Fine dining in trainers is how Bacchus, Hoxton Market’s contribution to the passing fancy that is molecular cooking, suicidally advertises itself online. Which is the last time you’ll hear mention of ‘trainers’ from me. Ditto ‘fine dining’. We eat, we don’t fine dine, and we eat appropriately shod.
Not that any of this is a problem once you’re inside Bacchus proper. The restaurant manages to be plain – square wooden tables, no tablecloths, nothing plush about the seating, somewhat Shaker in design, according to Jennifer, my accomplice in indulgence – without depriving you of the sensation of a night out.
Bacchus was once a pub, and restaurants that were once pubs never throw off that atmosphere of accidental conviviality. Bacchus, to its credit, doesn’t try to. The room isn’t voluptuous enough to be at all Bacchic, but any dourness is offset by the easy tempo of the service and the not-too-serious foodiness of the waiters.
In the spirit of nothing being quite what you expect it to be, the bread is utterly ordinary, which doesn’t stop me overdosing on it while we wait for drinks. Bread is my addiction – it can be 10 days stale and I will still finish off the basket. Jennifer takes a bite and delivers a damning verdict: ‘Chip-butty bread.’ So?
Her drink, however – iced cherries, aniseed and champagne – has her in raptures. ‘It’s like drinking my lipstick,’ she says. I am on a glass of indifferentish Australian Cabernet Sauvignon, buying by the glass being my latest ruse to thwart waiters who refill me on their whim. As it happens, there’s no unseemly race to empty bottles here, so I could have had a bottle of moderately priced New Zealand Pinot Noir or something equally reasonable from Tuscany.
After allowing us to sink or swim in the menu for a generous 15 minutes, our waiter wonders if we wouldn’t like to try the tasting menu, but it’s both of you or neither of you and I can’t handle banquets in restaurants. I never know how much to eat or leave because I can’t anticipate what’s coming. Overdo it early and you miss out on the finale. Pace yourself too much and you go home starving. Besides, this tasting menu, though linguistically fascinating – what is rosemary-sake spray? – is too anatomically explicit for my taste. Pork jowl, salmon belly, lamb shoulder. The only living thing that comes without specific reference to a body part is the sardine.
So it’s baby squid, potatoes, garlic, chervil and black paella paint for me, and langoustines, Catalan mix, hot garlic foam and citrus for her. We are not, which is the whole point of coming here, anywhere we have been before. A smell as of the bottom of the ocean rises from our plates. My baby squid resembles pasta in appearance and in taste, if you can imagine a crunchy, slightly bitter pasta that’s its own seafood accompaniment. Having drunk her lipstick, Jennifer is now drinking langoustines, disguised by the hot garlic foam. Hers is an altogether spumier dish than mine, like something that might have welled up from somewhere that is neither land nor sea. ‘Thrilling’, is her word for it – first the foam on her tongue, then the sharp kick of the citrus further back in her throat. If you can be jealous of a dish, I am jealous of hers. Not for being stranger than mine, but for thrilling her so intimately.
She beats me when it comes to the main course, too. I have a sirloin steak with mushroom puree, crispy bread, nashi pear (cut to look like chips – there’s a disappointment) and burnt onion jus. Steak is the great test of the sous vide method of gastronomy. Whatever else you can vacuum-seal and cook at low temperatures – boil in a bag we called it years ago when I helped run a restaurant in Cornwall – can you really take such liberties with steak? No, on this showing. How a steak can look good, taste good and yet still be unsatisfactory by virtue of its texture, I can’t explain. But that’s the fact of it. Though perfectly tender, it still manages to be chewy. And since you can’t achieve that paradox by any other means of cooking, I blame the plastic bag.
Jennifer’s winter roots, however, live up to all the claims chef Nuño Mendes, late of El Bulli in Barcelona, makes for his cuisine. Here, indeed, unusual combinations of ingredients and flavours surprise and excite. In turn sweet and smoky, the roots taste, she says, ‘of forbidden things’. ‘What forbidden things?’ I want to know. But it’s in the nature of forbidden things not to talk of them.
My complaint about the steak apart, I agree with her. There is something louche about this food, an unexpected and somewhat shameful sensuousness that justifies its gestures to the wickedness of art. Mendes is a visible presence, tossing his hair (cut in the neo-Mary Quant style, one side longer than the other), and daubing the plates with squid ink as they leave the kitchen, as though the final transgressive brushstroke must be his, the artist’s, and his alone.
However, the setting in which this stranger-than-strange food is served should be more in keeping with it. If I’m going to send my mouth on a journey it has never made before, I’d like it to be from a location more secretive and outlandish. It’s hard to believe that sesame-crusted squab, with cured foie gras, berries and milk skin, is ever going to replace coq au vin or Lancashire hotpot in the hearts of eaters, or that our black olive financier or chocolate cake in green tea will ever replace sticky toffee pudding. But if this is food passing through, then everyone should try it before it’s gone. And with change from £100 for three courses, four glasses of wine and one glass of lipstick, it’s worth the taxi fare to Hoxton.
177 Hoxton Street, N1, 020 7613 0477,
www.bacchus-restaurant.co.uk