Restaurant 1880, The Bentley Hotel, Harrington Gardens, London SW7 (020 7244 5555).
Meal for two, including drinks and precious metals, £150
It was when I began spooning gold leaf into my mouth that I really started hating myself. What kind of monster had I become that I could sit here, so casually, consuming precious metals as if it were an entirely reasonable thing to do?
I looked upwards at the ludicrously ornate ceiling, in the hope that the gold had somehow come away from the cornices and fluttered down to land here accidentally on the small shiny breast of chocolate before me, but obviously it hadn't. It was meant to be there. It was, I suppose, a case of gilt begetting guilt.
Restaurant 1880 at Kensington's Bentley Hotel isn't short on shiny things. I asked the affable restaurant manager whether there was any gold left in London. 'Oh no, not much,' he said wryly, in much the same way as he said that £18.50 was a reasonable price for the cheapest bottle of wine on a restaurant list 'these days'. Which it isn't.
The curious thing, for me if not for you, is that while 1880 made me hate myself for being there - I used to be a proper journalist, you know - I can't quite summon the will to hate the restaurant, too. It is what it is, the kind of stupidly opulent gaff that every major capital city seems to have at the beginning of the 21st century. From the echoing, gold-trimmed, marble-floored lobby upstairs, through to the padded cell of a bar, to the tasselled and trimmed, highlighted and downlighted, flocked and corniced, jewel-boxed absurdity of the dining room itself, everything about the Bentley is unselfconsciously over the top. The place has a bread trolley, for God's sake, wheeled tableside, because the choice is too big to get in a basket.
The food, by chef Andrew Turner, is just as ornate as the room. It's not that every dish came decorated with gold leaf. But at times, for all the immense technique on show, it felt like there was an ingredient too many on each plate, so that we could have pulled together another dish from what we'd ordered. Turner is not beyond doing that for you himself. Just as at Restaurant 1837 (clearly 43 years older than his current Restaurant 1880), he has created a set of grazing menus: lists of six, seven, eight or nine itsy-bitsy dishes for between £40 and £50 the job lot. They are designed, says the blurb, to take the stress out of ordering.
Me, I live for such stress, preferably in gold-encrusted rooms, and somehow I did manage to make a choice from the £45 carte. First up, a taster of smoked salmon with a drip of highly acidulated citrus dressing and a blob of caviar. It was the last gasp of clean simplicity that evening. For my starter I ordered rabbit veloute with a pithivier of confit pork, tarragon and onion. Never has a pasty looked so pretty, sitting there, all shiny and glazed, in the middle of the bowl. Next came the veloute poured in with a flourish. I lifted my spoon to begin and another waiter appeared with another jug holding a dark truffle jus, which also had to be added to the bowl, apparently. Why stop at one jug when you can have two?
Nice theatre but, frankly, unnecessary, for any truffle flavour was lost to the salty depths of the veloute. The pithivier was a class piece of work, though: buttery pastry and, inside, a rich tangle of fibrous pork. In the middle of eating this, the fire alarm went off. I do so love watching waiters trying to pretend there isn't a banshee wail shaking the chandeliers.
My companion, the chef John Torode, started with - deep breath - tortellini of chopped chicken oyster, peanut sauce, mesclun salad and breaded chicken oyster. (Chicken oyster is the meat on the thigh, rather than some weird genetic crossbreed.) They arrived on a rectangular plate, occupying three indentations - tortellini below, deep-fried bit above, sauce all around. It looked so pretty that we didn't know whether he should eat it or frame it.
John's main course was the best dish of the evening: lamb cutlets, with confit breast, sweetbreads and spinach, the lamb served pink and tasting of lamb, which isn't always the way. My waitress did a fine job of announcing my dish as 'turbot with a lobster sauce', which I told her sounded very nice, but nothing like the sea bass with oxtail I had actually ordered. The plate hovered over the tablecloth for a second before being whisked away. When it turned up I wished I'd stuck with the turbot. I'd imagined a big pile of unctuous oxtail alongside the bass; instead it was two sad little strands.
And then pudding: for him a slightly undercooked pear souffle, with pear sorbet, and for me 'emphasis on chocolate', which was a silly name for a great pudding. There was a long, cool, chocolate drink with a Baileys liqueur foam (you knew there'd be a foam somewhere) and a little caramel box containing white chocolate, and that dark chocolate mousse. There was a fourth chocolate thing, but the memory was smothered by the experience of consuming gold leaf; that moment which made me realise my job had turned me from high-minded seeker after truth into a filthy, decadent, capitalist, gold-ingesting belly-whore. So you see, bizarre places like Restaurant 1880 do have a purpose, even if the effect is only temporary. Because, by the next morning, I was hungry again, and I was eyeing up my wife's jewellery. Thank God she only wears silver, or, naturally, I would have troughed the lot.
