Fine dining delivered to your doorstep
BUT AT £150 FOR TWO IT’S DEFINITELY NOT YOUR USUAL SATURDAY NIGHT TAKEWAY
I’VE had a Michelin-starred chef round to my house to cook my dinner.
James Knappett, king of the kitchen at two Michelin-starred
Kitchen Table, wasn’t physically in my kitchen but the essence of the London-based chef was teleported to Nottingham in a sizeable cardboard box dropped off at my doorstep.
While his intimate 20-seater restaurant, set around a kitchen counter, is closed for a revamp, the chef has launched & Home by James Knappett, bringing a seven or 11-course tasting menu to the doorsteps of food lovers across the country.
Mouthwatering dishes include hand-dived Orkney Island scallops with scallop XO Butter, Cornish day boat fish and leek with wild garlic sauce, braised fennel and black garlic, and warm parsnip and honey cake, caramelised apple compote and chilled chamomile custard.
The specially-designed dishes have been created by the chef to be finished and enjoyed at home and although paired back from the restaurant’s usual menu still have all the pizzazz you’d expect from a culinary maestro.
The contents come in a sleek black box, elegantly wrapped in blue tissue paper accompanied by enveloped instructions and sealed with a wax logo.
Costing £150 for two it’s a massive leap from a typical Saturday dinner at home and the most expensive food delivery to land on our doorstep - and that includes the weekly supermarket delivery.
It sounds a daunting feat for a keen home cook to recreate the intricate, exquisite tasting dishes of a chef of Michelin-starred calibre, but two-and-a-half hours later we had plated up and eaten all seven courses, made up from the 20-odd tubs, sachets and scallop shells within the box.
Each container is numbered and labelled which makes it incredibly easy to gather the elements of each dish together. All the hard work has been done for us - sauces ready, pear compressed, the compote made and the custard chilled.
All we had to do is follow the simple instructions, warm through and then plate up, which allows you to go to town on your creative presentation.
It’s fool-proof and the most hapless cook could pull this off.
Even our photos closely resemble the ones on the & Home website so we must have been doing something right.
This Michelin-starred cooking is a doddle - only joking - we appreciate how long it takes to create the smallest blob on a fine dining plate.
The Cornish brill has the most steps to follow but even then it’s pretty simple. The fish is already ‘en papillote’ (in a paper wrapper) so all we have to do is pop it in the oven for eight minutes, add the fennel and warm the wild garlic sauce in a pan.
Some of the courses don’t even require warming up and are all ready to arrange on the plate.
Fourteen minutes is the longest cooking time and that’s for the baked goat’s cheese with sticky fig, accompanied by chicory salad and a fig and red wine caramel but four courses down it comes as a minibreak from eating.
We’ve had a fair few home deliveries during lockdown and this certainly ranks as one of the best.
Some of the flavours are sublime. Bread and butter has never had the wow factor until now (with the exception of Sat Bains’ treacle bread).
There’s no other word for the truffled creme fraiche brown butter but amazing. The scallop and XO sauce is a standout dish, with a rich umami taste.
The parsnip and honey cake is comforting and I’m telling myself it’s good for me since it contains a helping of root veg.
Canelé is something I’ve never had before so it came as a surprise that inside the dark caramelised crust infused with Tahitian vanilla and dark rum was a soft custard centre.
When we unpacked the box we did look at each other and think “are we going to be full after this?” But our fears are unfounded - we’re not stuffed, we’re not hungry, we are just
right - the sign of a cleverly thought-out tasting menu.
At £75-a-head it’s not cheap but it would be ideal for a special occasion, such as a birthday or anniversary.
And if you can’t get to a restaurant, let them bring the restaurant to you.
For more information visit jamesknappett.com