The Providores

The good thing about becoming a newly-appointed Ph.D. is that you get a lot of free dinners. I suspect I might not get any more of them until I become a professor, so I have to make the most of it. So here's my third:

I've been meaning to try Peter Gordon's much-acclaimed restaurant for a while (The Providores, 109 Marylebone High Street, London W1U 4RX), so thanks guys! The Tapas Room downstairs is a local favourite, judging by the endless Sunday brunch crowd. The small dining room upstairs serves about 15 tables and is a haven of the best of New Zealand Krip cuisine, combining traditional European ingredients with exotic Asian flavours. The space is a little cramped (not uncomfortably so) and I suspect you'd have trouble getting a party of ten in there, but it's a nice place for a more intimate, relaxed dinner. The menu's packed with exotic- sounding compositions, all of which look delicious. The dishes are quite complex, with lots of different flavours, and everything's very cleanly presented. Here are a few offerings from the current menu:

Salad of baby artichokes, Puy lentils, grilled courgettes, pickled beetroot and pea shoots with Greek yoghurt and NZ avocado oil dressing.

Buffalo mozzarella with grilled asparagus, yellow-bean cherry tomato salsa and fennel seed lavosh.

Pan-fried Manouri on moromi miso roast aubergine, inari, black rice, wild asparagus and walnut salad with sake ‘popped’ cherry tomatoes and pickled cucumber.

Roast ‘Welsh Black’ beef fillet on roast carrots and caramelised garlic Israeli cous cous with salsa rossa and vanilla oil.

Roast Gressingham duck breast on wok-fried Chinese broccoli with sesame dressed soba noodle salad, kombu broth, shiso cress and a Guindilla chilli.

Roast Elwy Valley lamb chump on Borlotti, broad and green bean salad with creamed Ortiz anchovies and crispy buckwheat.

Gooseberry compote with vanilla cream, wild strawberry sorbet, hazelnut praline and a Sevilla ‘torte de aceite’ biscuit.

On the whole, everything was excellent, particularly the sauces and dressings, which are all quite light, with interesting flavours but not overpowering (this coming from someone who's not particularly a sauce person). The one exception might be the caramelized cous cous, which is very sweet for that Wellington beef. My other gripe is that the dishes are really busy, so that it's really hard to remember what you've eaten, and some additions are pretty random (e.g., that guindilla chilli). On the upside, you'll find yourself dissecting each dish and saying "wow, those Puy lentils are excellent" or "that dressing is SO nice! What's in it?" [yellow-bean cherry tomato salsa]. If you're a hard-ass Blood, I expect this is the kind of place that might annoy the heck out of you. But if you wanna taste as many things as possible, all at the same time, this is a great place.

See also:

• London
• restaurants
• fusion
• food
• pictures