Game for a laugh - Great meat and fish in Corrigan’s new restaurant
Richard Corrigan has opened a new restaurant in Mayfair. Conjoined to (but not part of) the Grosvenor Hotel, and with a separate entrance, this will be his flagship enterprise.
From the moment you enter there is an air of calm professionalism and service veritably runs on ball bearings. A long bar with high backed chairs stretches parallel to the street. The restaurant itself describes an L-shape with big comfortable banquettes and chairs for the well, ahem, upholstered man or woman. The room is clean lined, atmospherically lit, but not too fussy or ostentatious and at one end there is relief with outlines of game birds to break up the monotony of the walls. In addition to the main room there is a large private dining room and a chef’s table which can seat about fourteen covers.
The menu is well-conceived and brilliantly priced. Starters include comfort food such as native oysters or herring and some Corrigan classics such as langoustines with spiced chicken peas and fried oyster with chorizo, fennel and apple. There are refreshing dishes: we had octopus carpaccio with clementines and nibbed almonds and heartier options; crubeens, beetroot and horseradish or ox tongue, cauliflower, Reform sauce or suckling pig sausage, oyster and duck tongue (the ultimate riff on surf-and-turf). Amongst the fish you may find John Dory consorting with Jerusalem artichokes, steamed fillet of sole with ceps or crumbed plaice with clams and whelk. Other than turbot (£24) all the fish are below £20. The choice of meat and game would bring a warm glow to a carnivore’s heart. Poached pheasant, chestnut, bacon and game toast sets the seasonal theme, taken up by grouse pie (with those pesky ceps), roe venison in pastry, saddle of hare accompanied by roast pumpkin and sprout tops, roast partridge, bread sauce, sprouts and bacon. There is also daube of pork, salt marsh lamb and fillet of beef on the bone with snails (turf and snurf) and, in case you are not getting your autumnal jollies, reassuring side orders of celeriac chips cooked in goose fat, roasted roots, buttered kale and - fanfare please - a bowl of ceps. Cepsimus maximus!
It’s not quite as simple as home on the farm and out with the poachers. The food is beautifully presented and the many of the dishes we tried were quite intricate in the manner in which the main ingredient had been deconstructed and then rebuilt. Portions are just right. It is comfort food with a modern twist and superbly and sympathetically rendered with intensely flavoured humble ingredients sharing a plate with the beasts of the field and the denizens of the deep (and sometimes all together).
The wine list, a joint effort between head sommelier Andrea Briccarello and myself, has personality and offers exciting drinking. Several themes emerged as we were working on it. Firstly, we wanted to link the terroir of the food to the wine and remark on the nature of the artisan grower or farmer. Part of this involved suggesting sympathetic food and wine pairings (without proselytising or being too schematic) and part involved highlighting the sustainable, organic and biodynamic credentials of the growers we had selected. These were pure, highly eloquent, often quite subtle wines, not marred by heavy oak treatment or over-extraction. They were chosen to dance with the food
See the wine list here (in Acrobat PDF format)
Corrigan in Mayfair will become a London institution. It is a special place and you are made to feel special. The food is brilliant and yet offers extremely good value (obviously very important in these straitened times). And you might enjoy the odd Caves de Pyrene wine there – never a hardship, surely?
Corrigan’s Mayfair
28 Upper Grosvenor Street,
Mayfair,
London,
W1K 7PF