Pearl

Dinner at Pearl, Jun Tanaka's restuarant at the Renaissance Chancery Hotel, on Saturday for my Mum's 60th birthday. Other than the celebration itself, the most memorable aspect of the meal was one of the most attentive pieces of services I've ever encountered. All through the meal, the service had been very good, but the real coup came with our puddings, when the maitre d' brought over my Mum's dish and said something along the lines of "I believe tonight is a special evening". The pudding had a carefully-styled "happy birthday" message and we were presented with two super pudding wines on the house. In some circumstances I might consider such service a bit cloying, maybe even verging on the cheesy (thinking back to my waiting days at a pizzeria in Edinburgh where a "special" cake was taken out for women's birthdays: shaped as a male torso, with, er, prominent whipped cream and cherries...), but the amazing thing about Saturday was that we had not told them about the birthday. In the end, we worked out that a waiter must have overhead the one time we toasted my Mum's birthday earlier in the meal... and I reckon that level of attention to detail is a mark of a pretty great restaurant.

Another really winning aspect of the restaurant is the room itself. I've often found myself slightly let down by the interiors of good restaurants, tending to find them somewhat bland and boring, when I expect pizazz and style. Pearl is so-called because the building was formerly the Pearl Assurance HQ and the restaurant and bar and sited in what was obviously an extremely grand entrance hall, now niftily done out with screens of pearls and plenty of low-lighting. The room is big, so tables are well-spaced and the overall effect felt rather like eating in Gotham City, of Batman fame, which is good for a special meal since I think it's nice in that situation to feel a complete sense of escape and a certain dreaminess.

Two paragraphs in and he hasn't mentioned the food; a good or a bad sign, they wonder. Certainly not a bad sign, but I do want to convey how much the environment created by the restaurant made the meal just as much as the food did. We began with drinks in the bar and four decent amuses: a spoon of refreshing ratatouille, a breaded mushroom mozarella ball, a scallop salad, and pork belly on celeriac. Moving the the table, the pre-starter was a rich, earthy pumpkin soup with wild mushrooms. Bread was really stand-out with the walnut and raisin number the best of those on offer, not least because it was one of the saltiest things I have eaten in ages. My Mum skipped starters and watched me eat what was my favourite thing on the menu: a winter salad of Jersualem artichokes and roasted salsify. For me one of the marks of great French cooking are these kinds of salads, of a kind which you would never make for yourself, and nor could you make for yourself because they display a degree of subtle skill which may seem hard to see, but which comes through in the great pleasure of the eating. The leaves were perfectly dressed, some with a truffled vinaigrette, and the combination of the root vegetables with a classic sauce and the salad was just sensational.

For mains, I went with a canneloni (pictured), which I think was made of celeriac, surrounded by plenty of mushrooms, great sauce and baby Leeks, while my Mum had a pithivier of butternut squash which came with carrots and parsnips which had been roasted to their absolute ultimate point, and were all the better for the immense richness and sweetness this brought to their flavour. The pre-pud was a glass of yoghurt, rhubarb and crumble, which was pleasingly simple, but it was the one dish I felt could have been markedly improved (it needs sassing or jazzing up in some way). For pudding my Mum went for an apple number that featured a salted caramel as well as a sorbet (I didn't get to try it, so I know it must have been good), whilst I followed my pudding philosophy of "order the one which is weirdest/you think you will dislike, because this will be the winner" and I was right, as I tend to be in this one very discrete area of life, because profiteroles with Bailey's parfait, orange and yuzu foam, and chocolate sauce, was just as wild and delicious as I my counterintuition had led me to believe it would be.

A fantastic meal.