This week's Restaurant of the Week is Lutyens, the latest venture from veteran London restaurateur Sir Terence Conran.
David Burke, head chef at Lutyens, the latest restaurant project from Terence and Vicki Conran in partnership with Peter Prescott, has constructed a menu on foundations of simplicity.
Burke and Conran go back a long way. When the Irish chef's three-year stint at Bibendum ended in 1990, he went on to open Le Pont de la Tour, where he stayed for 10 years. This latest collaboration came about because Conran felt the City was crying out for a decent grill room.
Lutyens restaurant honours British architect Sir Edwin Lutyens, who designed the grandiose former Reuters press agency building on Fleet Street in which it is housed. It comprises a 130-seat restaurant, a 50-cover bar, a members' club and four private dining rooms. The food offering includes breakfast, rôtisserie, crustacea bar, charcuterie counter and à la carte, with a modest sushi offering in the pipeline.
Burke has applied a menu fusing traditional high-end French bistro fare with dishes from his native Ireland and the odd retro indulgence. The result is a menu that features such unlikely bedfellows as champ and vichyssoise, home-made soda bread and tarte provencale, châteaubriand and peach melba.
Starters include feuilleté of quail eggs, with its yokes oozing through a bed of duxelle and into golden pastry, next to a lobster mousse that counterpoints feather-light mousse with briny bisque and generous cuts of lobster meat.
Lightening a meaty slice of wild sea trout are a delicate sorrel sauce and a glass of a 2008 Deltetto Gavi del comune di Gavi DOCG. From Burke's Irish roots come crubeens, pigs' trotters braised for six hours, shredded, mixed with onion, spinach, mustard and cayenne pepper, pan-fried and served with a celeriac rémoulade.
Desserts pack a punch and include crème brûlée; Eton mess; peach melba; and the tarte du jour, chocolate and blackberry.
You have to think the Reuters hacks of yesteryear would have approved.
Average spend £50 including wine and service.
Lutyens Restaurant, Bar & Cellar Rooms, 85 Fleet Street, London EC4Y 1AE; Tel: 020 7583 8385
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