A 10-course tasting menu of dreams, with a pudding selection for the afterlife
It is a badly kept secret among us coddled, gouty, 52-columns-a-year restaurant critics that we fear and avoid the lengthy, fine-dining tasting menu. No fact sends onlookers into more effervescent conniptions. But it’s not that we’re ungrateful for, say, our tiny amuse-bouches of blow-torched mallard lamella with a 12-hour Izumo Province nori reduction, or its delivery under cloche with all the rapidity of Julie Walters serving up two soups. No, it’s just that we have to do that kind of thing a lot, and it’s often done badly: too pompous, too many petals, too few carbs, not a lot of laughs.
But then, just as I’m questioning the entire point of modern haute cuisine, somewhere like Xier in Marylebone, central London, pops up and, like Michael Corleone in the Godfather, just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in again. Xier lives upstairs at chef Carlo Scotto’s new dual project on Thayer Street, not far from Oxford Street. Scotto trained under Angela Hartnett. Downstairs is a more casual affair named XR, with an elegant, modern European menu majoring in British produce: linguine with prawns, lamb sliders, pulled beef cheek and mango pavlova. But let’s respectfully ignore XR and focus instead on Xier, the entirely different beast breathing dreamily upstairs.
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