White Valentines Day is a celebration from my wife's home (and my second home) of Taiwan. Traditionally the guys take the girls out, so I booked an afternoon off work and planned a few little treats. The second was stopping off at Ladurée in Harrods to pick up an insanely decadent macaroon cake of rose and raspberry. I would recommend the surprisingly reasonable cost to anyone with a tooth as sweet as mine. We also had youghurt milkshakes at Yoo Moo, which topped off a decent afternoon of future work for the dentist.
What preceded it was the day's main talking point. Texture had been in the ether of my outlook for some time and I thought the lunch menu would suffice as a decent midweek gift for the wife: affordable but exceptional. Chef Aggi Sverrisson has been pulling in the plaudits for his great Icelandic cuisine for some time, staying true to his roots with the concepts and ingredients in his dishes. Plus he almost never uses butter.
Lunch at Texture was an interesting affair. The layout of the restaurant is one of classical modern warmth and glassy smoothness. It's not intimidating in the least (which many high end hotel restaurants can be), though the light which is seemingly funneled onto the ceiling from every angle is slightly off-putting. We ate some rather interesting crisps, flavoured with parmesan, seaweed and bready elements before enjoying some warm brown bread with their home-churned skyr butter. Skyr, it turns out, is Icelandic yoghurt and a mainstay ingredient in Texture's menu. Quite rightly so, too: the butter had a beautiful lightness to it, with notes of sourness sitting perfectly with the sweet, warm bread.
Our pre-starter was a distressing cold broth of cucumber, celery, apple and champagne (left). It was thin, insipid, uninspiring and poorly-flavoured. The ingredients read as a baffling mixture of disparate sweet blandness and the slop in the bowls was testament to something which did not work at all. I was more than a little apprehensive as we awaited our starters.
Main courses were more exciting, with the wife opting for the beef, which was rib-eye and ox cheek (right). The rib-eye was grilled to a perfect medium rare whilst the ox cheek was dense and musky. The olive oil bearnaise on the plate was clearly a tribute to the Sverrisson 'no butter' regime but I have to say; if you're going to serve bearnaise (and so you should), then butter is pretty essential to getting any flavour into it. This olive oil concoction didn't really hit home. The horseradish was a better-judged accompaniment. The onions with red wine on top of the ox cheek were marginally under-cooked, but the big chips on the side were lovely.
Before puddings were ordered, we were treated to a pre-dessert of blood orange granité with spiced sabayon, lemon and cinnamon. It was a slightly strange and sharp mixture of flavours, not dissimilar to our pre-starter. And, like our pre-starter, it wasn't that good. Desserts were easy picks for both of us. Mine was a mixture of rhubarb, cold skyr and granola. The idea was lovely: mix a wonderfully vibrant, colourful dessert ingredient with the natural yoghurt they are so fond of and throw in some grains for variation. Unfortunately the whole lot was just too chilly and crunchy in the end to be any good. There are many prerequisites to a good dessert and one of them certainly is comfort. This was slightly too abrasive in the event.
And that was that. But then came the real downer. We had forgotten to pick up the wife's scarf from the cloakroom and only realised when we got home. This then prompted a rather extended and unpleasant to-ing and fro-ing between the restaurant who would not claim any responsibility for the loss and us who were hoping for some sort of compensation. Eventually - with the help of a very friendly and professional gentleman from Texture's management - we negotiated a free dinner for ourselves which would effectively pay back the cost of the scarf.
Now, the lunch had been decent, there is no doubt, but it had not been as good as we had hoped for. On almost every dish, some small imperfection or misconception had rendered the meal an agonising 'nearly'. Though I must say the service (during the meal at least) was lovely and the place itself is every inch a Michelin-starred dining room.
So, to dinner. Aggi himself had offered to tailor a distinct menu of signature dishes for us, which we were more than happy to try. Dinner is of course the time to really rate a Michelin-starred restaurant. It's when they are pulling out all the stops, showing all the finesse they are renowned for. Having said that, it's not necessarily fair to rate a restaurant on a free meal but they had a lot to do in terms of making up a debt to us.
We again started with the same crackers, butter and brown bread which yet again disappeared with little fuss. This time there was no irritating pre-starter to get annoyed about; we were about to get fed impressively. The first course was Texture's take on salmon gravadlax. It came with preparations of cucumber and some horseradish cream (left). This was a long way away from a cold and unappetising broth. It was delicately moist and mild salmon, brought to life by the light cucumber and smooth horseradish. Dishes like this are hard to get right because there is little margin for error. However, when they're done like this, there is nothing to worry about. Things were already looking good.
The plate itself was impressive as a whole and it was this sense of completeness which made me realise what Texture is all about. It looked as if someone had taken a photo from the forest floor and recreated it on our plates with wonderful food. It's not the kind of fireworks one would describe as 'molecular gastronomy' - it's simpler and classier than that. This is food which merits eating in the most awe-inspired way. I had a huge grin on my face as we ate.
Breathlessly, we surveyed the remains of what was a frankly exceptional meal. The wife's only complaint was that the final morsels had been a little too much for her. I didn't really mind since I got to finish them off. However, the meal in its entirety was wonderful - brilliantly constructed courses containing impressive and genuinely surprising combinations. This is exactly what Michelin-starred dining should be all about.
That said, this meal was a freebie. And it was a freebie compensating for the loss of an expensive scarf which the restaurant themselves lost. As my wife said halfway through the meal: "I'll forgive them for it, but I'm still not happy about it." That pretty much sums this whole episode up. The experience at Texture can be incredible, but do keep an eye out for the cloakroom.
Incidentally, we were eating a version of their Scandinavian tasting menu, I later found out. So my recommendation is to sample this menu should you be at Texture. It won't be cheap, but there is a lot to be said for dishes that can make anyone expound their virtues as extensively as I just have.
Texture