208. The Year Starts In The Wilderness.

 

  And so it’s 2022 and two weeks into the new year we are off. Given the general mayhem prevailing in general society and in English politics at the present it’s fitting to start the year at a place called The Wilderness in which the country’s prime minister may or may not find himself in the foreseeable future.

  Visited now many times and always with great pleasure it was a joy once again to wander off the main street in Warstone Lane down the little alleyway that leads to the Michelin plated restaurant as well as to the excellent 24 Carat Bistro which I have visited in the past.

Greeted like an old friend and made instantly comfortable I was rapidly immersed in choosing a cocktail from the restaurant’s unique drinks menu and deciding which of the various tasting menus I would opt for. The ordinary menu was very alike the pescatarian menu with four rather than five fish/seafood dishes and I thought that you can only have so much fish in one meal and so it was to be the meat-containing meal.

  How calm the kitchen is at The Wilderness despite the booming 1970s music. It’s all rather trance inducing - the cocktail, strong and relaxing, the pulsating music and the fabulous amuse gueules - it was worth paying for the longer tasting menu just to have the masterful and delicious wagyu beef tartare (Alex Claridge always delivers an excruciatingly tasty tartare). The ecstasy of the tartare was complemented by an equally fabulous mini-crab doughnut and an extremely successful tiny tartlet with celeriac as its headline ingredient.

  Crab, richly flavoured, was the star of the starter. It sat on a tiny bed of mashed Yukon gold potato. The potato was far less thrilling than the crab and perhaps a little slice of bread and butter might have made a happier and pleasurably old-fashioned accompaniment to that very fine helping of crustacean. Talking of bread and butter, how delightful it is for a change not to be randomly brought any in these early stages of the menu. It is nice to have a nibble while things are getting going but when instead you are served with the three amuses bouches to nibble on then who needs bread? Chefs, please, unless it is integral to the dish, forget the bread especially the trendy but increasingly tiresome varieties of sourdough. Of course there’s one bread I make an exception for - Glynn Purnell’s manna, his light and delicious pain de campagne. Is it the best bread you can find anywhere?

  Moving on, next to arrive was a nicely cooked piece of cod, the dish’s flavour enhanced by XO and tiny crispy morsels of iberico pork. A very fine dish

 

 And then what usually annoys me, the now almost de rigeur and completely unnecessary vegetable centred course - carrot. Latterly chefs have almost made the carrot course a vital part of a menu. Let me suggest that it isn’t. But of all the carrot courses I’ve had in the Age of The Carrot Course I have to say this was probably the best I have been served and very worthwhile in its own right. And so pretty with so many textures - pickled carrot, little spherical jellies, raw carrot shaped like maple leaves, cooked carrot all topped very successfully by frozen goats cheese. When carrot courses are like this then I’m a fan of them. If the vegetable/carrot course is here to stay for the foreseeable future then it can only be worth bothering with when the work put into it matches The Carrot 2022.

  Another vegetable hove into view in the next dish - this time the leek in various pleasing forms and adding to the pleasure of some well cooked monkfish and shiitake mushrooms. An irreproachable  dish.

  And then, finally, meat. Venison cooked very much as I like it though I can see some might have considered it to have been cooked a little longer than they would have wished. With it a delightful and delicious little faggot, a little bouquet of kale and pomme purée which was not wholly successful being a little white puddle of no great consequence and not enough of it to be able to appreciate its flavour.

Nevertheless, as a whole, it was a dish that gave me great pleasure.

  Then the immaculate conception of Ch-ch-changes, the banana flavoured not-a-banana. Banana-camouflaged white chocolate containing innards of such cleverness (and deliciousness) that you would swear from the texture that it was very ripe banana inside. A gem of a signature dish. Then, dessert-proper. I’d had it before but I was delighted to be served it again. Honey-flavoured ice cream with honeyed jellies and honeycomb, and honeycomb-shaped tuiles and little subtle bursts of lavender breaking through. Light and spectacularly pleasurable. And then a cup of excellent Brazilian coffee to sup as I gaze at the Hot lips and indulge myself in gradually devouring them.

  The Wilderness never stops moving forward. It’s an adventure there. It’s an exploration. It’s a very great pleasure. The cooking and preparation is meticulous and the service is spot-on. This restaurant deserves special recognition when the restaurant guide books are published this year. To ignore it again makes what they say about everywhere else meaningless.