Table talk

Our critic thrills to a menu full of fantastical combinations

Michael Deacon at Gazelle in Mayfair

WHERE DO great ideas come from? The true moments of inspiration, the flashes of genius? The mental thunderbolts that impel someone to try the untried and do the undoable?

Bill Bryson wondered this, in Notes From a Small Island. ‘Among the many thousands of things that I have never been able to understand,’ he wrote, ‘one in particular stands out. That is the question of who was the first person who stood by a pile of sand and said, “You know, I bet if we took some of this and mixed it with a little potash and heated it, we could make a material that would be solid and yet transparent. We could call it glass.” Call me obtuse, but you could stand me on a beach until the end of time and never would it occur to me to try and make it into windows.’

On a slightly less world-changing scale, I feel the same about avant-garde cooking. Fusion cuisine, molecular gastronomy and so on. All those mad-butbrilliant Heston Blumenthal combinations from the early 2000s, like snail porridge and white-chocolate caviar. Types of food that we ordinary mortals, plugging stolidly away in our kitchens at home, would never have dreamt of putting together.

Apparently there’s a kind of science to it, in which the Blumenthal-type chefs carry out painstaking technical analyses to identify ingredients that contain complementary ‘flavour compounds’. Personally, though, I find that explanation a bit dry and unromantic. I prefer to imagine them rummaging through their

cupboards on their days off, just chucking random ingredients into a bowl and seeing what works. The culinary equivalent of rock musicians jamming. ‘Blanched asparagus… a tube of Smarties… and half a pint of washing-up liquid! No… Right, let’s try mashed potato… sautéed dishcloth… and 15 pounds of minced hydrangea! No…’

The food at this week’s restaurant – Gazelle in Mayfair, London – doesn’t reach the radical extremes of Hestonism. But even so, its menu teems with the kind of inventive combinations you’d be unlikely to find at the family dinner table. ‘Oyster, yeast emulsion,’ reads one entry. ‘Halibut, orange, elderflower,’ reads another. ‘Beef, juniper, salted plum,’ reads a third. ‘Pigs tails, Manhattan,’ reads a fourth.

I love this kind of thing. You’re not sure you’re actually going to like it, but you can’t wait to find out.

Gazelle is a ‘small plates’ place. The waiter recommended having five dishes each. Given that there were two of us, and there were only 12 dishes on the menu, ordering felt a bit odd: really it was just picking which two to eliminate. So we gave up and ordered all 12.

We were glad we did. First, those oysters. Outstanding. Big, fat, bulging beasts, explosively juicy, the yeast emulsion adding a buttery nuttiness. My friend has eaten oysters everywhere from Norfolk to New Orleans, and he instantly pronounced this the best he’d ever tasted.

Next, that halibut. The menu had mentioned the orange and the elderflower. It hadn’t mentioned the charcoal. The fish was jet-black. It was also chopped into slithery fat strips, moist as tongues. Good, mind you. Next, a curious salad of bitter herbs, Parmesan, and anchovy skeletons – which tasted unexpectedly delicious: like brittle little crisps.

We didn’t make much of the ‘cherry tomatoes, summer berries, long pepper’, but we loved the ‘squid, sandalwood-cured jowl, girolles’. Squid like a skinny stringy pasta, all tangled up with glistening slivers of pork and salty mushrooms. The ‘monkfish, burnt seeds’ featured more of the charcoal, plus a green pool of pistachio sauce. After a couple of mouthfuls the plate was a toad-coloured murky swirl: a bit like when you’re six, and you decide to see what happens if you mix all the paints together at once. Lovely fish, though: meaty but light at the same time.

Next up, ‘presa, salted carrots’. The presa was smooth and hunky: the George Clooney of pork. The carrots, meanwhile, had been vacuum-sealed with salt for an entire week. Loved the presa itself, but we weren’t sure how well it went with the carrot sauce. (Although I feel a bit bad saying that, given the lengths they went to make it. A week!)

Those pigs-tails I mentioned earlier: basically, posh pork scratchings, in a sauce that was both sweet and smoky. Loved them. Finally we come to the one dish we really didn’t get on with: the ‘beef, juniper, salted plum’. A lonely, fist-sized lump of Wagyu, made strange by a coating of plum, and even stranger by the juniper: two pungent rival flavours slugging out a scoreless draw.

On to pudding. The ‘dark chocolate, passion fruit, summer savoury’ was a sour gloop, but the ‘white chocolate, matcha tea’ was an absolute belter. Pure Willy Wonka. Like eating sweet powdered snow.

I can’t finish without pointing out the priciness of the wine list. Cheapest bottle: £31. Cheapest glass: £8 (and a small glass at that: 125ml). Admittedly Gazelle is more of a cocktail place, but a few less exorbitant wines would be nice, just to balance it out.

Most of the food, though, was stupendous. Maybe not quite up with there with the invention of windows, but not too far off.

A curious salad of bitter herbs, Parmesan and anchovy skeletons was unexpectedly delicious

Below ‘White chocolate, matcha tea’

Right The ‘monkfish, burnt seeds’.