We visit the French once or twice a year. It’s always a lovely evening – great room, good food, engaging and efficient service. I wouldn’t want to go more often, as the menu is now quite predictable. And I mean that in a good way. Many hours must have been spent developing each dish, so that one flows effortlessly into the next, needing only tweaks to account for seasonal availability of ingredients. You look at the menu and think “Oh, yeah, we had that last time and it was great”. But, truth be told, it does mean that you had the “WOW” reaction the first time you ate the dish, and not the third. But not always.
An exception to the lack of Wow, was right at the start. A French malt loaf, baked to the restaurant’s recipe by the Pollen Bakery on the other side of the city centre in Ancoats. It comes with a beef butter and a little cup of broth. It’s a different bread from last time and it’s great. And the broth is different. Last November it was onion. This time it was based on mixed vegetables. I really do not know how they get so much flavour into it. It really is a WOW.
Then there’s three snacks or, as the menu has it “Little bits of something fancy”. The single bit fish pie, topped with roe, was as before. Very thin crisp pastry, rich filling. The next is named after Reid’s son, Henry, who loves cheese and crackers. And his dad has done him proud here. There’s a cracker, topped with a mousse of Kirkham’s Lancashire and chives, topped with a sweetish hazelnut praline. The third is a very seasonal stuffed courgette flower, the filling heavy on eel.
Next up, is their take on leftovers. The best Boxing Day meal as the chef who brought it said. There’s slices of smoked salmon and ham. They cure the latter themselves in a sweet brine over a two week period. There’s thin oat crackers to load it on to, fiery grain mustard and lightly pickled vegetables. It really is a posher version of the sort of food I would eat on Boxing Day.
Then, Scottish scallops perfectly fresh and served raw. They’re an entirely different texture to cooked scallops – softer, slippery, delicious. They come with halved cherry tomatoes – a couple fresh and a couple cooked so they have almost the texture of sun dried tomatoes.
Up to this point, the food has been finished off by two chefs working in the dining room. They bring the dishes and explain them – they’ll be back at dessert time. But, now, it’s time for some hot food brought by the chefs from the kitchen. First up, there is a fillet of farmed halibut from the Scottish island of Gigha (which seems to have cornered the restaurant market for halibut of late). Perfectly cooked, it was hot smoked and was, indeed, not at all wimpy about the amount of smoke – Adam Reid is not frightened of big flavours. There’s a scattering of lightly pickled mussels and a thin onion and cider sauce. And, for the final savoury course, there’s venison. It’s a recently introduced dish for autumn, replacing the lamb of the summer months. Loin and fillet of fallow deer from the organic Rhug estate in North Wales are lightly cooked – you wouldn’t want it any less rare. There’s crispy kale for part of your “five a day”. And, served on the side, a Chinese style steamed bao bun as a carb, which makes you think “Nah, that won’t work”. But it does. And this was all brought together by the most intense beetroot and pickled cherry sauce. The best plate of Bambi I can recall in a long while.
There’s a cheese course next. Maida Vale cheese is actually made in Berkshire, not the district in London. Apparently the naming is a play on words. The cheese is washed with beer – “Maida Vale” - “Made of Ale”. Geddit? Still, the cheese is better than the joke. The chef turns a blowtorch onto it, melting it slightly and it’s served with a sharp damson chutney, honeycomb and a walnut cracker.
We both thought the first dessert was the better of the two. A baked custard, flavoured with meadowsweet and topped with a sugar biscuit and a drizzle of prune juice. The final course is an Adam Reid signature dish and has featured on the menu of our last two visits. It was also our least favourite dish of the evening. It’s “tipsy cake” – a rather dense sponge which soaks up copious amounts of rum, to which the chef serving it adds a teaspoon of more rum. Alongside there’s some whipped cream. And, served separately, a little pot of tea. Nothing wrong with it as such, just not much to our tastes.
The meal finishes with espresso and well made “sweet treats”.
As ever, the meal had been very well paced – taking getting on for three hours. No big gaps between courses but no feeling of being rushed. As always, service had been excellent, whether by the chefs bringing and explaining the dishes, or the two front of house people who sort out drinks, cutlery,etc.
We had a really nice time that would have been even better if the restaurant had been busier, giving the room its usual atmosphere. In years of visiting, it has never been as quiet as this midweek evening – only four tables occupied. Hopefully it was a one-off and not some deeper issue related to the cost of living crisis impacting on high end dining.
