Le Café Anglais: 9.5/10
Telephone: 020-7221 1415.
Address: 8 Porchester Gardens, London W2.
Open: All week, lunch, noon-3.30pm (last orders), dinner, 6.30-11.30pm (last orders).
Two-course set lunch, £12.50. Different featured roast every night .
In seeking an analogy for today's restaurant, we need to go back a very long way in Britain's high cultural history. All the way back to November 2007, in fact, when Cerys Matthews was unveiled as a contestant on I'm A Celebrity... Get Me Out Of Here! What in the name of all the saints is the wondrous Cerys, her abundant talent undimmed, doing there, surrounded by the dull and the pointless, not to mention the faded and the deranged, we ageing Catatonia fans morosely mused? It makes no sense at all.
The opening of Le Café Anglais in Whiteleys of Bayswater, at precisely the moment when Cerys first set her dilating pupils on the actor Marc Bannerman, represents no less incongruously lustrous an addition to a stable of dullards. Whiteleys is a shopping mall of smalltown American sterility. All the usual town centre suspects (M&S, HMV, Vodafone, etc) have been rounded up on the ground and first floors, and a multiscreen cinema shares the second with a vast array of plastic, disposable restaurants. There's a Yo! Sushi with charming service but not much sushi, an Ask pizzeria that offers good pizza but no service at all, and of the rest little more need be said other than that they have names such as Mamma Amalfi.
And then from nowhere, storming this citadel of homogenised mediocrity, and on a site inherited from McDonald's, comes a restaurant of the very highest quality. Its excellence will come as no surprise to fans of Kensington Place, where the chef/co-owner, Rowley Leigh, made his name. To my mind his new venture has a clear edge over the old in almost every regard other than in the gawp-worthiness of the clientele (not that the Guardian's Matthew Fort wasn't at the next table raving about his eel and bacon salad and his steamed whiting with mussels).
This is partly because Le Café Anglais, which, as its name implies, seeks to combine the all-day bustle of a grand, art deco Parisian brasserie (rectangular light boxes, distressed mirrors, original leaden windows) with fundamentally English cooking, has a carpet. This ensures a far better acoustic than that at Kensington Place, which tends to demand a refresher course in sign language before each visit.
Le Cafe Anglais' special brilliance, however, lies in the menu. Never have I seen one so seductive in the range and allure of dishes, and the less gluttonous could have a fine, very cheap, tapas-y meal just by sticking to the hors d'oeuvres, all priced at £3 and all fantastically good. Kipper pâté served with soft-boiled egg and Melba toast was beautifully delicate; pimientos de Padrón were hot, salty and juicy; a plump and succulent sardine in escabeche came with pickled carrot; and deeply flavoursome rabbit rillettes were enhanced by zingy pickled endive. But the pick of this spectacular bunch was a dish that wins itself instant classic status - gloriously gooey Parmesan custard with anchovy toast.
So much for the less gluttonous. Unmitigated hogs, my friend and I moved on to the first courses - the subtlest of beef consommés with oysters and shallots; and a pike boudin with fines herbes most notable for the comforting smoothness of its texture ("That's great, like a posh kid's fishcake," said my friend admiringly) - before setting about the mains.
For all the splendour of the undercast, topping the bill here are meats cooked on the rotisseries in the open kitchen that dominate the room, filling the air with an aroma to activate even the most sluggish saliva glands. In fact, the game birds we ordered - mallard with orange and red onion salad, served very plainly; and pheasant fighting doughtily to hold its own under a flavour assault from choucroute - were merely very good, lacking both the flair and majesty of what preceded them.
We had wanted the roast chicken and the beef, but the kitchen had already run out. It is to sort out teething troubles such as this, not to mention the slightly chaotic service - the Rhône recommended by the sommelier must have won a rosette at the recent Benylin Premier Cru Awards - that many ambitious projects have soft openings (the lunchtime we went, food was charged at half price, which, greed aside, perhaps explains why we ordered quite so much; the bill, left, shows the full price), and all subsequent reports I've had from friends have been unmitigated raves.
But even with these minor flaws, this was a memorably good meal, enhanced by such pleasingly retrograde puds as a coffee and vanilla sundae with chocolate sauce, and we waddled away agreeing that Leigh has surpassed even himself with a restaurant that is wonderfully well designed to delight and satisfy, rather than to intimidate and impress.
And yet, location, location, um, I forget the rest... If Rowley could airlift and drop his new baby on Piccadilly, he'd soon be rivalling the astonishing turnover of The Wolseley. Whether the union of Le Café Anglais and Whiteleys of Bayswater will be as happy as one half of it so richly deserves, or whether it proves a mismatch, I am frankly not sure. Just as with Cerys and Marc, we can only wait, fingers crossed, and see.
The bill
Cover charge: £1.50 x 2 £3
Kipper pâté £3
Rabbit rillettes £3
Sardine escabeche £3
Pimientos de Padrón £3
Parmesan custard & anchovy toasts £3
Pike boudin £7.50
Beef consommé £9
Pheasant with choucroute £18
Mallard £15
Ceps à la Bordelais £13.50
Endive salad £3
Crème caramel £4.50
Ice cream sundae £5.50
Drinks £45
Subtotal £139
Service @ 12.5% £17.37
Total: £156.37
