LUTYENS: BLUEPRINT CONRAN

A few weeks ago, HP came home with a bit o’ beef from Jack O’ Shea. He proudly announced that while it was being cut, he had guessed the weight to within an ounce much to the amazement of London’s celebrity meat cutter.

He’s like that HP. I love him, well like a brother, but there is the element of Rain Man about him when it comes to food as he proved last night as we took our seats in the cavernous dining room of new Conran restaurant, Lutyens.

From behind his menu, all I could hear was

“mumblemumblemumble about 120covers mumblemumblemumble”

I asked the waiter and, after checking with a colleague, he came back and said

“A little over 120 covers, sir”

I told you, Rain Man, bless him.

But, I digress.

Lutyens is the latest enterprise in the new direction of Sir Terence, named in honour of Sir Edwin Landseer Lutyens, one of Britain’s greatest architects and housed in one of his finest and last buildings, the former Reuters building at the bottom end of Fleet St.

It has all the hallmarks of Sir T with vast amounts of money obviously being spent on the restaurant, the bar and a soon to open private members club in the basement. The kitchen is on show and so too is the raw bar with enough seafood on ice to impress even HP, as he was playing “guess the number of clams”

"mummblemummb35and24and7mummblemummble"

The menu too wont come as any surprise to anyone who has ever eaten chez Terence. It’s decorated with waiters in their finest Frenchie livery and, on the inside, along with the seafood offerings, are enough classic French dishes to make you want to hide a picture of “The Madonna with the big boobies” in a fake sausage.

Knowing that oysters are one of the two things that will kill me (the other being accidentally catching an episode of “Supersizers go…….. on T.V”) HP suggested splitting half a dozen cherrystone clams from Essex.

With places owned and operated by Sir T, the one thing you can always count on is the exemplary quality of the ingredients. So it was with the clams, stunningly fresh and perfectly shucked to retain the juices so many places let drain away.

HP’s snail starter was well priced at £7.50 and comprised half a dozen meaty slitherers with, as it should, a hefty amount of garlic and parsley. As I said before about a similar dish at Bouchon Breton, at its best, it is the sort of unapologetic dish that makes you realise why you love food. Here, although there should be some points deducted for allowing excess garlic and parsley on the dish to burn and make the residue oil bitter, the main event, the snails, were spot on and I stole the shells from HP to suck clean.

It was welcome too to see the return of Coquille St Jacques to a British menu, but less welcome to see what they had done to three superb scallops, which although perfectly cooked were done a disservice by a dry and grainy mashed potato surround and not enough sauce to rectify the situation.

Main courses were an equally mixed bag and strengthened our long held opinion with matters Conran that, the execution of the cooking ranks behind design, service and ingredients. My own choice of suckling pig with apple sauce and crackling was as good as you are likely to find in London. Three thick slices helped along with a little bit of sage through the middle sat on a mound of perfect apple sauce, which retained a sharp bite to cut through the fat. On top, a sliver of perfect crackling that split easily so I could share it with HP.

Where more skill in the cooking was required however, things fell apart quite badly. Veal kidneys had tightened to chewy little bullets and HP prodded at them glumly until one of the staff came to check if all was well in DH world. To their credit they offered, twice, to replace the dish but given that I had wolfed down nearly half of my dish already, HP declined and worked his way though the nuggets of offal declaring that despite the poor cooking, they actually tasted pretty decent.

The sauce with the kidneys was announced as the classic Sauce Diable, which should be laced with lemon juice, black pepper and Cayenne. What we got was little more than a standard and not particularly nice veal demi-glaze that formed a pool around a splodge of unannounced mashed potatoes, which had we known they were coming would have made our side order of frites redundant.

As it were, side dishes, while well priced, were poorly executed. Spinach was acceptable, a tomato and shallot salad was struggling to come up for air in a pool of oil and the aforementioned frites were anaemic and in need of another frying.

The dessert list was a cookie cutter offering that allowed HP to order his inevitable selection of ice cream and me to see what they did with the classic Peach Melba. Again, the ingredients were superb. Raspberries in particular had us fighting to scoop the few we were given from the bowl, but a Peach Melba needs to be served in a less apologetic fashion than the little silver bowl with which I was presented and WHERE was my wafer? Damn them, I had to steal one from HP.

Mint tea and napkin tests were bitch slapped to oblivion by the excellent staff and although I don’t particularly like the new trend of “zonal marking” in service that means you get at least ten different servers during your meal, as long as they don’t mess things up, I can live with it. That never seems to be an issue at Sir T’s places and the staff were well deserving of the service charge that was added to the final bill.

As the name of the posts suggests, apart from a bit of a pun, this is an instantly recognisable Conran opening, great room, great service, top ingredients, adequate if hit and miss execution and a bill at the end that gives you a bit of a shiver. You also get the distinct impression that all the effort has gone into the opening and, as proved with a recent follow up meal at Boundary, this is as good as it’s going to get.

“mummblemumbleGoodasitsgoingtogetmummmble”

Come on HP, let’s get you home to bed.

BOUNDARY: LIMITED COOKING IN THE DITCH

At some point in my life I morphed from a grumpy young man to a grumpy middle aged man. I’m not sure exactly when that was. Maybe when I started staying in on a Saturday Night with some nice food and a good bottle of wine secretly hoping that no one would call or maybe the constant urge to write a stiff letter to the chairman of John Lewis bemoaning their decreasing standards of service.

Prime candidate might be the other night at Boundary restaurant when my increasingly iffy eyesight caused me to mistake Venison for Veal on the menu. It made for an embarrassing moment when the chef came up to apologise and find out why I hadn’t enjoyed the dish and had sent it back. “We don’t have any Veal” he said confused. I bowed my head in shame and vowed to get some reading glasses the next day.

To be honest it wasn’t a good piece of meat: tough, gristly and lacking the gamey flavour that had been evident in a similar cut I’d eaten at The Harwood Arms. It came with an over-pungent Juniper sauce that I could smell from several feet away and which smothered a poached quince. Some Braised Endive on the side was an Exxon Valdez in miniature.

Which is a bit of a shame really as DH had enjoyed a meal at the Albion, the caff upstairs, just before Christmas. Boundary is located two floors below and offers up the sort of Franglish menu that would be familiar from any of the old Conran gaffs. And like those places it flatters to deceive.

A pleasant basement room with exposed brickwork, sympathetic lighting and a view of the kitchen that is more intimate than is probably necessary, is manned by lots of amiable staff who do their job well and without fuss; belying the fact this was their first service.

Feeling pretty positive about the place, ordering a dozen oysters seemed like the right thing to do. Half a dozen each of French and English Natives were good although the ones from the Gironde slammed those from Perfidious Albion 6-0: briny, so very briny.

An underseasoned dish of Cuisses de Grenouilles was a bit of an oil bomb and could have done with a crisper coating. I’m not sure though that this classic preparation was an improvement over the tempura-like version at Le Bouchon Breton ten minutes away.

As a replacement for my Veal, sorry Venison, my Onglet aux échalotes (although I think it was actually Bavette) was a small but decent piece of beef with exemplary chips. But then they had to go and spoil it by smothering it in a demi-glace. Ho Hum.

They need to work a bit on the Ice Cream as well. The taste wasn’t too bad but the texture was odd. I don’t think a larger scoop would hurt their bottom lines too much either. But hey, there’s a recession on. For me, Albion remains the better, cheaper bet.

Now, where's the nearest Boots ?

ALBION: NO PERFIDY IN THE 'DITCH

In truth December is not a great time for visiting restaurants. The presence of big parties of loud-mouthed diners wearing funny hats palls somewhat and when it’s not French tourists then one has to contend with the British Office Party Outing. Why, in heaven’s name, would anyone spend an evening in the company of people they've spent a whole year avoiding in any sort of social setting ? Beats me.

Luckily, before our visit to new gaff Albion, HS had the wizard idea of popping in to Lounge Bohemia, an oasis of sanity in our nabe and bereft of any bad behaviour (shouting, being an arse, putting feet on the table - that sort of thing). After some inventive and pleasingly strong cocktails we pimp-walked our way up to Redchurch Street - currently the hippest street in London (and hence the known World).

I’m not sure how much Tel, sorry Sir Terence Conran, still owns of the D&D group to which he sold his restaurant portfolio, but the manager at Albion was very keen to emphasise that this was wholly a Conran operation. It’s an ambitious mix of restaurants, deli and hotel of which only the ground floor canteen and shop are up and running.

Of course all this matters naught to Dos Hemanos (that’s us) who are just looking for a good meal and despite mixed experiences at Conran joints in the past we were pretty impressed with our meal.

Albion has an uncomplicated menu of what is essentially British short-order cooking but what initially stood out for us were the reasonable prices – there’s nothing over a tenner. This could have translated into cost cutting in the quality of the ingredients, poor cooking or miniscule portions. It could have but didn’t.

Bread was homemade and good and yeasty. Over a bottle of Meantime Pale Ale we munched on a plate of excellent Pork Crackling. So excellent in fact that we had to have another.

Welsh Rabbit was probably the weakest dish. It needed a bit more Cheese and perhaps some extra mustard to give it some oomph. However, a salad of Beets and Goats Curd was perfectly judged: nicely dressed, tasty beets and a superior mix of interesting leaves.

Devilled Kidneys was a decent pile of the organ which had that slight whiff of the farmyard, ma non troppo. They were nice and pink inside and came in a good gravy that had us engaged in an unseemly scrap to mop up the juices (it was ever thus).

I was even more impressed with my Skirt Steak and Chips. The portion was a little petit for avowed carnivores like ourselves but the taste was great: Offaly and requiring a little extra effort to chew - a much underrated virtue and a good contrast when much food seems to be designed for people without teeth.

Chips were proper.

The fact that the cooking was pretty clean and non-greasy meant we could indulge in a couple of puds (ok – we would have had them anyway). HS’s crumble was the winner here. A bowl of Apple and Blackberry crumble was textbook stuff and came with a big spoon of clotted cream. Homemade Chocolate and Vanilla Ice Cream was not the best I’d ever had but did the job (of fulfilling my daily ice cream quota). Coffee was (like everything else) sensibly priced and much better than the tepid, brown, swill that’s usually dished up.

With friendly and efficient service and bottles of HP Sauce on the table we couldn’t really find anything to quibble about and thoroughly enjoyed ourselves. I really can’t say any more so I’ll just shut up now and let you enjoy the pics.