Taste? It’s a matter of course
Modou offers a feast of dishes ..but not all are up to scratch
The new lockdown means we’re all digging out the takeaway menus again. That’s why I’m glad I managed a great meal out before last orders at the bars and restaurants. And it’s definitely one to try when you can.
Six by Nico is one of the great restaurant success stories of recent years. The concept – six dinky themed courses that change every six weeks – has spread from its Glasgow mothership to Edinburgh, Belfast, Manchester and London.
The founder, Nico Simeone, hires anyone with promise to work in his kitchens. He has taken this to its logical conclusion by handing over his first restaurant, in a suburban west end shopping strip, to one of his original employees.
Which is how 26-year-old Modou Diagne finds himself busy with the tweezers in the open-plan kitchen of 111 by Modou. He arrived from Senegal with £150 to his name, started off as a lowly kitchen porter and now has his name over the door.
The menu has many of his mentor’s trademarks. It changes every month, has five courses plus an option of cheese. At each stage there are three choices, each one identified by a single ingredient. What exactly the chef might do with these is left to trust.
In theory, this means that everything is super seasonal and dramatic. That is debatable but it’s certainly good value, £30 for five courses, with the option of matching wines for £25.
Some choices were obvious. Black truffle trumped smoked mackerel, which I associate with economical fridge-based lunches. The rare tuber came blobbed on top of a savoury cannoli, the Italian fried pastry beloved of Tony Soprano’s mum. Two splintering rolls were filled with savoury custard and decorated with tiny rosettes of dense truffle gel. They resembled long gothic versions of Midget Gems.
The plate of stones they were served on, the waiter warned us, were not edible. But the crunchy umami cannoli were so rich that extra pebbles were not required.
Gorgonzola is another must-order, especially as Carb Boy prefers Tesco mild cheddar and complains if there is proper cheese in the house. Here it formed the filling and sauce of three ravioli, with broccoli and walnuts to cut through the oozy blue haze. The flavours were good if unoriginal
but the clumsy pasta failed Paul Hollywood’s neatness and thinness tests.
Carb Boy’s ham hough was pressed into a terrine, accompanied by pretty strips of carrot and a crunchy mustard seed relish. More strong flavours, but it was a homely dish forced to be fancy and feeling a bit uncomfortable. Inevitable when you need to serve five courses for a fixed price.
There is no universe in which Carb Boy is not going to order pink fir apple potatoes. These excellent knobbly specimens taste more potatoey than other spuds and were the perfect foil to what the waiter told us was parmesan foam but looked more like cheese sauce to me. This was not an elegant plate but it was a very good one to eat.
My duck was a more standard restaurant dish, breast with brambles in the reduction. It was fine but showed one of the other downsides of a menu with so many moving parts – searching for a new autumnal take on a familiar ingredient so that it feels a bit like more seasonal game but comes within budget.
The same went for Carb Boy’s Shetland cod sitting on a vaguely Mediterranean bean, tomato and mussel stew. It was perfectly good but had nothing wow about it.
My violet artichokes, on the other hand, were gorgeous. Some of the bigger purple leaves had been rolled around a dark vegetable mix. There were other portions of the artichoke heart griddled on the plate, plus chutney and herb oil to keep it all moist. This, with the truffle, hinted at what Modou can do.
The merciful waiter asked if we wanted a short pause before dessert. Phew. Four doll-sized, mostly carbohydrate-free, courses still amount to quite a lot of food.
My final choice of golden peach was a bad one. Peaches have had it by the time the leaves start turning. Made into a frozen mousse, they were a promising shade of boudoir pink but didn’t taste of much. This came with two slabs of something panna cotta-like, also uneventful. Then, underneath, was a layer of something very like peach chutney which would not have been out of place with the cheese course. It was the biggest misstep of the evening.
Carb Boy’s Perthshire strawberries were better, a similar arrangement of fruity ice cream with a ring of something else creamy filled with puree, but without the savoury surprise.
Walking home through the area known as Little England – the streets are called Manchester, Colchester and Southampton – we didn’t want to judge Modou too harshly. He’s only 26 and what he’s achieved is extraordinary.
But part of learning is working out what you still don’t know. This menu format is overambitious. The winning dishes get lost among place fillers and there is the odd howler. Time will bring consistency.