Blunos - posh fish in Bath

One of the biggest problems hotels have is how to keep their guests in the building for meals. The solution is generally to employ a celebrity chef and that’s what the County Hotel in Bath has done with Martin Blunos. (Sadly this restaurant has unexpectedly closed.)

If you haven’t heard of him, you should have done. With his engaging personality, distinctive walrus moustache and warm West Country burr this larger than life TV chef is hard to miss. (Think a 1990s version of Tom Kerridge.) I first met him 20 or so years ago when he was cooking at Lettonie, a restaurant for which he earned two Michelin stars.

It was a bit of a shock to find him in this rather bling brasserie-style dining room with its gashes of lime green and orange* - not that anything has been skimped on fitting it out. Reassuringly for a fish restaurant though, there’s a display of fish worthy of a high class fishmonger together with an extensive list of daily specials. “Today’s oysters are from Poole and Porthilly" it announced.

Fortunately they were among the dishes that Blunos sent us out to try (Disclosure: I was lunching with wine writer and consultant Angela Mount who had drawn up the wine list). There are some utterly delicious grilled ‘Asian oysters’ with sesame, chilli and sake you mustn’t miss if they’re on. We also tried the crisp salt and pepper squid with a nuoc cham dip, potted shrimps with salmon served in a dinky can (great idea - salmon definitely adds to the texture) and some fabulously airy crab tortellini (below), a worthy 2 Michelin star dish.

We then managed to consume the best part of a grilled seabass with salsa verde that could have easily served three - expensive at £49 but perfectly cooked and incredibly fresh. (Not all the mains are as expensive. A whole mackerel with ginger would only have been £18 and you could easily make up a meal from the ‘small plates’ which, oysters, crab and tiger prawns apart, mainly hover around £7-10)

Wine follows a similar pattern, pricewise. You could spend a bomb on a bottle of Dom Perignon which at £200 is the same as at Rick Stein’s Seafood restaurant but the very decent Devaux house champagne is available at £11 a glass. The fabulous Greywacke Wild Sauvignon - a worthy alternative to Cloudy Bay - is a toppy £65 but you can order the zesty Godello do Monterrei from Mara Martin - their best seller - for a far more affordable £29 or £5.50 a glass. Basic Chablis is pricey at £55 a bottle but there’s a good Languedoc chardonnay for £30.

So Blunos can be expensive, as befits a Michelin star-standard restaurant. It would be ideal if you wanted to book somewhere in Bath for a celebration but it’s also a good place to go for some great fish and a lighter meal - though I can imagine the cooking might not be quite as precise if the man himself was not in the kitchen**. (Those tortellini, in particular, are a hard act to pull off.)

Treat it like a seafood tapas restaurant, share a few small plates, especially the daily specials, have a glass of white wine or prosecco and you could get out at under £25 a head. Which for cooking of this quality is great value.

PS There is also (a distinct boon in Bath) off-street parking.

Blunos is at The County Hotel, 18-19 Pulteney Rd, Bath BA2 4EZ. Phone: 01225 481188. Closed Sunday and Monday and - note, late eaters - for reservations after 9.30pm in the evening on other days. Also closed for refurbishment in January 2015

I ate at Blunos as a guest of the restaurant

* I may be on my own on this. Several reviewers on Trip Advisor love the decor ;-)

** which, to be fair, he generally is. And often bringing dishes to the table and chatting to the guests.

Gordon Ramsay, Royal Hospital Road: is it really worth 10/10?

I don’t envy Gordon Ramsay - or rather his head chef Clare Smyth - the 10/10 rating they received in this year’s Good Food Guide. It makes people like me think ‘Ha! I wonder if they’re really worth it?’ and book to find out.

Not that I have anything against Gordon. He was of the first chefs I ever interviewed when he was a sous to Marco Pierre White and I can only admire the empire he’s built - and still building. Having spent time cooking in France he’s an accomplished classic chef, a fact recognised by Michelin which has given his Hospital Road site 3 stars since 2001. Another accolade to assess.

It took us long enough to get a booking anyway - a couple of months - so unsurprisingly the restaurant was full. It’s smaller than I remembered - still essentially the same room occupied by his predecessor Pierre Koffmann when he ran La Tante Claire.

I was greeted as if I had been there last week by the maitre’d Jean-Claude Breton who said how nice it was to see me again. Did he REALLY recognise me and if so how? I hadn't been for at least 10 years. My friend N had booked, not me. An impressive feat of memory if so.

There’s the usual ushering to table, a stool on which to put your handbag (laughable in our case as our bags were so huge they topped off so we had to keep them on the floor) and a minion to escort you to the Ladies.

We were offered a glass of champagne in a hospitable way but were both sufficiently old hands to know that means at least an extra tenner on the bill (or £14 in GR’s case) so held our fire - also resisting the offer of a white truffle pasta special. The accompanying warm gougères we were given anyway were faultless

The menus are ordered on the prix fixe model. As N wanted to compare the restaurant to Troisgros to which she had recently been she went for the £95 one while I tried out the £55 lunch. Although the three starter and main course options bizarrely included four dishes that contained ham I think I got by far the better deal.

My starter of pumpkin agnolotti with Iberico ham, sage and amaretti biscuit (above) had a gorgeous roast pumpkin 'jus' ladled over it (there were a lot of sauces being ladled) - a really terrific dish. Roast rabbit loin - also with ham and salted baked turnips was beautifully presented, if a touch salty and a fresh dessert of roast pineapple with coconut parfait, coriander rum and lime sorbet just lovely. Like an upmarket pina colada.

N was less impressed by the vast sausage-shaped (I’m chosing my words with care) beetroot which was presented at table then dismembered and served with goats curd and a kaleidoscope of colourful blobs and swirls, a rather ordinary - and small - main course of turbot with clams and a fiddly carrot ‘cake’ with mead, bee pollen and cream cheese ice-cream that had us both longing for a big vulgar slice of the real thing. You can read her trenchant reaction (with some rather good pictures) on her blog The Food Judge.

To do GR credit I certainly wasn’t short-changed on the amuses because I was having the cheapest menu. They were actually rather more exciting than N’s dishes: a deep fried chicken wing in a glass tube which billowed smoke and a fabulously sexy potato purée with smoked egg and truffles. Both would have been lovely with the champagne I suspect most there would have been drinking. There were also some pretty flashy petits fours which we were still offered despite the fact we didn’t order coffee or tea. Brownie points for that at least.

We had difficulty finding an affordable bottle from the very pricey wine list, eventually splashing out a half bottle of a lovely creamy 2010 Bernard Moreau Chassagne Montrachet (for £46) which was decanted and served at cellar temperature by the impressive young female sommelier. I topped up with a gorgeous glass of Ziereisen ‘Schulen’ spåtburgunder from Baden (£15) which proved perfect with the rabbit.

Overall though there just isn’t the wow factor you would expect from a restaurant that scores 10/10 - or from a 3 star. There aren’t enough dishes that leave you stunned with their invention and virtuosity. And no Gordon. Obviously. In fact it’s hard to see what role he plays in the restaurant. My guess he comes in for a menu tasting every so often and emails Clare with a dish he’s spotted somewhere - the talk when she got the GFG accolade was all about her not him. But a restaurant called Clare Smyth obviously wouldn’t pull in the punters the way the Ramsay brand does. Odd to say this of a Ramsay restaurant but it lacks personality.

The bill came to just over £250 for the two of us - I guess not excessive for a 3 star but we had been reasonably careful. You could easily clock up a bill twice that amount as I’m sure many people do. Worth it? Maybe if you've never been, maybe for lunch but despite the VIP treatment I'm in no hurry to go back.

Gordon Ramsay is at 68 Royal Hospital Road, London SW3 4HP. Tel: 020 7352 4441

Spring, Somerset House - the return of Skye Gyngell

No restaurant in London can have been more visited or commented on its first couple of weeks than Spring. Everyone seemingly has been there and has a view - not always complimentary - of the merits of chef Skye Gyngell’s return to London.

So why the hype? Well there’s a compelling human story behind the restaurant. Gyngell, the daughter of Australian TV entrepreneur Bruce Gyngell, had a well publicised (and successful) battle with alcohol and drug addiction which still gives her a somewhat waif-like quality. After working as both a restaurant and private chef she came to fame in the noughties through her stint at Petersham Nurseries Café which spawned cookbooks and a column in the Independent on Sunday. Since she left in 2012 bemoaning the expectations created by a Michelin star she’s been somewhat below the radar until this project which is clearly supported by some very wealthy backers.

It is a stunning space which spills over two rooms in the new wing of Somerset House - one like a romantically leafy glade, the other a much larger open brasserie, its walls studded with ceramic flowers. It feels like being in a dream, peopled by a slightly bewildering hierarchy of servers - women in colourful tents who seem to be the greeters, waiters, largely male, in what appear to be clown outfits. I'm sure a psychologist would have a field day with it. No wonder the restaurant has been such a long time in gestation.

There is at least thankfully no menu concept which has to be explained, just artfully simple food which apparently changes from day to day. Gyngell has a light touch, relying on first class ingredients rather than any cheffy tricks. There are no smears, drizzles or foams. Our starters were just lovely - some silky onion squash ravioli with ricotta and marjoram butter and an original twist on the well-trodden scallop and cauliflower combo - scallops with romanesco, beurre blanc and chickweed (the menu lists plenty of on-trend hedgerow ingredients)

This was just as well because the main courses took a good 45 minutes to arrive - clearly an oversight about which they went into a meltdown of embarrassment. It happens. It was the second week of opening though I think the size and popularity of the restaurant has left them a bit stretched.

Despite lusting after the plates of pork belly that were going by we were glad we’d stuck to fish once it came - some crisply seared seabass with girolles and chanterelles in my case, a beautifully fresh Dover sole with cannellini beans and spinach in my daughter-in-law’s. Both top notch.

Despite flagging slightly by this stage we felt we should at least try a couple of desserts - a very good homely hazelnut and pear tart and a slightly odd unmoulded pannacotta with damson sorbet and wood sorrel which tasted better than it looked.

We were brought a succession of well-chosen wines by the sommelier Frank who appeared to be the only member of the team wearing his own clothes. Cleverly he picked more adventurous pairings for me than he did for my daughter-in-law - a light red (Domaine des Roches Neuves Saumur Champigny) with my bass and a 2010 Jean-Marc Vincent Auxey-Duresses les Hautes for her sole. And suggested an amazing natural Sauternes from Domaine Rousset-Peyraguey I hadn’t come across which was great with the tart. As always it’s a rewarding but expensive way to drink. My guess is that with three different glasses each our wine bill would have come to around £40-45 a head - slightly less than you'll pay for the food. (Frank, having read this points out that the wines he selected would only have come to £30 a head which is still rather more than some people would expect to pay for wine but by no means excessive. So reckon on £80 a head + service including wine)

I just have this concern that Gyngell might have bitten off more than she can chew with Spring - that she’d be better suited to a smaller, more intimate venue. With its 100 covers it seems a big space for someone who strikes me as a domestic cook at heart rather than a chef. Which is also true, of course, of Ruthie Rodgers at the River Café and she’s pulled it off, so who knows?

I will go back though, probably at lunchtime when the room must be lovely flooded with natural light. And when it’s quite a bit less expensive than the evening. Apparently children are welcomed too which makes a pleasant change for a high-end restaurant.

PS If you want to experience Spring on the cheap you can sit in the 'Salon' outside the restaurant and have one of Gyngell’s rather glorious ice creams, a glass of wine and a sandwich, or, even better, an apple and pistachio soft drink (above) which may be the most delicious non-alcoholic option in London.

Spring is at Somerset House, Lancaster Place, London WC2R 1LA. Tel: +44 (0)20 3011 0115

I ate at Spring as a guest of the restaurant.

Les Déserteurs, Paris: two talented renegades

I didn’t manage to get to the highly-regarded Le Sargent Recruteur before I heard the original team had moved on so it was good to find them installed at 46 rue Trousseau, the former home of another hit restaurant, Rino*.

Les Déserteurs is obviously an ironic reference to their move.

It’s a really small space with just a few tables - in many ways more like a contemporary café than a restaurant. They’ve obviously decided the best way to make it work is to have a no-choice menu but they accompany it with a long and eclectic wine list, covering not just France but Spain, Italy and Austria.

The food is lovely - simple but imaginative with a perfect balance to every dish. A starter of raw daurade (seabream) with shredded black radish, an angelica dressing and dabs of sorrel purée flavoured with just the right amount of kaffir lime was sensationally good - beautiful to look at and full of vibrant flavours - one of the best starters I’ve had this year.

The main course of braised ham (name-checked as ‘jambon du Cantal de Mr Laborie) was boldly paired with some raw Japanese greens, fresh horseradish and creamy white polenta but they happily tweaked it for my dairy-intolerant husband substituting some mushrooms and a gorgeous quince and celeriac purée that was a brilliant match for a glass of orange wine (Ageno) he had ordered with his first course. It was also great with the main bottle we were drinking - a bright juicy Maupertuis, Les Pierres Noires.

We might have been tempted to skip dessert if they hadn’t craftily brought it round on a board beforehand - a simple but delicious apple tart, packed with apple, dusted - I think - with dried rose petals and served with a silky scoop of salted caramel ice cream. It seemed rude not to have a glass of sweet wine with it, an exotic 2010 Alois Kracher Beernenauslese

What particularly struck us was how friendly and hospitable they were. Two of the tables were celebrating birthdays - with children - and they couldn’t have been sweeter to them. Unusual for Paris, it has to be said, and for a restaurant this chic.

Lovely place. Do go.

Les Déserteurs is at 46 rue Trousseau, in the 11th arrondissment. Tel: +33 1 48 06 95 85. Our bill for 2 was 104€ though almost half of that was on wine! The fixed price three course lunch menu costs just 28€ - incredibly reasonable for food of this quality.

You may also find this post from my April 2014 trip to Paris useful

(*still looking for new premises, I gather)