Hotels are required to have restaurants and they used to be great places to dine well and quite cheaply. These days they hand their dining rooms over to celebrity chefs – so it’s no bargain. How often a celeb chef sets a foot in “his” dining room, let alone the kitchen, is a moot point. There are exceptions.
You may recall that earlier this week I was in the Gers. On my last day, fighting a well-deserved hangover, I tottered into Fleurance on Market Day to get a farewell lunch for my hosts. My co-guests did the driving, paying, heavy lifting and my contribution was negligible. I mention Fleurance because it is where Pierre Koffmann (above) worked as a young man. I went to La Tante Claire in Royal Hospital Road many years ago; it closed in 1998. More recently I had lunch at his pop-up on the roof of Selfridges and in his eponymous gaff in the Berkeley Hotel in Knightsbridge. On both the latter occasions I sought him out for a chat and – professional and bon oeuf that he is – he evinced pleasure at being button-holed by an appreciative but lubricated customer. Rowley Leigh, likewise, was usually on deck either at Kensington Place or later Le Café Anglais. I often saw Terence Conran eating, usually by himself, at Le Pont de la Tour. He found the food more to his taste than I did – too rich for me. My clients seemed to like it and I liked the wine list. I enjoyed choosing wine from the adjacent Conran-owned shop to drink with lunch.
I went to Bentley’s, not far from Piccadilly Circus, some years ago and met another celeb chef, the proprietor, Irishman, Richard Corrigan. He was, as it happens, and I imagine it often does, squiffier than me and rude. I might add, and I will, that he devoted his attention to the bar and not to his kitchen. If you haven’t heard of Rich Corr allow this modest chef to introduce himself. This is taken from his website –
Richard is the Michelin star chef/owner of Corrigan Restaurants, which operates Bentley’s Oyster Bar & Grill, Corrigan’s Mayfair in London and Bentley’s Sea Grill in Harrods, London. Richard’s culinary career, in brief, spans several years in the Netherlands, head chef of Mulligan’s in Mayfair and gaining his first Michelin Star as head chef of Fulham Road in Fulham in 1994 and his second star at Lindsay House in Soho, in 1997. Most recently, in 2013, Richard bought a 100-acre private estate, the Virginia Park Lodge in Ireland.
In addition to wowing the London food scene, Richard has cooked for the Queen twice, British Airways Concorde and is the Chef’s Alliance Spokesperson of the Slow Food Movement. Lauded as one of the greatest chefs of his generation (having won 3 AA restaurant of the year awards), he has received praise from some of the fiercest food and restaurants (sic) critics in the land.
He used to have to cook, now he lives off his name. I used to work in the City, now I live off my pension. But we digress; I have installed an avian restaurant in my back yard. I have put the buffet hanging in front of foliage on an east facing fence. No takers yet but my plan is that, sated on scoff, they will check into a nesting box.
