Western Daily Press (Saturday)
UNDER-THE- UNDER THE RADAR CLASS
ONCE upon a time, back in the 1990s, Robert Clayton was one of the youngest chefs in the UK to be awarded a shiny Michelin star.
After learning his craft under the legendary Nico Ladenis at London’s three-starred Chez Nico, Clayton moved to the West Country where he won a star of his own in 1995 at Hunstrete House hotel near Bath.
I first encountered him when he moved to the Bath Priory a couple of years after that. He notched up another Michelin star there and held on to it for the entirety of his sevenyear stay.
Since 2012, Clayton has been running his eponymously named restaurant in central Bath pretty much under the radar. If his name wasn’t over the door, you probably wouldn’t realise he was still cooking in the city.
Like many chefs who worked back-breaking, knee-crumbling shifts throughout the Nineties and Noughties in order to please customers as well as pernickety restaurant inspectors from a French car tyre company, Clayton is happier running his own place, cooking the food he wants and serving them to the masses rather than a privileged few. He probably even gets the odd day off to spend with his family, which in the old days might have been a rarity.
Apart from an admittedly impressive and hefty hardback scrapbook inscribed with ‘ Rob Clayton press cuttings and editorials’ on a shelf beneath a stack of battered copies of The Good Food Guide and Michelin Guide from the 1990s, most customers probably wouldn’t even know Clayton’s Kitchen was owned by a chef with such a star-spangled CV.
A corner building above the famous Moles music venue, Clayton’s Kitchen is a relaxed, informal and airy place with wooden boards, unclothed tables and the sort of heavy industrial lamps you might expect to see in a Shoreditch dive rather than a refined Bath restaurant.
There’s a good-value lunchtime set menu (£20 for two courses or £25 for three), plus five different sandwiches with fries to keep shoppers, tourists and local office workers happy.
And then there’s the seasonal à la carte and prices more in line with top-flight restaurants with Michelin stars in their eyes - starters from £8-£13, main courses from £22 to a hefty £32, and desserts around the £8 mark if you don’t go for the £12 British cheese course.
A starter of slow-cooked pork ballontine with cider and apple purée and toasted sourdough (£11) displayed the sort of classical handling that only really comes from a kitchen run by a chef with as much pedigree as the rare-breed pork itself.
The meat, the menu proudly stated, was from Robert and Sara Buttle of Buttle Farm in Wiltshire and it had been treated with utter respect during its slow, careful cooking. The result was a puck of moist, meaty, deep-flavoured piggyness set against the piquant slices of pickled beetroot, cornichons and golden raisins.
And, of course, there was just the right amount of toasted sourdough in ratio to the ballontine. It was almost as if the chefs had tested it with some sort of ‘toast:terrine’ time and motion study.
For my main course, fillets of seriously fresh, snowy white brill (£26) had been gently grilled and served with a spiralling tower of heritage carrots ‘tagliatelle’ (not pasta, simply thinly sliced ribbons of vegetable with a crunch - very 1990s), fregola pasta with a decent chew, silky Jerusalem artichoke purée and a rich langoustine sauce that had been made with great care.
The dish had been finished with a scattering of finely snipped chives, a touch as pleasingly retro as the 1990s-style Tudor rose-shaped plate.
To finish, passion fruit creme brûlée, burnt white chocolate and passion fruit sorbet (£8) was a beautifully executed classic.
I have eaten hundreds of creme brûlées in the artery-hardening line of duty but I can’t recall a more unimprovable version than this one.
It passed the spoon test with flying colours, the caramelised sugar top cracking like ice on a frozen lake, the sugary shards collapsing into the deep yellow set custard with its intense passion fruit flavour. To the side, there was an equally intense and sharp passion fruit sorbet and clusters of burnt chocolate crumbs.
It brought to a close a meal of rare class, backed by unstuffy but efficient service throughout.
Whether Mr Clayton is still quietly hoping for a visit from the Michelin inspectors or not, they would certainly see that there has been no decline in standards and his food is giving his customers as much pleasure as it used to, accolades or not.