Fera at Claridge's: a restaurant for a big occasion

Housed in Gordon Ramsay’s former restaurant in Claridge's, Fera is one of the most high profile restaurant openings in London this year which means that it’s burdened with a high level of expectation.

After a couple of lukewarm reviews* - and having seen the prices - I wasn’t even sure I was going to bother but when I was invited last week it seemed too good an opportunity to miss.

I’d remembered the room being rather dull but it certainly isn’t now. there is That Tree in the middle that everyone’s written about but it doesn’t dominate. What strikes you is how beautiful the room now is with its art deco look and shades of soft grey-green. It really is one of the most stunning dining rooms in the West End. Oddly cosy and intimate too, at night at least.

The food is ambitious as you’d expect from Rogan who made his reputation at the two Michelin-starred L’Enclume in the Lake District. It’s one of those meals which is so complicated that it’s hard to remember exactly what you ate. Apart from a couple of standout dishes which stuck in my memory - and one I didn’t think quite came off - I had to get hold of the menu afterwards to find out what we had. And that was even after checking the surreptitiously shot pix on my iPhone

Highlights? A pretty and delicious cocktail of pea shoots (right), with apple, marigold and what I seem to remember was a home-made vermouth - dry, herby and refreshing. A perfect aperitif. A bowl of unctuous warm potato purée with Winslade cheese (below, a new one on me and I know my cheese) with a spoonful of deep, savoury chopped duck hearts in the centre - but don’t let that put you off. Prawns [sic] from Gairloch with pickled alexander, asparagus and (heavenly) shellfish butter though I only remember one prawn. Classic French cooking with a modern twist. We’d unfortunately finished our rather interesting 'The Sylphs' Napa Valley Chardonnay from the Scholium Project by then but it was a dish that was made for a quality chard.

Some little crunchy mouthfuls of ...er.... rabbit, it must have been with lovage cream though it says ‘stewed’ on my menu. Confused. (Style note. Lovage is the new kale). Raw mackerel with caviar and seawater cream. Mmmm.

After that it all fades into a bit of a blur as we were busy talking (as normal, non food-obsessed people do). There was some very good warm malty bread I remember which arrived with whipped (goats?) butter and a pottery beaker of something faintly Marmitey) Nice though oddly homely and rustic compared to everything else. Something fishy (monkfish, my menu tells me) with cabbage, sea purslane and black saison. A refreshing savoury dessert of “Iced sorrel, nitro sweet cheese and apple” (below), basically a lozenge of sorbet with crunchy apple and a rubble of frozen (?) cheese. Rogan likes rubbles. I had to leave before the other desserts so missed the sweet cicely cake and smoked meringue. Damn.

The one dish that really didn’t do it for me was the Goosnargh duck with yellow bean puree, leek and hyssop, which I'm guessing had been cooked sous-vide. I know chefs love their sous vide machines but I’m getting to hate them. They make all meats taste the same - both raw and warm, an unpleasant (to me) combination. Duck in particular needs more intense cooking given its fatty skin. A rare slip in a pretty well faultless meal though portion size and lack of more indulgent desserts will irk some.

The service is relaxed but couldn’t have been more attentive or cossetting. Rogan himself emerges from the kitchen periodically bearing dishes, Noma-style. In fact the comparison with Noma, given the foraged content of much of the meal is irresistible. The British Noma, we will all be lazily saying.

There may be weeds and other wild plants scattered round with gay abandon but this kind of food doesn’t come cheap. You can have lunch for as ‘little’ as £45 (for 2 courses) but at dinner it’s £85 for 4 which you can at least choose yourself, £95 for the short tasting menu, which we had and £125 for the longer one. I’m guessing the bill for our dinner would have come to at least £150 a head with cocktails, wine and service. It would be easy to spend £200 a head without doing significant damage to the wine list.

But if money is no object and you want somewhere special to go to propose, for example, or to celebrate an anniversary or a Big Birthday it fits the bill perfectly. But book well ahead. I suspect getting a table may be difficult.

Fera at Claridge's is in Brook Street, Mayfair, London W1K 4HR. +44 (0)20 7107 8888

* Fay Maschler in the Evening Standard and Jay Rayner in The Observer.

I ate at Fera as a guest of Alice Marshall Public Relations and VisitNapaValley.com

Birch restaurant, Bristol - just simple, lovely food

From the minimalist decor to the simple seasonal food Bristol’s latest restaurant opening, Birch, will seem instantly familiar to anyone who’s eaten at St John.

Sam Leach and his partner Beccy Massey have served their apprenticeship well. The pair have had a long-standing ambition to open a restaurant in their home town but felt they needed to learn the ropes by working for some of the establishments they most admired in London. Sam was a pastry chef at St John, Beccy worked as a waitress and wine buyer at the Quality Chop house

The brilliant bread they bake themselves and which arrives at the beginning of the meal is a classic St John touch. There are fresh radishes with wild garlic mayo, (the wild garlic “picked on the way to work”), some delicious warm parmesan and anchovy biscuits and properly devilled sticky almonds to kick off with while you work out what else to eat.

We resolve that dilemma by ordering practically everything on the menu. The flavours are clean and punchy, A rich slab of brawn comes with pickled red cabbage and a dollop of hot mustard, a pretty dish of lightly cured mackerel with beetroot and a fine dusting of fresh horseradish, asparagus with a rich cider butter and a scattering of toasted hazelnuts

We’ve heard there is a special of hogget (aka mutton) and turnip pie so reserve one via Twitter. It comes in a pie dish made by Becky’s dad (aaaah) with huge chunks of rich gamey meat and a generous St John-style bowl of Cornish early potatoes and greens. Roast pork is sweet, slightly sticky and full of flavour. My friend Elly’s lemon sole impeccably fresh though I was too preoccuped with my pie to pay it much attention.

There are wonderful puddings. A genuinely treacley treacle tart (we snatch the last helping) with Ivy House cream and a teetering wedding cake-like tower of Eton Mess for those who can find room for them. A single scoop of hazelnut or lemon sorbet for those who can’t. (We obviously tried both).

I believe we had cheese. It all becomes a bit of a blur at that point fuelled by two excellent bottles from the short, imaginative list - a Leon Boesch Alsace pinot blanc and a slightly funky Il Secondo di Pacino Tuscan red which we order as Al Pacino and fall about laughing childishly. Maybe the manzanilla before dinner was a mistake ...

What’s so impressive about the enterprise is that Sam and Beccy did most of the work on the place themselves with the help of their parents. There were pictures of them plastering and tiling all over Twitter - their blog charts the arduous process of converting the building into somewhere habitable. They’ve also got their own small market garden which will inspire Sam’s cooking - the short menu will change regularly depending on what's available

Admittedly I was expecting to love Birch - I know Sam and Beccy from way back so it’s hard to be entirely objective - but it’s even better than I’d anticipated with faultless seasonal cooking and warm friendly service. And although I love some of the places that do them well like Bell’s Diner and Flinty Red it’s refreshing to have a change from small plates.

The only downside for those of us who live the other side of town is that it’s over in Southville but it’s a shortish walk or quick cab ride from the city centre. And given the cost of rents neighbourhood restaurants are where it's at right now.

The bill for the four of us came to £45 a head plus service but in addition to demolishing the menu we had a couple of relatively expensive bottles of wine. You could easily get away with £35-40.

Birch is at 47 Raleigh Road, Southville, Bristol, BS3 1QS on the junction with Birch Road and currently opens for supper from 6 to 10pm, Wednesday to Saturday. 01179 028 326.

The Dairy, Clapham: Smart, casual

I’d heard good things about The Dairy, not least from my son Will (of Hawksmoor*), one of whose favourite restaurants it is, but being south of the river it took me a while to haul myself down there.

In fact even longer than I’d anticipated. It was a tube strike the day I went so I had to take a bus which progressed in sedate and leisurely fashion from Marble Arch to Clapham Common, a not disagreeable experience on a sunny spring evening. As I was trying to avoid the rush hour and was early I also managed a brisk walk on the common to work up an appetite, a strategy I can strongly recommend.

The restaurant is much smaller and more rustic than I’d imagined, more like a gastropub or bar than the fine dining set-up you'd expect from an establishment with a tasting menu. Thankfully they don't impose that on you - you can also order dishes individually which is what we did. There’s some ambitious cooking though, no doubt about that.

The most memorable dish which has had me obsessing about it continuously since my visit was chicken oysters with a couple of little stacks of crisp deep-fried chicken skin, wild mushrooms and asparagus. It obviously looks a great deal more enticing than this shockingly bad photo. Make sure you order your own portion. Don’t share.

Other great dishes were a cracking chicken liver mousse (oddly on-trend at the moment) with rhubarb and apple, broad beans with smoked ricotta, house lardo and whey (at least I think that’s the version we had), a gorgeous dish of rooftop carrots (presumably grown in their 'urban garden') with goats cheese, oat granola and buttermilk, and Galician octopus with tomatoes, fried bread and rooftop herbs. We also, I see from our bill, had some squid. I can’t remember for the life of me how it was cooked. It was a catch-up meal with an old friend and we were yammering too much.

We also found room for two desserts: salted caramel with cacao and malted barley ice cream and that chocolatey 'soil' you see everywhere which I found a tad rich but I probably wouldn’t have bothered with dessert had we not felt we *should* do the menu justice. And something more refreshingly rhubarby - also good I seem to recall but which has vanished into the mists of time. And some warm madeleines or maybe that was somewhere else.

As is usual with small plate restaurants it’s easy to work up a fair sized bill without realising it. A modest drinks tally of one cocktail (a deliciously refreshing Fennel and Apple Hendricks, below), one ‘virgin’ version and two glasses of wine came to £28.25 + service - almost a third of the total £100.40 bill.

You could easily do significantly more damage to the short but appealingly quirky wine list which is divided up by style and mood (textured, intricate, mouth-filling whites and dark-toned, fleshy, energetic reds, for example). On the other hand you could drink beer - there’s a short but well-chosen list - and eat rather less or stick to the bar snacks. And there's a 4 plate lunch for £25 from Wednesday to Friday which is a steal.

Is The Dairy worth the detour? I’m not sure it is if you’re based the other side of the river. Not that it’s difficult to get to but if you're only in London for a short while there are plenty more central alternatives. But it's a fantastic place to have on your doorstep if you’re a sarf Londoner like Will or my lucky friend. I might just have to scrounge a bed for the night to re-taste that chicken.

The Dairy is at 15 the Pavement, Clapham Old Town, London SW4 0HY. Tel: 0207 622 4165

* never resist an opportunity to give the family a plug ...

The Hole in the Wall, Little Wilbraham: not your average country pub

The Hole in the Wall at Little Wilbraham near Cambridge sounded like the sort of twee country pub that I hate. Discovering it had a celebrity chef and a tasting menu made it appeal even less but on my visit last week I was bowled over

The pub is run by 2010 Masterchef finalist Alex Rushmer and his business partner Ben Maude who have been friends since they met at Cambridge. Both are self-taught but produce beautifully nuanced light, elegant food in a country pub with a decor that harks back to the ‘70s. (The swirly carpet has to be seen to be believed.) It’s as if Noma had pitched up in the Essex stockbroker belt

As we sat down we wished we’d opted for the à la carte which looked comfortingly familiar. Airy pies and triple-cooked chips wafted past. And then the first dish arrived. A velvety curried parsnip soup with some warm chunky rillettes and matchsticks of apple tumbling off a couple of fingers of toast. The perfect start on a chilly spring evening. The accompanying Harviestoun Bitter & Twisted blonde ale was a bold and clever match.

Next up a simply gorgeous bread board - two hefty chunks of homemade tomato and herb foccacia, black treacle bread, a vivid wild garlic pesto and the best imaginable home-made crisps. It was as much as we could do not to scoff the lot

There was applewood-smoked mackerel and broccoli from the allotment, with a smooth velvety broccoli purée offsetting the rich oily mackerel. (Apparently they smoke it just before service.) A tricky dish for wine, cleverly paired with a 2012 Kurt Angerer, "Kies" Grûner Veltliner.

Next a fantastic cauliflower dish roast, raw and puréed with a curried peanut granola and a sweet and sour raisin dressing. Sounds a bit of a car crash but it was so well judged - the sweetness of the raisins playing on the caramelisation of the cauliflower and the slight sweetness of the accompanying wine, a Cave de Hunawihr, Pinot Gris Reserve, 2011. (The pairings were in general as good as the food.)

There was super-fresh seabass, with a lovely crisp skin, wild garlic purée, a sweet, mealy new potato, a couple of girolles, a spear of asparagus, a couple of leaves of hispi cabbage and a slick of lobster sauce. A perfect miniaturised fish dish with its own veg - The Hole in the Wall's thoughtful contribution to your 5-a-day. It needed a slightly drier wine than the Domaine Treloar muscat it was paired with though - a Savennières maybe.

Next the dish that Rushmer cooked in the Masterchef final 4 years ago - two slices of very rare duck breast, pickled cucumber and spiced caramel with a crisp rectangle of rosti (below). Impressive but slightly overworked - not quite in the same relaxed, intuitive register as his current food. Brilliantly matched with an orange wine though - the 2010 Equipo Navazos, Bota de Vino Blanco 44, "Florpower".

An extra dish - beef cheek and shin of a marvellous fall-apart texture with celeriac and bone marrow mash. Full marks to the kitchen for resisting the temptation to coat it with an over-extracted sauce. It was partnered with an equally robust Languedoc red, the 2009 Domaine de Trinités, La Deves which the sommelier Joel Servy recommended when he found we had a house in the Languedoc and hadn’t tried it.

For dessert, to which I admit we didn’t do full justice, there was a coconut panna cotta with green mango and tamarind sherbert, and a truly lovely warm white chocolate cake with seared strawberry, sumac and ‘sticky micky’ jelly (below) made from a late harvest wine of the same name from the Eradus estate in Marlborough, New Zealand Oh, and the lightest, airiest doughnuts and a pool of salted caramel to dunk them in - as if we hadn’t eaten enough ...

Although, as I say, I’m generally not a fan of tasting menus this was a stunner. It’s rare to find a meal achieve such a high standard course after course. (Rushmer cites Thomas Keller of French Laundry fame as a major influence.) The engaging Servy, who drives the team, has done time at Midsummer House and Hedone.

It’s a very special place which if there’s any justice will get at least one Michelin star. Though I do worry about the carpet.

The Hole in the Wall at Little Wilbraham is about 6 miles east of Cambridge city centre (about a £20 taxi ride if you don’t want to drive but don’t let that put you off). Tel 01223 812282. Lunch from Wednesday-Sunday. Dinner from Tuesday to Saturday. The tasting menu is £45, matching wines £35. A la carte is also very reasonably priced or you can eat in the bar which is just like a typical country pub (apart from the food, of course).

Disclaimer: We paid for our tasting menus and most of the wine though were brought a couple of extra dishes and glasses to try. Our bill was £135 for two.