the posh­est restau­rant ever

I’ve been work­ing so hard on my book! Really. Increas­ingly more of every day is spent doing things to try to pro­duce really good writ­ing to pack, some­day, between two cov­ers and have as a real book. Some of these tasks are a bit tedious, like mak­ing a huge batch of pesto when I didn’t really want any, in order to be able to say with all con­vic­tion how much my alleged recipe would pro­duce! I can’t really say it will feed four as a pasta sauce for a starter if I haven’t a clue how many it will feed since I use it only as a salad gar­nish. But as you can see, even just assem­bling the ingre­di­ents on the kitchen counter is pretty much cre­at­ing a still life, and it was actu­ally fun to mea­sure and taste for con­sis­tency, and come up with a real-live recipe for pesto that does what it says on the tin: feeds four as a starter. So here you go.

Pesto
(serves four as sauce for starter with pasta)

4 cups loosely packed whole fresh basil leaves
¾ cup extra vir­gin olive oil
juice ½ lemon
3 tbsps pine nuts
3 tbsps grated pecorino or Parme­san cheese
2 cloves gar­lic, roughly chopped
pinch sea salt to taste

Place all ingre­di­ents in food proces­sor and blend till smooth, tak­ing care to scrape the pesto away from the sides of the proces­sor to incor­po­rate all bits.

This pesto is equally good as a dress­ing for tomato salad with moz­zarella, or driz­zled over a white fish like cod, sea bream, sea bass or lemon sole. Try adding a spoon­ful to any vinai­grette. It is lovely treated like a salsa verde and served along­side grilled pork, beef or lamb. Stir some into mashed pota­toes for the side dish of your life.

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I cer­tainly don’t want to give the impres­sion that my other recipes are faked by any means, but every once in awhile I say air­ily that a dish will serve four, when all I can really say is that three of us hun­gry fam­ily mem­bers downed it all with sec­onds, so I imag­ine it will serve four! I should really be a bit more accu­rate. I want you to trust me after all!

The idea of think­ing about how many a given dish will feed is so beyond the ken of the chef at whose restau­rant I ate on Mon­day that it makes me laugh to think we both “cook.” I was taken, by a friend from my Devon food writ­ing course, to Mar­cus Ware­ing at the Berke­ley Hotel in Knightsbridge.

There are two kinds of peo­ple in the world, I think (I know I often say this). There are peo­ple who absolutely swoon at food that has been taken apart, rearranged, pressed, tri­an­gu­lated, stacked and foamed. And then there are peo­ple who, when pre­sented with food like this, want to stab the som­me­lier with a steak knife and run for the near­est fryup. I am, unusu­ally for me, some­where in between. As a per­son who truly loves to cook, and who rec­og­nizes her­self for what she is: a pretty depend­able, some­times inno­v­a­tive cook who can be counted on to feed fam­ily and friends, I truly admire finesse and del­i­cacy of touch. I myself can never make a plate of food look beau­ti­ful. My plates look at best… approach­able. So I do like to eat restau­rant food that’s beau­ti­fully pre­sented, that rep­re­sents tech­niques I could never pull off myself.

Before I describe the food, I must say also that while I know it is my own inse­cu­rity, con­stantly hov­er­ing wait­staff that out­num­ber the peo­ple at my table (two) make me ner­vous. Granted, I was with a food critic and per­haps the wait­staff were that much more atten­tive. But. There was a cham­pagne waiter, a water waiter, a bread waiter, a take-your-order waiter, a cheese waiter and a dessert waiter. Dif­fer­ent peo­ple! My com­pan­ion Roger asked sotto voce, “Do you have ANY idea what accent that was?” when one of them sidled away bear­ing aloft what­ever his offer­ing had been. A sort of Intim­i­dat­ing Waiter Esperanto, hushed and polite to the point that I couldn’t under­stand any of what he said and resorted to look­ing at what he held to imag­ine what was being asked of me. And, another first for me: I have never had my nap­kin replaced halfway through a meal. I don’t mean, replaced newly-folded on my chair if I went to the ladies’ room. I mean replaced with a fresh nap­kin, just before the cheese course. Why? I haven’t a clue. I really wasn’t that messy. AND the nap­kins were han­dled with sil­ver tongs. I am not mak­ing this up.

I should make the point right now that I had a lovely time. For one thing, my com­pan­ion is a man of enor­mous sophis­ti­ca­tion, a world-traveller beyond any I have ever known (he’s writ­ing a travel guide to Fin­land while plan­ning his year in Nepal but first would have to spend the day after we were together in Morocco, just for exam­ple). Roger is soft-spoken, dif­fi­dent, hes­i­tant to put him­self for­ward; his con­ver­sa­tion is punc­tu­ated by long pauses while he gazes some­where just beyond me, see­ing Lord only knows what, in his mind’s eye. He needs a lot of time to react to every­thing: to see­ing each other after months of not, to digest a story I tell about Avery’s school, to decide what he thinks about the main course, to react to my ques­tions about his PhD. He is one of the least hur­ried peo­ple I have ever met, and every word is con­sid­ered. I guess, when I think about it, he is truly gen­uine, and unconcocted.

And we both laughed at the same things over lunch. Tiny, tiny tri­an­gles of some crunchy things sur­round­ing a layer of foie gras made us laugh a bit because… what on earth were they? They lay on an excla­ma­tion point of quince jelly, that was dis­cern­able in the waiter’s hushed mono­logue. “What else did he say this was?” I hiss, and Roger smiles patiently. “No idea.” And since they were lit­tle amuse-bouches, a lit­tle heady offer­ing by the chef, there was no menu to fall back on. At this point it came back to me that Mar­cus Ware­ing was trained by and inspired by Gor­don Ram­say, another chef in whose estab­lish­ment I must have the menu beside me at all times. Any­thing could be any­thing! A tiny glass dish of hum­mous with absolutely NO tex­ture of chick­pea: it must have been passed through the finest of sieves to achieve such a vel­vety feel. And under­neath the tiny spoon­ful of hum­mous was a layer of per­fectly sea­soned roasted puree of gar­lic. Sublime.

Then another thing we did not order and so had to ask again exactly what it was: a tall, nar­row glass of hot sweet­corn veloute, topped with a blob of tar­ragon foam. Now, it is well doc­u­mented here that I am no fan of foam. The phe­nom­e­non appeared at about the same time as boys’ trousers hang­ing below the waist­band of their under­wear, and while I can see they arise out of dif­fer­ent moti­va­tions, the two trends are equally unpalat­able to me and can both dis­ap­pear any time they like. This tar­ragon foam was, though, more of a mousse than a foam and as such, and so lovely in anise-ish fla­vor, was accept­able. “Drink it like you would a cap­puc­cino,” our unnamed-starter waiter purred, and thus instructed, we did. Delight­ful and mys­te­ri­ous. As far from my own sweet­corn soup as could be, and yet con­tain­ing the same ingredient.

For the starter we each had a dish of nearly (only nearly) laugh­able char­ac­ter: an enor­mous white shal­low bowl appeared at each of our places stud­ded with sev­eral small spoons­ful of tomato-lobster com­pote, and three tiny gnoc­chi made of ricotta and truf­fle. We looked down at this most Lil­liput­ian of offer­ings and nearly began to snicker, when two wait­ers appeared with lit­tle sil­ver tureens and poured ambrosial lan­gous­tine bisque over all. And that, my friends, is heaven in a soup bowl.

For my main I had sea bass (the most del­i­cately cooked imag­in­able; I even ate the skin and I never do that), on a bed of sur­pris­ingly for­get­table broc­coli flo­rets, but accom­pa­nied by a per­fect potato puree, served in a tiny cop­per saucepan at my place. Roger indulged in pork belly and was under­whelmed. “The pork belly we made on our cook­ing day in Devon was bet­ter,” he said, and I was obliged to feel his fore­head. He seemed fever-free, so I tasted a bit and I could not agree: this dish was but­tery soft, with a per­fect piece of crack­ling on top. Sim­ply superb. I decided he was invest­ing the Devon pork with mem­o­ries of friend­ship, not a bad qual­ity in a companion.

Then the cheese board! Hon­estly, there was a fro­magier, or what­ever the cheese equiv­a­lent of a wine expert might be called. A dar­ling man whose sole job at Mar­cus Ware­ing is to wheel out a ginor­mous trol­ley bear­ing per­haps 40 cheeses, and to describe them each lov­ingly, as one would boast about a baby’s first checkup. There were goats, triple cremes, blues, ched­dars. We chose one of each and they were served in per­fectly pro­por­tioned, del­i­cately arranged slices, as the spokes of a wheel, on a shared plate. A sil­ver dish of every cracker known to man was placed before us, with a dar­ling lit­tle slid­ing lid that swung away to reveal its trea­sures. Really my most favorite piece of kit from the lunch, that cracker dish.

Heav­enly. I could not stop for dessert because I had to leave this shangri-la (escap­ing a dif­fer­ent scary waiter at every step) to pick up Avery at school. A truf­fle waiter (I for­got about that one until now!) came by with an enor­mous tiered uten­sil con­tain­ing at least six dif­fer­ent vari­eties of filled choco­lates. Peanut but­ter and jelly! “Madame will have peanut but­ter and jelly,” Roger said sweetly, then ate it him­self, thank good­ness. And may I say: there is some­thing jolly about hav­ing fin­ished a meal and sim­ply stand­ing up and leav­ing. “Our soci­ety has really got some­where when it pays peo­ple to go eat fancy food and tell other peo­ple what it’s like,” Roger said, but I was only glad that soci­ety also pays for some­one to go along and chat.

We parted at the lux­u­ri­ous cor­ner of Wilton Place and Knights­bridge, so posh that you (well, I) imme­di­ately feel under­dressed (of course I wore all black, hop­ing to dis­ap­pear). It was a lovely after­noon on many lev­els: won­der­ful com­pany (he kissed me into a taxi and was imme­di­ately claimed by his Black­berry and what­ever roman­tic assig­na­tion came next: Cairo? the Suez Canal?), a chance to be in an atmos­phere of osten­ta­tious lux­ury that almost never comes my way, and to eat food that is so beyond my level of capa­bil­ity that it’s like tak­ing a first-year sculp­ture stu­dent to the Uffizi and say­ing, “So, how does that make you feel?”

I try to ana­lyze exactly how the after­noon made me feel. Silly priv­i­leged, to eat such food (two Miche­lin stars!) and not even know how much it cost (no prices on my menu). A lit­tle silly to care, to be hon­est, about such poncy food. But also quite in awe of refined achieve­ment on that scale no mat­ter the sub­ject mat­ter. Enjoy­ing the fruits of labor from some­one at the top of THE game is a treat. But… I must tell you I was long­ing for a piece of poached salmon and a pile of mash by dinnertime.