Friday 19 February 2010

Anniversary Dinner - The Clarendon

Strangely, our second visit to The Clarendon was also a consolation prize. For our wedding anniversary recently I'd booked a table at our favourite French restaurant in Covent Garden. And then the night before they'd called me to say that there was a mistake and they were fully booked.

So Paul booked a table for us at The Clarendon. I didn't have my camera with me, so you are just getting one phone picture!

We each started with a glass of champagne. As a starter Paul ordered smoked salmon with preserved lemon and soda bread. I think we were both expecting a couple of slices of bread, on the side of a plate of smoked salmon. The presentation was a bit poncier than that (and not necessarily more successful). Curled rosettes of really lovely salmon were placed about the plate, interspersed with crumbs of soda bread, rosettes of creme fraiche and thin, elegant slices of preserved lemon. The flavours were all there, and were wonderful, but it's bloody hard to pick up breadcrumbs on a fork.

I loved the pea salad with goats cheese fritters so much last time that I ordered the seasonal beetroot version. Then I doubted my sanity because I've been getting beetroot in my vegetable box for the last 6 weeks and I'm sick to death of them. But when the salad arrived, I was at peace with my choice. Tiny halved, pickled beets (I mean TINY - about an inch long), cubes of confit beet, shavings of a raw pink-streaked white beet and a lot of pea sprouts were topped with three hot goats cheese fritters (alleluja! The last time there were only two fritters and it was just plain wrong) and dressed with pomegranate seeds and juice. The pea sprouts were very boring to eat, and took a lot of chewing, and I think the raw beet could possibly have been scrubbed more scrupulously, but the combination of beetrooty flavours and textures with the hot cheese fritters and the fruity pomegranate was just lovely.

We hit a bit of a snag with the wine for our main courses. We ended up having our third choice because the others were all out of stock. Still, it was a very nice Bordeaux that I really enjoyed.

Paul's main course was a venison hotpot with honey roast parsnips, while I had 7-hour roast pork belly with red cabbage and apple and ginger puree. Both dishes were good, but badly overdid the veal demi-glace. The apple and ginger puree with my pork was gorgeous - smooth and tangy, but with an underlying heat from ground ginger. I think I will adopt the idea next time I make an apple sauce.

We'd both spurned potato accompaniments with our mains (we had a wonderful little gem salad with mustard vinaigrette) in order to leave a little bit of room for dessert. Paul had the eccles cakes that I'd so adored the last time (served this time with stilton as well as wensleydale) and I surprised myself by ordering a chocolate dessert. I hardly ever order chocolate desserts! I think chocolate is shown to best advantage in a stand-alone afternoon tea dish or something, and not in a rich dessert at the end of a filling meal when the palate is already dulled by too many flavours. But the waitress showed her only real animation of the evening talking about this chocolate tart, so I thought I really had to. Boy. Oh boy. What a dessert! The pastry was very thin and quite crisp, not the shortbready sort of texture you often get with a dessert tart. The chocolate filling was very dark and quite bitter, smooth but not dense and not at all cloying. It was topped with the tiniest scattering of salt flakes. I know salted chocolate and caramel are very chic at the moment, but this is the first time I have had it done really well. It was just the right amount of salt to cut through the chocolate but not overpower it. There was also half of a warm clementine, poached, I am told, for 24 hours, so it was meltingly soft. Again, I'm really not a fan of fruit and chocolate usually, but this combination was sublime. And a shot glass of warm spiced chocolate wine, which brought the flavour of the clementine and the tart together perfectly. It made me wonder why everyone doesn't whisk some dark chocolate into their mulled wine - I think I will try it.

So. Not my first choice of restaurant, and certainly not flawless, but very good and definitely worth a visit for a special occasion.

16 comments:

Marie said...

Happy Anniversary!

HH said...

Happy Anniversary FC! It sounds like a good dinner. I like the repeat goats cheese fritters, the beetroot sounds like a nice change. The dessert sounds amazing, I do long for a good chocolate tart! (and the wine! WOW!)

George Gaston said...

Happy Anniversary! Sounds like a great celebration...

Alicia Foodycat said...

Marie - thanks!

HH - the dessert was beyond good!

George - thank you!

kat said...

That dessert sounds heavenly

mscrankypants said...

Happy anniversary to you both!

I'm flabbergasted the French restaurant bumped your booking ... was it full of people celebrating more important occasions? I think not! The chocolate tart at The Clarendon seems to have made up for the inconveniences though :-).

Suelle said...

Happy Anniversary! It sounds a great celebratory meal. I really like the sound of all three of your choices.

Laurie said...

Happy anniversary! Even though it wasn't your first choice, I'm so glad you had such a nice meal.

I love all the things you've done with beets! I adore beets, but I've never even come close to your creativity with them.

The hearts on the cake were so cute...

SKIP TO MALOU said...

Congratulations on your anniversary... glad it still turned out good despite the initial inconveniences...
Cheers on your anniversary!

Alicia Foodycat said...

Kat - It was superb!

Cranky - I suspect a new staff member filled the book in wrong.

Sue - I think I could have done better on the starter.

Laurie - thanks! Cake decorating really isn't my forte.

Malou - thank you! 4 years and going strong.

NKP said...

Sounds like a wonderful meal!
Happy Anniversary!

Dharm said...

Happy Anniversary! So my daughter and you share dates in the same vicinity. Hers is the 17th and yours the 19th! Pretty cool I reckon!

Alicia Foodycat said...

Natashya - thank you!

Dharm - it was actually on the 10th, I just took a while to write about it.

Simona Carini said...

Happy Anniversary! I agree with your take on chocolate desserts, so I am intrigued by your excellent review. It would be nice to have the recipe.

Anita said...

Happy Anniversary! The dessert looks like my sort of dessert.... mmmm

Alicia Foodycat said...

Simona - I was thinking about asking for it!

Anita - thank you!

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