The London Restaurant Festival had the British capital sizzling this past October, and our Yvonne Yorke was in the middle of all the culinary action. (photo credit for Yvonne on double-decker bus and London Eye Observation Wheel, Richard Simpson, all other photos by Yvonne Yorke).
 

SPECIAL MEALS IN SPECIAL PLACES

Ah, food, glorious food!

Virginia Woolf once said, “One cannot think well, love well, or sleep well, if one has not dined well.”  I couldn’t agree more. I just happened to be in London this October 8 to 13 when the inaugural London Restaurant Festival launched with mouth-watering fanfare to the sound of champagne corks popping all over the city. 

A brainchild of journalist Simon Davis and Fay Maschler, the venerable restaurant critic at the London Evening Standard (some say the most feared and influential reviewer in London), the London Restaurant Festival seems set to become the Edinburgh Festival of the food world. Over 300 restaurants (some relatively unknown, and others already iconic dining establishments) participated with specially-created, prix-fixe “Festival Menus” starting from ₤10, and restaurant sales were expected to increase by 20% during the week of the event. Let’s face it, London is one of the most expensive cities for dining out, and in these tight economic times, the fabulous food offered at wallet-easy prices drew people into restaurants. There was even a “pop-up” restaurant on the roof of Selfridges department store on Oxford Street.

The resounding success of the newly minted festival with its sell-out events was largely due to Maschler’s clout and connections in the industry, in addition to full support from the Mayor’s Office, Visit London, and the Taste of London Festival organizers.

As Machler explains, “London leads the world in the evolution of restaurants with every style, price point, and nuance of every kind of cuisine available. This incredibly strong suit in a capital city’s appeal needs to be celebrated, which is why London Restaurant Festival was created.”

Boris Johnson, the Mayor of London agrees, adding, "London's restaurant scene is world-class, boasting a massive 6,000 eateries. The sheer scale and diversity of the capital's gastronomic delights is testament to the vibrancy of our city and the many communities living and eating here. So it is timely that this exciting new festival has been launched to celebrate all that is best about London's restaurants."

Towards that endeavor, innovative and highly entertaining festival events were launched to whet the appetites of food lovers everywhere. One in particular that caught my attention was the celluloid celebration of food and film entitled, ‘Eat Film’. The idea is that a food-inspired movie is shown followed by a meal with dishes themed around the film. So if Julie and Julia gives you a craving for Beef Bourguignon, you can see the movie at the Charlotte Street Hotel screening room before dining at the hotel’s Oscar restaurant for a three-course French meal featuring, you guessed it, Beef Bourguignon. Other gastronomic offerings included Tom Jones, the family oriented Ratatouille, and Scorsese’s Goodfellas, which was appropriately followed by an Italian feast at the SoHo hotel.

However, for me it was a toss up between seeing Ang Lee’s Taiwanese food fest, Eat Drink Man Woman before indulging in a 12-course Taiwanese banquet at Keelung restaurant, or the Spanish cult classic, Jamon Jamon – where a 17-year old Penelope Cruz made her sizzling film debut. I ultimately decided on Spain, and even though the Spanish meal afterwards at Alfie’s Kitchen at Bermondsey Square Hotel was disappointing, Ms. Cruz and the surreal final scene where two men beat each other with giant legs of Iberian ham was worth the price of admission. Talk about using food to advance the plot!

Another imaginative hit (no pun intended) was ‘The Gourmet Odyssey’, where guests ate three different courses at three different London restaurants while transported between each venue in London’s iconic double-decker red buses, which were privately hired for the event. Four different itineraries with different top restaurants were chosen. Those on the Soho route enjoyed a starter at Maze, a main course at the Michelin-star Hakkasan, and dessert (or simply “pudding” in England) at Quo Vadis. The Piccadilly Odyssey took in the culinary wizardry at world-famous Nobu, The Square and The Greenhouse. The Park Lane gourmet tour alighted at other iconic London establishments such as Theo Randall, Corrigan’s Mayfair and Scott’s. Each itinerary costs £135 plus an undisclosed booking fee, which might seem a bit pricey to some, but consider that many of these are the best restaurants in London, and ordinarily would be almost impossible to get into.

After some deliberation, I went with the Pall Mall itinerary, and on a gloriously sunny Saturday afternoon, I arrived at the Metropolitan Hotel’s Met Bar in Mayfair where gourmands from all four itineraries gathered for a glass of Mumm champagne (a sponsor) before boarding their respective Routemaster bus. As it turned out, my fellow Pall Mall diners were an eclectic group that included a brother-sister team who just launched their restaurant review website, an Italian lifestyle reporter based in London, an American expat couple who work in finance, and a young Chinese couple from Hong Kong, among others.

We all rushed for the top deck on our bus, accompanied by an official photographer from the festival who encouraged us to look “natural” while he snapped pictures of us looking at the menu for our route. Most of us just laughed and made new friends while checking out London landmarks as we went along Piccadilly. By the time we reached our first destination, Sake No Hana (Flower of Sake) on St. James Street near Oxford Circus, anticipation was at a feverish pitch. As we entered the sparsely chic restaurant owned by Alan Yau of Hakkasan fame, we were asked to take off our shoes before sitting down at the tables with a lowered floor beneath the tables. An optical illusion that made us look like we were sitting on the floor cross-legged, but we were not. One diner lamented that if he knew he had to take off his shoes, he wouldn’t have worn socks with holes in them! 

The jovial mood continued when carafes of hot sake were brought to the tables, followed by our sushi appetizer sampler of sea bass sashimi with ponzu sauce, eel and salmon sushi, and kanpyo gourd roll. Our menu listed sesame aubergine as well but this wasn’t on our plate, although nobody was really bothered as it looked like they had replaced the vegetable with a lobster roll. Or was it a shrimp sushi roll? Can’t exactly recall – oh, the sake! In either case, it was very, very good – succulent, flavorful, and well-constructed so it doesn’t completely disintegrate at the first bite, which is what good sushi should be. You can see why Sake No Hana won the “Best New Restaurant” designation in 2008 from the London Good Food Guide.

A food writer sitting next to me told me that there was a ‘Starter for Ten’ quiz event later that afternoon, where top chefs match wits and food knowledge with a team of restaurant critics. This got the attention of everyone at the table and we all had a go with some of the sample questions that she had helped write.

Question number one: Do you know which London restaurant Karl Marx once lived above? Too easy – Quo Vadis, of course.

Question number two:  Do you know the difference between ceviche and tataki? Okay, ceviche we all know, but tataki? Not so sure about that one. Apparently, it’s lightly seared meat or fish over a hot pan. To think, I’ve been eating lightly seared tuna for years and didn’t know that’s what it was called.

By the time we got to question three, ‘What is the delicacy tomalley otherwise known as?’, we had all thrown in the towel. Actually, we literally had to throw in our napkins because it was time to leave for the next course in our Pall Mall gourmet tour. (In case, you were wondering, tomalley is the liver of a lobster).

So back on the double-decker bus we went and shortly, our group arrived at Hibiscus on Maddox Street in Mayfair. Much had been written in the UK press about this two-Michelin star establishment since it appeared in the London restaurant scene in 2007, including being ranked number six in London in the 2009 San Pellegrino’s World’s Best Restaurant Awards.  Chef/patron Claude Bosi – who had trained under such great chefs as Alain Ducasse, is known for food that has an unmistakably French flourish with a cutting edge.

As we sat down in the unremarkably decorated, wood-paneled restaurant, our main course of slow cooked “clod of veal” with paimpol beans, pear  and red pepper was quickly served. While the meat was simply and perfectly cooked, the pear and red pepper was more of a garnish, rather than adding to the flavor of the dish. The consensus amongst our group of diners was that Bosi could have chosen something a bit more inspiring to showcase his creative flair and wizardry at pairing unusual ingredients. After all, this is the maverick chef who had a wood pigeon with caramelized cauliflower and peanut butter on the menu. When Bosi appeared to say his goodbyes outside the restaurant, all appeared to be forgiven as we practically ambushed him with our cameras as if he was a Gallic movie star.

The next stop was at the Michelin-star Wild Honey in the heart of Mayfair, which has become a regular haunt for fashionable magazine editors, art dealers and London’s property tycoons. Perhaps it’s the cozy ambience of the high-ceilinged dining room reminiscent of a gentlemen’s club, or the delectable desserts which draw such a devout following. The predominantly modern European menu features market-fresh, English ingredients with French-peasant cooking styles. Our dessert of cold chocolate fondant with chocolate wafer and salted caramel ice cream not only tasted rich and lusciously indulgent, but was beautifully garnished with a light sprinkling of colorful sugared nuts. This was paired with two exquisite dessert wines - a Lustau, Pedro Ximénez, San Emilio Solera Reserva, or my favorite, a 10-year old Verdelho Madeira, which tasted of raisins.

Though our appetites were sated by our scrumptious Gourmet Odyssey experience, some of us still had ‘The Big Roast’ to look forward to the next day. Sunday roast is a quintessentially English meal, however this event held at Leadenhall Market(which appeared as Diagon Alley in the Harry Potter movie) took it to another level. Trumpeted as the biggest collective Sunday Roast ever held in London, 400 ticket holders sat down on long trestle tables to enjoy a meal cooked by eight of the capital’s top chefs including Mark Hix, Richard Corrigan and Rowley Leigh. Along with fine carvings of beef, lamb, Tipperary pig, wild roe deer, and various game birds, there were bowls of roast vegetables, and puddings of rhubarb crumble and custard. I imagine that the mouthwatering scent of all the roasted meats was enough to attract every animal, human or otherwise, within a 10-mile radius of the market!

With all the appetizing happenings designed to lure the gastronomically inclined, the ultimate showstopper creating the most excitement was the transformation of the 443-foot-high, London Eye observation wheel into a ‘pop-up’ restaurant. Each night over the course of the festival, a different, award-winning chef prepared dinner for 10 guests who dined in one of the Eye’s glass pods, which had been converted into a revolving dining room in the sky. Food was prepared on the ground, and the observation wheel stopped briefly after each 30-minute rotation for the next course to be brought on and served.

This extraordinary event kicked off on October 8 with Richard Corrigan from Corrigan’s of Mayfair, followed by bad boy chef Gordon Ramsey the next night. October 10 had Francesco Mazzei from L’Anima dishing up Sicilian specialties. Asian chefs came onboard the next three nights with Vineet Bhatia of Rasoi Vineet Bhatia in spicy form on October 11, Chef Ross Shonhan of Zuma with contemporary Japanese creations the next evening, followed by Tong Chee Hwee with upscale Chinese dishes from Hakkasan. A final night added by The Ivy’s Alan Bird and Gary Lee on October 13 completed the lineup.

Each of the evenings was auctioned off, fittingly, in aid of Action Against Hunger. Tickets for the Gordon Ramsey dinner were auctioned on September 27 with Prince William in attendance at a Starlight event - a charity that grants wishes to seriously and terminally ill children. When the final winning bid came to ₤23,000, it brought the house down. Recession? What recession? At least not in some parts of London!

As the London Eye capsule rotated at a leisurely 0.6 miles per hour, guests enjoyed an once-in-a-lifetime, unique dining experience with the sparkling lights of London below them as a backdrop. If a festival can reach such heights on its inaugural run, I can’t wait to join the celebrations again next year!

For information, go to www.visitlondon.com/londonrestaurantfestival.

© December 2009 LuxuryWeb Magazine. All rights reserved.