Ten courses of twaddle
Celebrity chef Tom Aikens’ new restaurant has been dubbed the most pretentious ever – thanks to its cryptic ‘life story’ menu. So what DO you get for a £145 dinner? JAN MOIR tucks into...
Even before it had opened on Saturday night, Muse in London had been called the most pretentious restaurant in the country. Considering there is a restaurant in York that serves bread in upturned flat caps and one in the capital that manages to serve a prawn as two courses — head first, body later — that is some achievement.
Yet celebrity chef Tom Aikens managed to hit the headlines by unveiling a menu that initially offers diners little clue as to what is actually being served.
Instead, he gives his dishes titles as if they were films or books, like Just Down The Road, The Love Affair Continues and, most pertinently, neither Black nor White.
Surprise dishes with mystery elements are nothing new in fashionable restaurants but Aikens takes the concept one step further by making each dish a piece of his own ‘culinary autobiography’; by taking diners on a journey that is an homage to himself.
From his childhood in norfolk to his summer holidays in France to his training with some of the top chefs in the industry, no tasty nugget of Tom’s life is left ungarnished, no incident is too big or too small to be commemorated in an emulsion of beetroot (he is obsessive about beetroots) or by a jelly tot flavoured with whisky (I don’t want to know).
Is that truly pretentious? Or is it just imaginative, daring and different? For calling any kind of food pretentious is a socially hazardous affair. It can mean anything from serving salad cream in a ramekin (get her) to slipping a doily under the digestives. One man’s grillade de porc à l’ananas is another’s gammon and pineapple. It’s a minefield!
Style arbiter and interior designer nicky Haslam thinks that ‘all organic food’ is pretentious and anything with ‘leek foam, ugh’ is beneath contempt, while Aikens himself thinks that, when applied to food, ‘pretentious’ is a word used only by the fearful.
‘I think people who use that term don’t want to understand it and they’re scared of it,’ he told The Caterer magazine recently. He added: ‘It’s not me being pretentious, it’s me being inquisitive and interesting.’
Yet from where I am sitting, which is at the marble counter in the upstairs dining room of Muse, midway through the three-hour £145 ten-course tasting menu, it seems more of an ordeal than an affectation.
PERHAPS this has less to do with the parade of complicated dishes served up on everything from porcelain cubes, moss-covered mini-troughs to spiked bowls and more about the omnipresence of Aikens himself; a rather morose figure whose charisma-free appearances on television shows such as Great British Menu and Iron Chef UK suggest he would be the last chef on the planet to construct an intimate dining experience based around his own personality, or lack thereof. Yet here he is, trundling around the tiny dining room in his stripy work shirt, delivering monotone tableside soliloquies about the provenance and inspiration of key dishes. ‘From an early age I have always been fascinated by fire, I was a pyromaniac,’ he mutters urgently in my ear. I nearly scream. This is the prelude to the appearance of the main dish, heroically titled Always playing With Fire; a highly titivated, high-concept steak and chips, comprised of a small piece of beef fillet, a stuffed onion and a solitary potato chip — the latter served like an offering to the gods on its own porcelain orb, where it is affixed by ketchup to a long piece of bone. This unusual element features again in a tiny starter snack of venison tartare, which is served in two inch-long halves of hollowed bone. Human? Let’s hope not. If you think that might be a conceit too far, consider another dish called Conquering The Beech Tree. This is so special it is introduced at Muse with its own linen-covered booklet, which opens to reveal a pop-up paper tree, complete with a tiny boy who has climbed to the top (it’s wee Tom!). printed alongside is a 120-word explanation which drones on about chefs challenging themselves, fearlessness, creativity connecting ideas and inspirations . . . zzzzz.
It concludes that ‘without risks there are no rewards’. pause to consider that cooking as a macho, mythical and heroic endeavour seems to be an entirely male concept while women just peel the onions and get on with it.
The Beech dish consists of half a scallop (or langoustine, when available) speared on to a beech-tree twig. ‘Be careful of the twig,’ a waiter warns. ‘Someone has already tried to eat it.’ Diners are encouraged to use this campfire lollipop to dip in a pool of ‘burnt apple’ emulsion after they have wrapped a wafer of pig fat around it. It’s a heavenly bite but it takes more time to research it, understand it, appreciate it and worship it than it does to eat it. All of which begs the question, if Muse has a story to tell, what on earth is it? And what does it say about us? The concept of tasting menus — an interminable pageant of intricately wrought tiny dishes, designed to showcase technique and heighten taste — goes in and out of fashion. It’s on a high, as it appeals to Instagram gourmets; those with high incomes and low attention spans who need to be entertained and visually stimulated instead of just being fed.
Owners and chefs love tasting menus, too, as smaller portions mean increased profits from highcost produce, including fish and meat. At the tiny, 25-seat Muse, where everyone has a ringside view, little actual cooking goes on in the custom-built kitchen; the implement most used by the chefs are tweezers. All the hard work has been done days in advance, where great sacks of vegetables and fruits, rivers of dairy and vats of stock are boiled and roasted and mulched down into the jewel-coloured purees, emulsions, jellies and indulgences that garnish the dishes; the turbot bone sauce, the bacon cream, the candied beetroots, the fermented cucumber balls to name a few.
These are stored in labelled boxes in a glass cupboard; the plastic receptacles into which taciturn Aikens pours his very soul.
The twice-married chef is now 49, but first hit the headlines as an enfant terrible back in 1999. This followed a kitchen prank that went wrong, and ended with him branding a colleague with a red-hot palette knife. In the ensuing fall-out, Aikens left the industry to cook privately for clients such as Lord and Lady Bamford.
Later, he opened the eponymous restaurant in London’s Chelsea which showcased his genius — he is an extraordinarily gifted chef — although it closed in 2014.
His ventures into the casual dining market have also been problematic, with branches of Tom’s Kitchen brasseries recently closing. no wonder he wants to concentrate on the top end at Muse, where dishes such as Muddy Flats & Bacon feature two teaspoons of crab at most. pretentious? What can I say? Muse is an elegant and cosy restaurant in a lovely mews in Belgravia. It is comfortable, luxuriously appointed; the perfect location for a date night for a hedge funder or banker with little conversational skills who wants to impress a date.
The bread is magnificent and you can expect it to be hand-sliced, wrapped in linen and served by Tom Aikens himself. The accompanying cep butter is amazing, the cheese course is £20 extra and the chefs in the 11-strong team are charming, even if the front of house staff are a little brusque.
When my guest asked for an extra glass of wine, they gave him a mean pour from an already opened bottle and charged him £31.50 for the pleasure. With wine, two glasses of champagne and service, our total bill came to £512.44.
We certainly went on a journey. I just don’t think it’s going to be a return one.