Tom Kemble’s cooking at Bonhams is exquisite… It’s so good Jay almost didn’t want to tell you about it
A restaurant of quiet ambition, located within a fancy auction house, is a whole bunch of dreadful, overwrought analogies just waiting to happen. It didn’t help that, on the day we visited the restaurant inside Bonhams on London’s New Bond Street, the galleries were filled with glorious works. There were Hockneys and Auerbachs, Rileys and Hodgkins. Another room displayed sleek Art Deco pieces all of which I coveted. In the long dirty fight to find ways by which fragile words might be bent to the service of robust flavours, ignoring the possibilities of the language of art when it is so plainly offered really is tough. How easy to talk of “provenance” and the “masterpiece” and of the “acutely composed”. Still I’ll do my best, even though Tom Kemble’s cooking is about as good a candidate for this sort of guff as I’ve come across in a long while.
