflé she hasn't tried was my favourite food as a child. It was cheddar cheese soufflé with tinned spaghetti hoops. I don't know how I convinced my mother to concoct this recipe but it was delicious and is the dish I cooked the night I met my hus- band. It rose magnificently but he didn't appreciate the subtle taste of tomato and egg, so I've never cooked souffles again.
A souffle personifies French cooking. The ingredients are so simple they can be found in an upmarket garage shop. All you need are eggs, flour, butter and cheese or chocolate. The result is dramatic, never vul- gar. It is also impossible to fake. You can buy perfect lemon tarts at Conran's delis and apple crumbles from M&S, but a souf- fle has to be home-made. Runny and moist are horrible words, but this pudding makes them sound divine. A soufflé should be moist enough to eat without cream, but not so wet that it becomes a mousse. The inside must be %guide baveuse', otherwise called a runny gunge. The puff should dissolve on the tongue and the crust should be crunchy. The only restaurant that does justice to this pudding is Marco Pierre White's Oak Room, where there are always three on the menu. Marco is obsessed by souffles: pan- baked or oven-baked but never frozen or double-baked and certainly not savoury. The first time I saw a soufflé as a boy I was love. Of all foods, it most successfully combines science and art,' he said. It gave as the perfect excuse to go to his outra- geously expensive restaurant at the Meridi- en Hotel on Piccadilly. The Oak Room is every aesthetic epi- cure's dream. It doesn't have a name on its door, you enter through a chilly hotel lobby, and are taken into a vast waiting- room with tiny gilt chairs and mirrored screens. This is the gastro-premier division — one of the few places in Britain where you can talk about French haute cuisine without blushing the shade of your red mul- let soup. It is a restaurant totally wasted on a business lunch or a romantic evening when the food could be subsumed by finan- cial or romantic foreplay.
We booked a table for a Friday night so that we could recuperate over the weekend. As we perched on our gilt chairs, a portly man arrived with a suitcase and sprawled on a nearby sofa. He opened his bag to reveal row after row of Havanas, picked up a silver cigar-cutter and warmed a Partagas Series D with a match — he looked like the restaurant's resident cigar expert. The wait- er brought him a plate of miniature pud- dings, a cup of coffee and a brandy. They treat their staff very well, we decided. Then Max, the head waiter, arrived, and laughed. `He's not a cigar-taster, he's the pre-emi- nent surgeon in Harley Street. After an all- day operation, he likes to work his way through seven courses.'
Most London restaurants aren't worth going to on a Friday or Saturday night. They're filled with rowdy hen nights and office parties. The Oak Room is different. At one table sat twin ladies in their mid- 30s, one vast, one minuscule. Both were eating so hard their hair was falling into their food. 'They're regulars,' said Max. A Japanese family sitting under the Bugatti bronzes were onto their third helpings of apple tart.
We knew our puddings would be souf- fles. The rest of the dinner was more com- plicated. Max discreetly offered his advice. `Do you like foie gras, oysters, truffles and caviar, madam?' We blanched. 'Not all on the same plate.'
Soups, after the first spoonful, are always disappointingly samey. But not the red mullet soup, which was so intensely flavoured you wanted more. Petronella's seafood mariniere arrived in a soufflé dish to titillate. Next came the starters. At one end of the scale, 'milk feuilles of crab' could mean a soggy stick of crab in a stale vol-au-vent. At the Oak Room it involves finely peeling and slicing beef tomatoes and sandwiching them between exquisite crab flesh and velvety avocado. Petronella ate eight oysters in aspic.
For the next course, I had whole Cornish blue lobster grilled with black-truffle but- ter, with mashed potato swirled in more butter, while Petronella ate her lobster with black Perigord truffles. Lobster can be exhausting to eat, but this one melted in the mouth. We both managed to finish the tails before faltering. The souffles were shimmering ominously in the distance. I wasn't sure I was going to cope. Max sug- gested time out for half an hour. A crème caramel arrived unannounced, as did a plate of petits fours. Maybe they'd run out of egg whites in the kitchen. We were beginning to feel hungry again. Then two waiters appeared bearing a vast silver tray with the most magnificent souffles puffed up in pride. Mine was the caramel almond soufflé, which was child's play. Petronella's was more sophisticated, a soufflé Roth- schild, cooked in a pan, that oozed volup- tuously all over the plate. Both were so light we demolished them in seconds. The final course of caramelised pineapple with vanilla sticks, fromage blanc ice cream and sponge cake was simply showing off by the kitchen.
The sommelier was gallant, despite our already having prostituted ourselves with three glasses of very average champagne. On the menu was a Yquem '74 at £30,000 (`yes, that's 1874, madam, but we can't take any responsibility for pre-war vintages'). He suggested a Pouilly Fume D. Dageneau '96, a Mersault premier cru Charmes 0. Leslaive '95 and a Château d'Yquem '89. A sumptuous meal, but I had to spend the next 24 hours lying down in a darkened room. Next time, I'm just going to ask for the soufflé.
The Oak Room, Le Meridien Hotel, 21 Pic- cadilly, London SW1 (0171 437 0202). The a la carte dinner is £75 a head.
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