Bacchus

I decided to start the year and this blog with a treat. Bacchus is one of the London restaurants I've most wanted to visit, so on something of a whim I called them early this evening and walked over there for dinner. They've managed to generate a great deal of buzz around the place for a whole series of reasons: the tag-line "fine-dining in trainers", lots of dishes cooked sous-vide, and plenty of El Bulli-style weirdery on the menus. Most things I'd heard about the place were pretty positive, beyond the hype, so I'm pleased to report that it was far from a let-down.

I began with some decent walnut and raisin bread and some excellent salt-encrusted butter. It was rather better than my no-flash, low-light, not-very-subtle, secret-restaurant photography. I'd told them I was vegetarian on the phone, but it was a mark of the well-drilled service that they had quickly rustled up a veggie amuse, which was at the wilder end of the Bacchus dish spectrum: a small bowl which contained yoghurt, olive oil, salt, a spinach puree, an apple granita, wasabi and seaweed. It tastes as you'd imagine such a mix to taste: often pretty good, but sometimes a tad forced. The salt and the apple were my favourite with the spinach a clear loser. I'm not quite sure what how the spinach had been prepared but it had lost its spinachness and become rather like a very cheap and artificial spinach substitute. It made me think, rather wistfully, of the stellar, simple pile of boiled spinach on the brunch plate at Flaneur in Farringdon.

I skipped the starters and went straight for a main of root vegetables, wild mushrooms, lentils and a fennel crisp (at least that's what I think it was). This was just a really tasty dish and a pretty classical, non-fancy dish at that. The mushrooms tasted barbecued, but with a deeper flavour than one would expect from any kind of grilling, though I've no idea if they were cooked sous-vide. The other vegetables (baby onion, carrot, cabbage) were simple, rich and delicious. It reminded me of a similar dish I had recently at Arbutus, but this was better because the flavours were deeper.

The part of the meal I was most looking forward to was pudding because I've stared long and hard at each of the puddings on the Bacchus menu on-line. I like my puddings weird and wild and all of them are here, so I picked the oddest sounding dish: apple panna cotta, ginger bread grounds, lemongrass bubble bath, Thai basil oil. Loved it. Just a great dish in that it looked fantastic, the sour/spicey/oriental flavours all worked well and it just made you happy eating it.

I'll be back I'm sure because the cooking's good, there's actually quite a range of dishes from the classical to the outlandish, the prices are reasonable and the service was good. The food wouldn't be to all tastes and nor would the style of dining (I'm happy to listen to The Cure and synth-dance but I guess it's not to all tastes), but overall Bacchus is a great addition to London dining.