BRILLIANT COOKING – AND JOHN COLTRANE TOO!
March, 2005
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SUMMARY: Superb modern European food from a Danish chef with flair and imagination. Open for dinner all week (Sundays until 9pm). Expect to spend around £27 each before drinks and service. Islington food safety score: **** "Very Good. Good food safety management. High standard of compliance with food safety legislation."
THIS IS why I do this job! For these rare occasions, usually quite unexpected, and often in the most unassuming surroundings, when we suddenly encounter an artist with an instinct for ingredients and an obvious passion about it all that is quite breathtaking.
You can see it the moment you pick up the menu. Who else is offering giant puffball mushrooms to customers at the moment? Or rock oysters with wood sorrel and bacon vinaigrette. Main courses like roasted mallard with quince compote and liquorice jus, or smoked bone marrow, or the vegetarian offering: puy lentils, root vegetables and spinach bouillabaise with saffron rouille. Ever tried meringue with sweet beetroot and a liquorice dressing and buttermilk sorbet? Or how about a caramelised pear, quince and pineapple terrine?
And don't think that this is what I call "parfait cooking", where a chef just piles on disparate ingredients for the hell of it. These dishes are beautifully designed and carefully balanced.
We had been to Fig before, after a powerful recommendation from a Famous Estate Agent, and after the restaurant won the Time Out award for best local restaurant in 2004. Previously it had been a greasy spoon café called The Dining Room before being taken over by two women who renamed it after the fig tree in the garden (open in the summer, incidentally). But while we appreciated their enthusiasm, the food was ultimately disappointing.
Just over a year ago it was taken over by Australian Jeffrey Critchley and his business partner, Danish chef Christoffer Hruskova and this is, I promise you, a formidable team.
It’s not a big place, and I suspect that it could be a little draughty if you had to sit anywhere near the door on a cold night, but it’s imaginatively decorated and they have done what they can with the place. In any case once you see the menu and taste the food everything else will recede into irrelevance.
My Chief Culinary Adviser has a thing about gastropod moluscs and sometimes she has exquisite dreams in which she is locked in overnight at Chez George, near the Bourse in Paris, where the snails are just superb. So there was no question but that she would order a starter of braised beef shin and snail lasagne with mild garlic and herbs. And this is where we start reaching for superlatives. Under a delicate little blanket of pasta were strips of beef shin with the snails which almost brought tears to her eyes.
Beef shin can become a little stringy and ragged if you cook it too much, but this shin was tender, moist and just gluey enough to deserve to share the plate with the fat, succulent snails that, we were told later, are farmed somewhere in the home counties.
I, meanwhile, was engaged with the most delicate dish of raw marinated Scottish scallops with little knobs of brown butter mayonnaise and fragments of thin, crisp fried rye bread – all served with a sprinkling of wild sea purslane which, as every fule kno, is a halophyte called halimione portulacoides or, in other words, a coastal saltmarsh plant with succulent edible leaves which taste slightly salty. Sublime.
My main course was tender, tasty 28-day-hung Galloway beef fore rib served with little lumps of smoked bone marrow with girolle mushrooms, celeriac puree and a stout sauce. These flavours danced happily with each other with an intensity that was simply startling.
My Adviser had a carefully baked fillet of red mullet with parsnip puree, chestnuts, black truffle and red wine jus which was an object lesson in delicacy, subtlety and graceful combinations of flavours and ingredients.
She also had no hesitation whatsoever in ordering an enticing dessert described as a chocolate ganache cake with a red pepper coulis and crunchy con leche ice cream. This was a divine slice of a biscuity chocolate gateau, the red pimento sause adding both a splash of colour and taste contrast. And the ice cream, made on the premises, was excellent.
I was resolutely standing out against having any dessert at all, but was somehow talked into some ollebrod with vanilla ice cream and sweet rye crumbs. Ollebrod, as we all know, is Danish rye bread which has been soaked in stout (or, in this case, Guinness), and it has a remarkable flavour. Then there was the ice cream, gloriously not too sweet, and that was covered by the most fragile mousse which, despite all the earlier stimulation, had my palate clamouring for more. Quite out of the ordinary.
Including two glasses of very good Cote Du Rhone at £5.50 and service, this meal came to £76, or £38 each. For the food alone it was just over £28 each. We just couldn’t see how it could possibly have been any better, and I have no alternative but to give the very rare accolade of five stars.
This is food just about as good as you can get in London without paying £100 a head.
I pray that they can maintain this quality, and I suspect they can. The menu changes once a month to reflect seasonal ingredients, and we had the distinct impression that Chris Hruskova is enjoying himself a lot.
As things wound down towards the end of the evening, we noticed that they were quietly playing John Coltrane’s album, Blue Trane, over the stereo system. That alone would entice my Adviser back.