Fallow, 2 St James’s Market, Haymarket, London SW1Y 4AH. Snacks and small plates £7.50-£22, large plates £16-£40, desserts £9-£16, wines from £36
Early on in our dinner at Fallow on London’s Haymarket, a waiter delivers a mushroom parfait to our table and then points up at a shelf suspended from the industrially scaffolded ceiling. Gnarled, fungally embellished logs are sitting up there. “And we even grow some of the mushrooms for this dish right here at the restaurant,” he says. Even allowing for the restaurant’s noisily proclaimed commitment to sustainability, this could be a profoundly annoying outbreak of virtue signalling, were it not for one thing. That mushroom parfait is astonishing. The furious blizzard of shitake and oyster is as smooth as velvet stroked the right way. It’s as deep as a Samuel Beckett play, and as rich as Rockefeller. It surprises me not at all that dairy has been involved, along with separated eggs: yolks for the fat, whipped whites for the aeration.
