In a room packed with fancy types just off Sloane Square in London, I am eating a £52 plate of dover sole and chips while Status Quo’s Rockin’ All Over the World blasts cheerfully through the room. The chips are very nice, all crunchingly crisp and yieldingly fluffy in all the right places. All 12 of them were perfect, in fact, stood aloft in their silver serving vessel. “A-giddy-up and giddy-up and get awaaaay,” sings Francis Rossi as I perch on a velvet, pale mustard banquette that’s clearly so very expensive that I shudder every time my greasy paws so much as skim close to touching it.
Clare Smyth, of three Michelin-starred Core fame, is letting her hair down with this new project, Corenucopia, where she’s cooking a less pricey, more comfort food-focused menu. Expect seafood vol-au-vent, chicken kiev, Barnsley chop and trifle. There’s even a separate potato menu that comes to the table in its own frame, and offers pommes anna, dauphinoise, croquettes, fondant, hasselback and so on. If you order that dover sole, which, incidentally, comes battered and stuffed with lobster mousse, it turns up with its own vinegar menu, also gilt-framed. Balsamic? Barrel-aged sherry? Champagne? “Malt, please,” I said, aware that this was the request of a drab traditionalist.
