Swanky affair: the Mount St. dining room
(Picture: Daniel Hambury/Stella Pictures Ltd)Even as the cost-of-living crisis deepens — even as market volatility gave us a Prime Minister outlasted by lettuce and another age of austerity beckons — new luxury restaurants continue to emerge. Miro is still gleefully offering 14 quid caviar “bumps” and £195 wagyu steaks. Blingy Essex institution Sheesh is coming to Mayfair soon. And then there is Richard Caring’s Bacchanalia: a place that, tittering behind its hand like a schoolboy who has crudely chalked a penis on someone’s blazer, recently put out a job ad for an in-house grape-feeder.
This isn’t all that surprising. But the question of how to cover these sorts of openings — and, beyond that, how to square that coverage with the fact that exceptional cooking should be adequately priced, and food businesses are locked in their own fight for survival in ruinously costly premises — has been something of a gnawing private dilemma. So let me just say that the obvious ridiculousness of many of these spendier restaurants, the ease with which they can be basically ignored, has been quite helpful.
Or, at least, that was the case until I went to Mount St. Restaurant, a highly swanky and art-focused new all-day affair above a revamped Mayfair pub. To look at the prices on the menu — the £96 lobster pie for two, the £62 dover sole — is to simultaneously marvel and wince. Any attempt to gloss over it would be daft. And yet, unlike many identical, money-pit launches in this part of town, Mount St. is deserving of both attention and acclaim. It is a plush sanctum of technically dazzling culinary Victoriana and also the basest of deep-fried, cheese-blasted pleasures.
More broadly, it also marks the London arrival of a major new restaurant player. Founded by Artfarm (the hospitality arm of luxe-gallery Hauser & Wirth, and the same team that has just taken over the Groucho) in a five-storey 19th-century building just along from Scott’s, it feels like an important flag planted on the company’s growing map of conquest. The job done on The Audley pub downstairs — a sensitively scrubbed-up, determinedly casual hall of wood-panelling, Tayto crisps, and dented board game boxes — helps make sense of the lavish contrast on the first-floor: a sun-drenched gallery of notable artworks, Ferrari-red chairs and weighty salt and pepper grinders (modelled on Paul McCarthy’s sculpture ‘Tree’) that, not accidentally you imagine, look uncannily like sex toys.
The menu of Dickensian deep-cuts by chef Jamie Shears carries on this sense of luxury infiltrated by subtle subversiveness. A ‘mock turtle’ croquette starter (actually veal) was an outrageous opening: shreds of moist, delicate meat in a golden-fried patty, given another dimension by the briny, haunting thwack of oyster mayonnaise. Elsewhere, a blushing loin of venison main came with silky parsnip puree, tart blackberries, and faggot meat rolled into a little spring roll of pastry. Bubble and squeak was not, as we assumed, a little cake of smooshed veg, but golden chips of the stuff: seemingly fried in butter to a deep, toffee bronze, and served with the ungodly, pale-yellow brilliance of something called HP hollandaise. It was one of the most ridiculously fun things I’ve eaten in months.
There were, here and there, perhaps signs of the fustiness of these culinary ideas (the steamed paté layer of a wellington-like Pigeons in Pimlico slightly hampered my enjoyment). Still, by the time we had drained our hugely appealing glasses of Vega Caledonia Rioja Reserva 2014 and shared a pitch-perfect lemon tart, we were awe-struck to the point of laughter. It feels strange to shout about such an expensive experience right now. But the world of blowout restaurants isn’t going anywhere. It will always have an audience of special occasion diners, business lunch splurgers and regulars for whom economic calamity has barely touched the sides. And here, at Mount St., overlooked by a couple of Lucian Freuds and a Matisse, that genre is enlivened by inventiveness, historical curiosity and, yes, real artistry.
