Savoury desserts and eye-catching price disparities.
I get far too many emails from food and restaurant publicists and I ignore most of them. A recent one looked innocuous but intriguing, however. It was headed ‘TREND: A few of our favourite savoury desserts’. I am a firm believer in the importance of desserts – most pastry chefs are magicians in my opinion – but I am fascinated by those that offer more than just sweetness. There has to be something extra, an additional flavour, citrus or ginger perhaps, that will linger.
The email went on to list seven restaurants featuring ‘savoury desserts’ including Brooklands in the Peninsula Hotel (Scottish cep, banana and crème fraîche); Sabor in Heddon Street (goat’s cheese ice cream); and Smoke in Hampton Manor outside Birmingham (Colston Bassett, a Pink Lady apple tart Tatin and lemon-verbena pudding). Also in the mix was a panna cotta with basil oil from Prawn on the Lawn in Islington, into which I immediately booked.
This restaurant initially opened with only eight seats in 2013 and proved so popular that in 2015 they had to move into their current, much larger site practically on Highbury Corner, at the same time as they opened their sister restaurant in Padstow, Cornwall, made so famous by TV chef Rick Stein.
Whatever you may think of the restaurant’s name (discreetly shortened to POTL on the restaurant’s fascia), once you walk in you feel transported to any coastal seafood restaurant, perhaps in Brittany, southern Italy, Greece, Mexico, even New Zealand. Only the roar of the traffic from St Paul’s Road outside, which invades the space every time the front door opens, destroys the illusion.
The restaurant occupies the double frontage of what must have been a shop in the past. The open kitchen and grill are directly opposite the door, fronted by a collection of what look like strong young men and women in POTL T-shirts. A bar is to the left, from which emerged for our party of four a classic negroni, a cucumber-and-chilli margarita and a vodka martini, and there are tables and bar counters off to the right. The menus hang proudly on two blackboards.
What’s on those menus continues the impression of being by the sea, being entirely composed of fish and shellfish, with 10 ‘small plates’, an oysters section with Carlingford oysters served both raw and deep fried, and a couple of larger fish dishes for the table. On the night we were there, there were silver mullet and Dover sole with their weights correctly listed alongside and their prices – £75 for the 500-g sole!
Having downed our cocktails, we ordered a dish of fish tempura with a chilli dipping sauce; a plate of seared tuna with coriander, soy and mirin; a dish described as king scallops with a Thai marinade, of which one was king size but the other was more of a baby prince; and a very pretty dish of four sardines that had been cleverly butterflied before being quickly shown the grill, drizzled with chilli oil and served with anchovy mayonnaise. Each vanished almost as quickly as the cocktails.
Our main course arrived. I had taken control and ordered the Dover sole for us four to share and we added an order of ‘crushed, spiced potatoes’, a description that did not do them justice. These small potatoes had indeed been crushed before being deep fried and sensitively spiced, I would strongly recommend them; we finished every crumb. I ordered the sole because it is a test of any kitchen to precisely grill such a thin fish and also because, having moved several years ago to a kitchen that is 100% electric and induction, I miss this particular method of cooking at home.
The fish arrived looking splendid, head and tail on, and drizzled with a moderate amount of wild garlic oil. It easily fell off the bone revealing a long roe – my late father’s favourite part, which I nabbed – and allowed me to display some basic carving skills. Its flesh was firm, its outer nicely marked from the grill, and the whole fish was soon disposed of. With this we drank a bottle of Luciano Sandrone Nebbiolo d’Alba which we brought and for which the restaurant forgot to charge us corkage. Their wine list is fine if not terribly exciting.
When our waitress arrived with their dessert menu I confessed to the reason for our visit. Our two friends ordered an affogato with coffee liqueur and I ordered the panna cotta with basil oil, which was extremely good. The cooked cream was slightly firmer than many but it was the basil oil that really distinguished this dessert and left a lingering taste in my mouth. I paid a bill of £221.63, vowing to return.
As we waited for a bus or taxi, I looked across the road at the restaurant. There was, sadly, no sunset over the seashore and nor were my feet in warm sand.
Prawn on the Lawn 292–294 St Paul’s Road, London N1 2LH; tel: +44 (0)20 3302 8668. Closed Sunday and Monday.
Michelin-starred meals in the US
I am grateful to our esteemed managing editor who passed on another press release, this time from Restaurant Furniture, about the tasting-menu prices of Michelin-starred restaurants across the US.
The least expensive is the two-star Aquavit in New York at US$175 per person for the food alone, but the biggest difference in pricing is between two three-star restaurants: Masa in Manhattan’s Columbus Circle and Le Bernardin, just nine blocks away. While the former charges US$750 per person, the latter charges US$210.
My immediate reaction was to ask Restaurant Furniture’s publicists how many covers each restaurant can serve. This question remains unanswered, but that is at the core of their pricing policy. Restaurants may be highly idiosyncratic businesses but they still have to obey certain basic financial rules and have to generate sufficient revenue each month to pay their rent, their staff costs, their food and drink bills and their general overheads. These will vary considerably. At Masa the heaviest costs will be absorbed by the high wages for sushi chefs, somewhat offset by the fact that they double as waiters, as well as the cost of so much food and sake imported from Japan. The wage and food bills at Le Bernardin will not be that much lower – nothing comes cheap at this level – but the numbers will be considerably higher as Le Bernardin occupies a third of a block, 12,000 sq ft (1,115 m2)in total. The number of covers they will serve will determine the price they will have to charge.
These two restaurants prove my point. My own research reveals that Masa can serve only 26 customers while Le Bernardin can serve 80 in its dining room and 20 in its lounge, almost four times the number.
Masa 10 Columbus Circle, New York 10019; reservation@masanyc.com
Le Bernardin 155 W 51st Street, New York 10019; tel: +1 (212) 514-1515