276. Grace And Savour.

 

When I recently attended the 2022 Good Food Guide Awards at the Groucho Club in Soho, I was delighted that a restaurant I visited very soon after it opened at the beginning of this year, Grace And Savour, was named the 17th most exciting restaurant in Britain. 

  I had a reservation to revisit it shortly after my first meal there but the restaurant had to cancel the booking because there were staff health problems on the day that I was due to visit. So my second visit was delayed much longer than I expected but by the time I eventually returned the format had evolved and the food had reached new heights. The guests gathered as before, like the denouement of an Agatha Christie movie, in the comfortable pre-dinner lounge, smart and chic, and thence were guided to the dining area where we sat at comfortable tables rather than on high chairs around the serving counter (I prefer the more relaxed comfort of table and chairs rather than sitting perched on high).

  I still had a good view of the action in the kitchen, if a little more removed from it than on my first visit to Grace and Favour. It was as thrilling as ever to witness the well-oiled gastronomic machine working as chef David Taylor and his immaculately turned out crew plied their trade and studiously prepared the food and plated up each exquisite dish. The menu was only presented at the end of the meal, signed by Chef, so each course was a mystery until revealed by the front of house staff and sometimes the chefs.

 The meal opened with a deeply flavoured Mushroom broth with cream of Berkswell cheese, chanterelles and truffle; then came a dish Chef had reinserted on the menu because of its popularity - a Jerusalem artichoke and apple combination - its popularity is quite understandable.

 

  Following on were more canapé-style wonders eventually emerging into more substantial dishes including a little crisp made from sourdough leaven with beetroot and wild garlic caper, swede with beef tongue and beef heart with pickled tagette, burnt leeks in butter and beef garam emulsion, scallops with a butternut squash sauce and finely cooked Cornwall cod with a fabulous cream of mussel, horseradish, herbs and pickled mustard. All of these courses were unimpeachable and a great delight to eyes and taste buds.

  The meat course came in the form of finely cooked Aylesbury-Peking duck from Worcestershire, deliciously glazed with spiced plum and pickled cherries. A well established favourite appeared as the intermediate dish - caramelised whey and sheep’s milk sorbet with a compote of red currants which recalled a Swedish breakfast and the land of birth of Chef’s wife. On to a ewe’s milk yogurt sorbet with rhubarb root oil, then a splendid-looking, hedgehogesque and wondrous dish of little slices of Concorde pears glazed in wild pear syrup with a custard and apple marigold. Finally, and perhaps the least successful course, was a sort of bread pudding - a ‘cake’ made from left-over sourdough with cobnut ice cream. This seemed like a course too far but the whole meal had been, as the Good Food Guide has described the whole restaurant, “exceptional”.