Roger Hickman’s Restaurant, 79 Upper St Giles Street, Norwich (01603 633522). Lunch for two, including drinks and service: £125
In an episode of The Trip, Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon’s picaresque journey around the Lake District doing my job, Coogan opines that restaurant reviewing is a funny old business; that eventually you find yourself far from home, sitting in front of a bowl of orange soup trying to think of something to say. And now here I am, sitting gloomily before a bowl of orange soup desperately trying to think of something to say. But say something I must.
It has been served to me at Roger Hickman’s Restaurant in Norwich. For a few years Hickman has been encouraging me to come, but all my trips to the city have been on Mondays, when the restaurant is closed. I have made my apologies. This trip is also on a Monday, but it’s in the two weeks before Christmas, when he is open. And so, after literally years of back and forth, I am here. And as the less-than-obliging thoughts about this orange soup coalesce in my mind, so does one other: “Well, he did bloody ask for it.”
Hickman was for many years the head chef of Adlard’s. He took over the site when founding chef David Adlard moved on after a couple of decades knocking out the sort of refined, classical bourgeois food that a university town like Norwich needs at least one version of. Adlard was a great mentor: both Tom Kerridge and Aiden Byrne passed through his kitchen. For people who cared just a little too much about their dinner, Adlard’s was regarded as a place of safety in a city which, for far too long, didn’t offer that many options. Given the lack of competition it just needed to be fine, and it was more than that.
I suspect Roger Hickman’s Restaurant still fulfils that role. It’s the fancy French place that well-heeled parents can take their kids to when they come to visit them at university. Each table has a permafrost of white linen. There is silverware and long-stemmed glassware, banquettes, and amuse-bouches and petit fours and tasting menus and tasteful art. The problem with restaurants of this sort is that you have to see through all that stuff – too often the equivalent of an optional leather trim and alloy wheels on a Nissan Micra – to get to the essentials.
The essentials are these: that orange soup, served as a pre-taster, could have been made with anything. We’re told its pumpkin soup, but blindfolded I might have gone for chicken. Maybe butternut squash. Perhaps puppy. It’s just a hit of savouriness. Nice little spoon. Dinky little cup. But what’s inside is just a victory of blitzing, seasoning and cream. There are other worries: the dried-out, bland cottonwool bread, has a rough crumb, as if sliced up before service. It’s announced as sourdough, but we can only take their word for it. And then there’s the wine list, on which I can find no bottle for less than £26 and lots for much more. I find that inexcusable in London, where rents and rates are astronomical, but here in Norwich it’s close to shameless.
But then he likes robust pricing. In this, the month before Christmas, it’s £30 for two courses and £35 for three. So what does that get you? With the starters, a lot of it is from the blob-and-sprinkle school of presentation. Three fat Jerusalem artichokes are nicely roasted and sprinkled with a bit of Asian spicing, with a few dribbles of acidulated yogurt. It’s nice enough and superb for the margins.
A ham hock terrine is served as a long, thin Jenga brick. There are crispy shallots, dressed mandolined celery and splodges of this and that, but what matters is the charcutier’s art at the heart of this. It doesn’t matter how sharp the knife with which you cut that terrine. If you serve it too cold, on a cold plate, and it’s over-compressed and tastes mostly of salt rather than pig, it’s a fail. Which this one is. Not for the only time in this meal do I find myself thinking back to Piquet and the perfect example served to me there for £8.50.
With mains the issue is unevenness. There’s a dry partridge breast on a rather better shredded confit of the leg, with a little cabbage and jus. I like the duck fat potatoes with their hard, golden crust. A braised beef cheek with mash and a garlic pûrée is good on flavour but terrible on texture. Everything has been cooked to a mush. Even the baby carrots can be turned into baby food with the back of a spoon. The simplicity of these dishes is fine. It’s admirable. Lord save me from innovation for innovation’s sake. But if you’re going to do simple you have to do it perfectly. That dry partridge is a disaster.
The best dish is a superb prune and Armagnac tart, with crisp sweet pastry from bottom to side, and a luscious frangipane filling. A Christmas pudding parfait is a nice idea and cheap to make.
So pull off that leather trim and those alloy wheels and what have you got? A lot of posturing in the service of food that is at best serviceable, and in places far less than that. And then, hurrah, at the end Hickman himself comes out to say hello, which is awful because I’m English and desperate to avoid confrontation. Surely he understood the deal. I turn up. I eat stuff. I express an opinion, but only in print and I don’t guarantee it will be pretty. Please don’t force me to make small talk. Because all I really want to say is: “Come on – do you really think that soup tastes of pumpkin?” He tells me that usually it’s £25 for three courses at lunch, but that he put it up to £35 for December because there’s four choices at each course. I don’t see the logic of the extra tenner.
Much later that night, after performing one of my live shows, I visit Shiki, a Japanese restaurant in Tombland for a solo supper. Because I’m a metropolitan snob I have low expectations. The sushi is terrific, not just for East Anglia but for anywhere in Britain. There are fat prawns seared and dressed with ponzu, and sweet raw prawns, and perfectly sliced pieces of sea bass. The temperature of the rice is spot on, the service lovely, the sparkling saké perfectly chilled. It’s a meal of simple joys that restores my faith.
Jay’s news bites
■ Amoul hasn’t put her full name above the door of her lovely Lebanese restaurant in London’s Warwick Avenue – she wouldn’t even tell me what it is – but her restaurant, Amoul’s Hideaway, is an expression of who she is. The dishes – beautifully flaky pastries stuffed with lamb, wild chicory tamed by sweet, caramelised onions, meat loaf or chicken with tabbouleh – are her history explained one plate at a time (amoul.com).
■ The Real Junk Food Project, which liberates food that would otherwise go to waste, is to open its first café, inside a community project building in Manchester’s Shudehill at the end of January. It will function on a ‘pay what you feel’ basis: you eat and then make a donation (realjunkfoodmanchester.co.uk).
■ Final proof that we’ve reached peak burger: the Holiday Inn, Brighton, is to open a new burger bar ‘concept’, marrying quality burgers to craft beers. Then again the beef will be supplied by the highly regarded Hannan Meats of Northern Ireland, so there is hope.
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or follow him on Twitter @jayrayner1
