Telephone: 0161 929 4008
Address: 21 The Downs, Altrincham, Cheshire
Dinner for two, including wine and service, £140
Gastronomic restaurants are many things. Funny is rarely one of them. The good ones know how to do drama. The bad ones are experts only at tragedy (complete with a little catharsis back home to follow). But slapstick? Whimsy, even? Nah. Unless, however, the restaurant is Juniper in Altrincham. There is no doubting that Michelin-starred Juniper is a serious gastronomic restaurant. I am willing to go so far as to say that its chef, Paul Kitching, is on more than nodding terms with genius. But it also manages to be that very rare thing: bloody amusing.
I'm not sure which of the 37 dishes we tried had us laughing the loudest, but almost all of them warranted at least a wry lift of the eyebrow. Yes, that's right - 37 dishes. Let me explain. We actually ordered the mere eight-course gourmet menu at £50 a head, not simply out of greed (though, as ever, that played its part), but because it seemed a good way to make sense of the distinctly curious food. Usually the descriptions of dishes on a menu give some indication of what's about to happen, but not here. How about 'Very gently poached fillet of wild seabass à la grecque, black olives, cornichon, scallop, bacon, fig purée, four Mediterranean vegetable purées, truffle and Madeira glaze, meaux mustard cream, crushed meringue and nutmeg'. Meringue and cornichon? No. Me neither. In any case, ordering from the carte would cost as near to £50 a head as makes no difference. The gourmet menus (which rise to 20 courses at £95; I was being positively restrained) offered us the chance to try Kitching's cooking at, quote, 'its most impromptu and creative'.
Which meant as well as eight small 'proper' courses, there would be a whole bunch of tiny other things besides, starting with dish one: a salmon pink 'spaghetti purée', spelling out the word spaghetti on the plate to be spooned off or mopped with bread. It genuinely had the taste and mouth feel of spaghetti in tomato sauce. We giggled. Moving along, dish eight brought 'mini mango eggs': tiny fried eggs on the plate, the whites made of sharp natural yogurt, the yolks made of mango purée. Dish nine, a loose egg mayonnaise and pea purée, served in a white, plastic, disposable picnic cup, to be eaten with a plastic picnic spoon still in its own wrapping. It was the taste of a childhood lunch on the beach. More giggling.
Dish 14, tiny nuggets of malty juniper cake with curried mayonnaise followed, while dish 15 was intense pieces of dried root vegetable with a peanut butter mayonnaise. At 17 came curried white chocolate and almond nuggets. Next, dried pimentos with Branston mayonnaise. And yes, these flavour combinations worked. Dish 21: a smiley face formed from a sharp and refreshing aubergine purée, with a moustache of dried leek. And onward through a macaroni purée (dish 24), a dried herb salad of just a few delicate leaves (27), the flavour of each punched up by the drying process, to (dish 36) a light mint jelly on a plate dusted with crushed up Refresher sweets.
Did I really like all this stuff? Well, yes and no. Each of these dishes worked in and of themselves. Each was strikingly imaginative and diverting. And why not start painting the plates with smiley faces and words? The act of food presentation is so marginal anyway, you might as well make something of it occasionally.
The problem was that there were just too many of those dishes, a splatter gun approach which undermined the effect. Inevitably, it overplayed Kitching's tricks and games: there were too many of the weird and wonderful flavoured mayonnaises; the big curry flavour turned up too often; drying of anything from parsnips to beef appeared to be an obsession. While it was genuinely funny, and served with a remarkable dry wit by the waiters, it also started to get just a little irritating.
And that was a shame because, hidden inside this clattering menu, was a truly stunning meal fighting to get out. A shot glass containing, at the bottom, an intense red pepper gazpacho and, at the top, a foamed crab bisque that tasted sweetly of the sea, was divine. There was an espresso cup full of a powerful, creamy parsnip soup hiding a stalk of salsify and a square of bacon. Three solid discs of curried scallop with little pieces of meringue and mint presented as a sad clown's face, were weird and wonderful (and would have been more so if we hadn't already encountered the curry spicing so often). There was a soft tile of salmon with a finely diced ratatouille and a meaux mustard sauce; a gamey piece of slow-roast rabbit with the musk of saffron, a dollop of caviar and a leek and yeast sauce.
And - best of all - the most extraordinarily tender cut of venison with a sweet chestnut glaze and a garlic beignet (and a whole bunch of other things besides).
The final straight brought a plate ringed by 25 squares of different French cheeses, all of which the waitress could name and describe, and I can not. We finished with dish 37: a gorgeously inventive hot-cross bun soufflé, full of the appropriate flavours of malt and yeast and sultana. We were told that these menus really are impromptu, that Kitching makes them up as he goes along, sometimes even inventing what goes on the plate that very night. It is, I think, more than a slight weakness that I found this entirely believable. And yet, for all that, I have to applaud what Kitching is doing.
I want people to go there. It's eccentric and tasty and truly diverting and, in a restaurant world that too often aims at some perceived notion of straight-faced quality, that has to be a good thing.
