Rating: 3/10
Telephone: 020-7750 5000
Address: 164 Sloane Street, London SW1
Open: Mon-Fri: lunch, noon-2.30pm. Mon-Sat: dinner, 6-10.30pm
Price: Set menus from £21-£65 ('Inspirational'); à la carte three courses with wine, £70-£89 per head
Wheelchair access
We are, all of us, prey to savage, sleep-disrupting doubts about our competence at work. At one extreme, Ron Atkinson's apparent belief that his television career can be rebuilt might be posited in support of this. So, at the other, might the prime minister's absolute certainty that he has never made an error of judgment in the field of foreign policy.
For the rest of us, crises of confidence bob to the surface from time to time, and my latest concerns the chef-proprietor of a new Knightsbridge restaurant on a notorious graveyard site (several useful cooks, Jamie Oliver among them, have bombed there) owned by Gordon Ramsay.
Mr Ramsay's latest tenant is one Bjorn van der Horst, a chef ritually feted by critics for reasons that evaded me when I ate at his previous gaff, a gruesome arms dealer's paradise called The Greenhouse - and which seem even more elusive after lunch at La Noisette.
Ladies and gentlemen, I present for your consideration my starter: watermelon carpaccio with a black olive tapenade and feta cheese. If that strikes Vicar Of Dibley fans as a tribute to Mrs Letitia Cropley, whose comedic calling card was marrying absurdly assonant sweet and savoury flavours (a stilton and kiwi fruit tart, for example), it is presented here without a pinch of humour or self-parody. It is, in fact, a signature dish, albeit the repugnance of this collation suggests the signature belongs on the sort of confession that once led straight to the gallows.
Only a mind that has fought a battle with maniacal pretension and swiftly surrendered could dream up such a dish, you'd imagine, and only one wrongly convinced of its own genius could offer it for public consumption. Yet so-called rivals by and large share the self-estimation of a chef who splits his menu into such bashfully-entitled segments as Inspirational Tasting Menu ("Let my team and I take you on a culinary adventure ... ") and Signatures And Classics. (Classics, eh. A fortnight after opening?)
One of us is wrong about Mr van der Horst, him or me, and anyone tempted to go along to adjudicate is advised not to hang around. For this is among the most charmless, smug, irksome, self-regarding and generally - please forgive what follows; I've had a good bash at the thesaurus, but nothing else comes close - wankiest restaurants this planet has ever known.
Waiting 10 minutes in a downstairs lobby to be shown up wasn't a brilliant start, and it wasn't helped by the plethora of pinstriped staff whose supercilious manner hinted we hadn't grasped what a privilege it was to be there. Nor by the dismal rectangular room done out in a chocolate medley, with nods to the late 1960s (pillbox hat lampshades) and, at one end, a mural of a Tuscan hillside presumably from a time when the cuisine was Italian.
"This looks terrible," said my friend, taking in the room, before glancing at the menu, "... and this looks even worse. God, there's an awful lot of philosophy. And what's this, 'Summer Favourites'? I think we'll be the judge of that."
Soon enough we were. "Will you have a taste?" I put some feta on a piece of olive-darkened melon and we dissolved into snorting laughter. His starter, "local heirloom tomato with cod fishcakes", tended towards Findusy blandness, with far too much potato in the cakes.
"Oh please. Honestly. Honestly!" he said when his braised red mullet arrived, with not only ricotta gnocchi but "more fucking tapenade", and although he thought the fish was "nicely cooked", it offered "nothing to lift the spirits". My saddle of Lincolnshire rabbit with snails, squid and a bean salad, and a Parmesan foam bubbling in a jug, was prettily presented but slightly oversalted, and contrived to detonate a sequence of bitter implosions on the tongue.
"Rabbit stuffed with its own liver" was another dish that caught the eye. But that, we agreed, was a more seemly punishment for the chef than a blameless bunny, and when Mr van der Horst appeared in his whites for a round of "How are you enjoying your lunch?", we made a dash for the door. Even for a hack in a crisis of confidence, there's a white lie too far.
