TOM PARKER BOWLES: Kerridge’s Bar & Grill is a lavish treat

Kerridge’s Bar & Grill

Corinthia Hotel, Whitehall Place, London SW1

Rating:

It started with a pie. But this was no commonplace creation, no run-of-the-mill mediocrity, rather the very pinnacle of the pie-maker’s art, a great, burnished beauty filled with peppery pork and lashings of jelly, all wrapped up in golden, glorious, lard-infused pastry. I was co-presenting a show called Market Kitchen, about a decade back, and said pie had just been cooked by a young chef called Tom Kerridge.

He was a big fella then, before he lost all that weight. But those vast hands belied the most delicate and elegant of touches. Damn it, the man could cook – a dazzlingly talented chef with French soul and English heart. At The Hand And Flowers, his two-Michelin-starred pub, his dishes seemed simple but actually involved a whole lot of serious technique. And at Kerridge’s Bar and Grill at the Corinthia, it’s more of the same. Thank God.

Kerridge’s Bar & Grill has soaring ceilings, ox-blood leather banquettes, rich green walls and polished wooden floors

Kerridge’s Bar & Grill has soaring ceilings, ox-blood leather banquettes, rich green walls and polished wooden floors

OK, so the place is more club deluxe than pub, a huge and handsome space with soaring ceilings, ox-blood leather banquettes, rich green walls and polished wooden floors. It’s up there with The Wolseley as one of London’s knockout dining rooms. Money has not just been spent but lavished. And the smell of cash lingers alongside the scent of lamb grilling on the huge open rotisserie. There in the ubiquitous meat-ageing cabinet, ribs of beef are displayed like Amsterdam working girls, and there’s a glittering bar, and staff who do not so much walk as glide. Service is predictably immaculate.

I first went for lunch a few weeks back, and started with the most delicate of cheese-and-onion tarts, which very much amused the bouche, the filling light but packing real punch, the pastry as fragile as a drunken promise. There’s ‘Claude’s mushroom risotto with Daniel’s crispy egg’, the Claude being Bosi of Bibendum, the Daniel, Clifford of Midsummer House. No rice, though, rather finely chopped fungi and oozing egg, and an astounding depth of forest-floor allure. Kerridge’s technique may be fancy but his flavours always sing. He uses brill for his fish and chips, which may seem a little excessive. Like salting the pasta water with caviar. And at just a whisper under £35, they’re not exactly given away. But the fish is as good as I’ve eaten anywhere, the pearlescent fish wearing its batter like a silk slip. Pub grub with celestial charm.

I come back for dinner, when the lights are low, and eat a crab vol-au-vent. Retro, maybe, but there’s no ironic wink here. Paper-thin slices of apple top the case, and there seems to be a whole crab, fresh picked and still bearing that fleeting scent of the sea, stuffed into the fantastic flaky pastry. It’s a dish of astonishing lightness. Until you taste that sauce, the sort of brawling, bosky bisque that seems more at home in some quayside dive rather than the gilded splendour of a five-star Westminster hotel. It’s a classic Kerridge dish, where elegance and power stroll merrily hand in hand.

Claude’s mushroom risotto with Daniel’s crispy egg. The Claude being Bosi of Bibendum, the Daniel, Clifford of Midsummer House

Claude’s mushroom risotto with Daniel’s crispy egg. The Claude being Bosi of Bibendum, the Daniel, Clifford of Midsummer House

Pig’s cheek pie is the size and shape of a cricket ball, with a tiny snout on top. It sits somewhere between a hot pork pie and pithivier, although the pastry is shortcrust rather than puff. The filling is more farce then loose meat, but the flavours are big and bold. Silken puréed potatoes, lustily dosed with cream, come studded with crumbs of crisp black pudding. Fat, dairy, blood and salt. Oh yeah. No blood in the brown butter tart, but all the others, present and correct. The very definition of lush.

As you’ve probably gathered, this is hardly a fasting spa. Fat, as we all know, is flavour, and Kerridge and his immaculate kitchen staff are masters of that particular art. But even I couldn’t eat here every day. It’s a treat, a blowout, a new London dining room that seems as if it’s been around for ever. In short, a class act. Lavish, but lavishly lovely too. 

About £50 per head

 

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