I hadn’t realised a word less sexy than dogwood existed, but it turns out there’s its Latin equivalent Cornus, which to me sounds like a cream for fungal infections. However inconceivably, Cornus also happens to be the name chosen for a new, outlandishly high-end restaurant from David O’Connor and Joe Mercer Nairne, the pair behind Chelsea’s rightly celebrated Medlar (Latin, too; must be their thing). Baffling decision, that.
It’s not the only one. I wish the urban myth about Greece’s half-built buildings were true — that the Greeks purposefully leave them unfinished as a tax ruse — because then I could jauntily explain away the interiors. I’d pin it on benevolent Greek brickies thinking they were doing the landlord a right old favour by leaving the industrial air-con unit on full display above a sedate, white-tableclothed room of marble counters and mustard-coloured cushions. I’d understand why the wood on the walls doesn’t match the chairs, or why some sections get art and the rest nothing. The feeling is incompleteness.
Fine, fine, I’m not a designer. But I do know that certain restaurants — especially ones in Belgravia, with £40 starters and £500 wines — are meant to be pristine. They are meant to revel in their own opulence, not have menus dashed off on printer paper with Instagram’s web logo pasted on. I thought I remembered ours from a GCSE production of Dealer’s Choice. “Is this its soft launch?” asked Twiggy. “No,” I said. “This is it finished.” Which it is, in the school of Greek construction.
And so what’s left is the food and the drink. A gamble, this — other places attempt to woo in other ways (like being comfortable, or attractive). But stone me, does everyone here know what they’re doing. In the kitchen is Gary Foulkes, one of those chefs’-chef chefs (try saying that after a bottle of Burgundy). His is a Michelin-starred background, most notably at Angler and Phil Howard’s the Square, and the latter’s influence is apparent — in fact, it’s right there on the shoddy A4 print-out. “Phil Howard’s langoustine dish” is one starter: three parmesan-infused gnocchi pucks topped with langoustines painted in a potato and truffle sauce, topped with girolles and shavings of black summer truffle. If you don’t like truffle, it ain’t for you. But otherwise? It’s bang-the-table, f***-me-that’s-good, up there with Wilton’s twice-baked cheese soufflé as London’s finest starter. Not a cheap one, it should be said: count the 15 per cent service and it’s £16 a gnocchi puck, or £8 a bite.
Or there’s the Cornish lobster, three rounds of it resting on hand-rolled spaghetti, the whole thing drenched in its own bisque — I may have childishly been reminded of Heinz spaghetti — lifted with a lemon dressing and then topped with a teaspoon of caviar. Dishes like this are those that might convert fine-dining sceptics, offering a convincer for the merits of fine French technique, being one of those plates passed between diners swearing on each other’s lives: no, no, you don’t understand, try it, don’t make me beg.
Thickly sliced lamb under a smattering of olives arrived with its own kofte on the side, rewarding when its neat presentation was tousled, revealing a plucky pepper piperade: taken all together, the dish was, in old money, far more than the sum of its parts. Chicken supplied by Arnaud Tauzin came with a distressingly phallic, albeit one-balled, pea purée (with a skin, as if left under a heat lamp too long), along with yet more truffle, another bite of langoustine, and sweetcorn. Worth its £50 price tag, purée aside, though mostly because of a truly beautiful sauce, tasting as if a roast chicken had simply melted. We smiled dreamily.
At the other end of the restaurant, a pair of old boys sat and drained two bottles of red while we were there (“Ah,” said a friend, also in that day, “but you didn’t see the three they had before you turned up.”). Next to them, another table was littered with glasses. Wine — an excellent list from Melania Battiston — will evidently be a draw for locals. There are passable glasses from £8.50, but gems from the mid-teens.
So here we are again at the cost. You may have gathered there is rather a lot of it. Bread, two amuse-bouche, a cheese course and petits fours arrive complimentary, a softener. Mindful of expenses, I tried to do it on the cheap (little wine, little water, none of the nursery-food puds), and escaped at £285. But truthfully? I wouldn’t bother holding back. Cornus is not for that; this is a place for those who were already in, whose jewellery in the sunlight gave the room its own strobe-lighting, who talk of summering somewhere. It is not, perhaps, for the hot young things. Not sexy, in other words. But then we knew that already: it’s in the name.
