There’s a reason why so few restaurants use white tablecloths nowadays. Mess. They require way too much manpower and effort to maintain that pristine standard between courses, let alone between diners.
And so between the second and third “meals” of my nine-course tasting menu at Gauthier Vegan Restaurant in Soho, London, I was – I believed surreptitiously – nudging some of the copious flaky specks of wild rocket pain feuillete from the white cloth to the deep carpeted floor, when I discovered a new level of fancy.
Out of nowhere, silently, efficiently and without judgment of my unsophisticated gobbling – or so I was assured – our young sommelier appeared with a long thin metal crumber. I’d never encountered such a tool before, but with a few subtle flicks over the table, it removed the detritus from the white cloth, and we were now ready for a terrine of smoked carrot, orange tarragon and pine oil. An equally flaky morsel, but this time I was confident enough not to bother with the discrete attempts to cover my tracks and relaxed into the feast.
We had booked for the nine-course Grand Dîner, though however many times I counted on the menu, it added up to ten elaborately presented mini-meals.
The accomplished French chef Alexis Gauthier, who has been an occasional judge on BBC’s Masterchef since 2009, originally opened this restaurant in 2010. It served traditional French cuisine at that point, and within a year had achieved a Michelin star. Gauthier’s interest in vegetables and plant-based fine dining goes back more than 20 years, but even after going vegan himself in 2016, his Soho establishment continued to serve some meat dishes until 2021.
The restaurant consists of five rooms of varying sizes in what was originally a Georgian townhouse. Entry is by ringing the bell on an elegantly understated door. This feels special, like you are visiting an incredibly posh friend, or maybe that you are an invited guest at some exclusive dinner club.
Once inside, our dining room contained four other pairs of customers all ready for the £95-a-head banquet, with some opting to pay an extra £70 for wine pairing. After a very brief discussion – would we be leaving the restaurant standing after that amount of alcohol, and were our palates really refined enough to justify the cash? – we decided no to course-by-course wine. Instead we spread a glass of house red and a few jugs of tap water across the two-and-a-half hours it took to complete our repast.
The food was plentiful, flavoursome and tasty. We both enjoyed the elaborate and intricately pretty vegetable-based morsels, though my companion balked at the potato salad, saying she couldn’t place her finger on what was making it so sour.
And aside from the novelty factor, the “3D printed meat” wasn’t for me. It’s made using an alternative protein to print the ingredients layer-by-layer based on the structure of animal meat. It’s been more than 40 years since I gave up eating flesh and maybe this was just too unfamiliar and stringy a texture for me and too umami a flavour, but it was good to get a taste of one possible future for the artificial meat industry.
I thoroughly enjoyed the whole experience. It felt very much like an event rather than your bog-standard night out, and, along with some amazing innovative flavour blends, that was enough for me.
I also loved the young staff who served us; po-faced and with an over-the-top seriousness, they described the opulent food they were placing before us in fantastically flowery and pompous language. It felt distinctly like we were all playing set roles in the fine-dining game, with an understood tongue-in-cheek humour behind it all (pssst, it’s only food)… though this could merely have been our own rather insecure sense that here was a place where we didn’t really quite belong.
For a cheaper, but still fancy Gauthier experience in London, try the vegan sushi or burgers in his family-friendly restaurant 123V in New Bond Street, Mayfair. Alternatively, you can sample the vegan French pastries or enjoy a bottomless salad bowl at the 123V Bakery within BFI Fitzrovia.
If you’re interested in knowing a bit more about what Alexis Gauthier does, the video below is a good introduction.
Bardo Burner 