Precisely so.
To understand the new London restaurant, it may be necessary to begin with the classic English breakfast, known as a fry-up, at a classic London caff-perhaps the well-known Borough Cafe, a couple of steps from the Borough Market, near London Bridge. A proper fry-up is an intimidating sight to a novice, a big plate sluiced with tinned baked beans, surmounted by a couple of fried eggs, a fried tomato, a fried slab of black pudding (which is to say blood sausage), a slice of fried bread, fried mushrooms, two or three rashers of streaky bacon, and a terrifying hillock of bubble and squeak-potatoes fried hard with cabbage-which all leaks a sort of pale, orange grease that puddles across the plate in rude abundance. You may be tempted to flee to the nearest Starbucks, but it's gruesomely fascinating to see small-boned Englishwomen tearing through these absolutely enormous plates of food.
Modern British cooking can be defined thusly: anything but that.
So the morning after England eked its way into the second round of the World Cup by tying Nigeria-an event celebrated by lager louts across the land-I was not wholly surprised to walk into Gordon Ramsay's restaurant on Royal Hospital Road, a long, flag-draped walk from Sloane Square past an immense veterans' hospital, and find & a restaurant that might have been 12 paces from the Arc de Triomphe, with a French sommelier, a French maître d', and a cheese cart, bereft of even a single English specimen, that ranged from Époisses to Cabécou.
I was seated at first in a sort of foyer, where I was furnished with salted nuts, a copy of The Daily Telegraph, and a flute of Dom Pérignon for which I was destined to pay about $35. A waiter brought out some breadsticks and a little dish of cream cheese heavily scented with truffle oil. I rattled the sports page-if nuclear war had broken out that week, it would have been pushed to page 14 behind news of David Beckham's injured toe. A headwaiter looked alarmed, and substituted a menu for the newspaper before I could get to the summary of the England-Nigeria game. If I guess correctly, he whisked the paper off to be ironed.
Then Ramsay walked by (he has other restaurants, but this is the place where he seems to be) and I leapt at the chance to chat him up. He gently changed the subject from the inadequacies of the England eleven to the succulence of the new season's lamb before I had so much as a chance to blurt out a single "Oi! Gordo!" I gestured toward the crystal panels and the blond wood and smirked. "Very Arpège," I said, referring to the Paris restaurant that Ramsay's interior is probably meant to recall.
Ramsay just smiled.
I waved toward the canapé, telling him that I had always considered truffle oil to be the Heinz ketchup of the overbred, and a corner of his mouth twitched at my rudeness, but the headwaiter came by just then to lead me to a proper table. Ramsay shrugged and wandered back into the kitchen.
I would evidently not be thrown out of Gordon Ramsay's restaurant today. (Nor would I be when I visited his gorgeous new restaurant at Claridge's a few days later, where the menu was strikingly similar.) I would, on the other hand, consume a thoroughly conventional luxury-French meal, starting with a consommé spiked with tiny favas, chervil, and more truffle oil, continuing with a foie gras terrine overpowered by its larding of smoked goose, a single ravioli stuffed with a rubbery, overemulsified bolus of lobster, and a pretty, if overcooked, bit of John Dory moistened with browned butter and garnished with delicious little cubes of spiced celery root. A lamb loin, very rare, with a salt-marsh funkiness, was served on a bed of melted cabbage. Ramsay was right: The new season's lamb was pretty spectacular.
Still, with all the brashness, all the hype, I had been expecting at least a cuisine of big flavors from London, something with a punch, but what I had been experiencing was as mild as lemonade. When I finally took a trip to Marcoland, or to one outpost of his kingdom anyway, a wonderworld in Mayfair called Mirabelle, I found a fantasy of '50s posh, with neither wild attitude nor blood sausage in sight. The menus are as tall as The Sunday Times, and the wine list-actually, I just saw the training-wheels version, magnificent in itself-is one of the deepest in London. The truffled stuffed pig's trotter, a borrowing from La Tante Claire's chef Pierre Koffmann that was always part of the Marco legend, was almost refined, at least as refined as it is possible for a huge, naked pig's foot to be.
These days, when you go to a restaurant run by Marco Pierre White, you're buying a branded product. You can't be accused of lacking class for going to an MPW restaurant, where you can be pretty sure you'll go the route of sole meunière, haddock-stuffed "omelets Arnold Bennett," and reliably good steak frites. The old MPW delighted in sea-pirate prices and cowering customers; the new one just wants to sell you dinner. Mirabelle was all right in its way, but I felt like a rock 'n' roller who never got around to seeing the Beatles on stage and is now making do with Wings.
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