‘A weird glimpse into the future of PC dishes’

Alexis Gauthier was once at the helm of Roussillon in Pimlico, a place that was all about pigeon and poultry and foie gras. But in 2016 he had a Damascene conversion and went vegan at his own Gauthier restaurant in Soho.

Now in his new spin-off, Studio Gauthier, he has a place to show off his several years of experimentation and practice. Long admiring Gauthier, I wanted to like it and, as I’ve had runins with vegans in the past, I was excited to display my openness to the food – as I approach all foods (barring fermented cabbage) – and to surprise those who would assume that I’d use this review as an excuse to pour another bucket of excrement over the plant-lovers.

But then I went and ate there.

It’s on a dead and soulless street in that officeridden desert that exists between Tottenham Court Road and Goodge Street. There’s a large room of parquet floor and concrete ceiling, with multicoloured chairs to liven up the space. And at the centre is an open kitchen. There, it transpires, they do things to plants and transform them into new edible substances. Indeed, I can’t quite bring myself to describe it as cooking as you’ll shortly understand.

There’s a nice-looking outside space but we ate inside at a round table. One that wobbled considerably. The staff were slightly irritated when I brought it to their attention, and we were referred to a more senior bod who told us that some of the tables were like that when they bought the place.

Presumably when you’re reinventing the wheel, you find you have rather more pressing issues than fussing about wobbly tables. In any case, we were moved and then went à la carte, not quite having the tenacity for the two-and-a-half-hour tasting menu.

We started with brioche and piperade (a Basque dish of tomatoes and peppers). But brioche has butter in, you might say. So here was a clever mimicry, a big, blowsy, crumbly brioche. But its texture was more like a croissant and it had an oily taint you don’t get with butter. So it’s not as good as the real thing.

I was expecting a dip of piperade to go with the ‘brioche’ but got a vast tub of the stuff: a mountain of sodden vegetables. It felt clumsy, oversized and indelicate. Then came vegan caviar: some clever boffin managing to spherify kelp seaweed. All kind and compassionate, right? But not as magnificently spoiling as actual caviar and not as luxuriously salty and seashore-fresh. As well as heavy blinis, it came with a solid thud of something called ‘cremata’, which is not cream. We had ‘V-tuna’ rolls too. God knows what the ‘tuna’ was (compressed tomato?) but it wasn’t as pure and tasty as tuna, and a ‘dragon roll’ was a messy splodge of avocado and other carby effects, sauces and crunch.

Happy relief was a dish of coriander houmous, a refreshing and clever mix served with a pile of little pineapple chunks, but then came ‘graffiti aubergine’. The skin and mixed flesh of the aubergine was so burnt it was a carcinogenic hazard that called for a cordon, a police presence and hazmat suits.

Finally, a huge bowl of lettuce, wrecked by a drizzle of acrid and gloopy yellow sauce.

The whole thing was a carb overload, more hireable plant – think digger – than vegetable. A weird glimpse into the future of PC dishes mimicking those old shameful dinosaurs. And they may be clever in the kitchen, but the whole episode left me yearning for natural simplicity and that joy of actual food, cooked.

It was so burnt it was a carcinogenic hazard that called for a cordon, a police presence and hazmat suits