St Alban
4-12 Regent Street, London SW1.
Telephone 020-7499 8558.
Open All week, lunch noon-3pm dinner 5.30pm-midnight.
Price Three courses with wine, £55-65 a head.
Score: 9/10
At no restaurant to have opened in Britain recently could the sound of someone choking to death have caused less concern than at St Alban. "Do you not think I should do something?" asked my friend, an NHS-trained physiotherapist, as a stout woman's take on that old foodie cliché "to die for" became ever more zealously literal. "Nah, don't give it a thought," I told her. "This place is King and Corbin. She'll be fine."
This is the genius of Jeremy King and Chris Corbin, the chaps who sold The Ivy, The Caprice and J Sheekey to the hyper-eloquent Channel 4 chairman Luke Johnson and then opened The Wolseley. So absolute is their commitment to perfect service that mastery of the Heimlich manoeuvre would be the least medical requirement they'd demand of their staff. You'd probably have to wait 20 minutes for the sommelier to do you a hip replacement, but then you have to wait 25 minutes here for the wild mushroom risotto.
The lavishness for which the pair are also known is evident in a large, light, very swish room with a low ceiling designed to produce an excellent acoustic. The banquettes come in slightly startling colours (ours were turquoise), the swirly-patterned murals of the restaurant's motif - a curious collation of cutlery, crockery, light bulb, bunch of keys and a solitary sandal - lend it a faint late-60s retro look; and the room is cunningly designed around concentric circles, to ensure that no punters are denied the chance to stare at the sort of clientele K&C tend to attract.
This lunchtime everyone looked very like someone, but on the whole wasn't. Yonder an Ian McKellen lookalike got stuck into tagliolini, hither a ringer for Gavyn Davies toyed nervously with carpaccio, thither the spit of Alexander Armstrong nibbled at squid... it brought to mind Agatha Christie's At Bertram's Hotel, in which the owner filled the hotel with doppelgängers of country parsons and retired squadron leaders for murder-related reasons that escape me. So obsessive are K&C in their attention to detail, in fact, that you wouldn't put it past them to keep a handful of lookey-likeys on standby for quiet days (not that we didn't have the real Simon Russell Beale nearby) to keep the gawpers happy.
The clearest departure from their previous form, meanwhile, is the emphasis on the food. At the places mentioned above, the cooking - although generally very good of its comforting, mix-and-match, New York/mittel European brasserie kind - was never allowed to detract from the theatricality. At St Alban, the menu, although faintly eclectic, is less determinedly chopped-liver-followed-by-ghoulash eclectic, the cuisine being mainly Italo-Hispanic, with the upper hand held by the chef's homeland of Italy.
Having said that, neither starter was remotely Italian. My friend was wild about her Cornish crab, which was fantastically fresh and sweet and came with crushed avocado, chilli and a twist of lime, while my Joselito gran reserva ham confirmed the old saw that from the smallest acorns mightily delicious pigs do grow. Slices of this spectacularly good ham came with olives and pickles, mushrooms, artichoke hearts and good dark rye bread.
There was some carping about the food in St Alban's early weeks, but any teething problems seem to have been sorted out. Juicy quails came with that glorious, char-grilled tang, as well as butternut squash spiced with pistachio; and Sicilian rabbit stew combined a large portion of the tenderest meat, slow-cooked to flaky perfection, with a Mandarin sweet-and-sour flavour that worked brilliantly on the plate, however alarming it looked on the page.
Once we'd finished a shared pud of wood-baked apple with rosemary-infused honey ice cream, our sense of civic responsibility demanded a check on Madam Heimlich... and there she was behind us, laying about a pannacotta risotto with vim (not Vim; recent near-death experience or not, that would be plain silly) and vigour. A waiter had performed the manoeuvre, a manager told us, and liberated a shrimp, but he'd done it with such elegance and lack of fuss that we hadn't even noticed. If there's a better front of house/back of gullet team anywhere in the country today, I'd be amazed.
