The Providores
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:
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.
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.
2 Comments:
What do you mean by "Blood"? Are you referring to the LA based criminal organization? As in "Bloods and Crips"? And what does that have to do with food?
RS
Hey CCT thanks for reminding me what I ate that night. You also forgot the wine - which OK you didn't have but was delicious... Mt Difficulty Pinot I think? Anyway, great meal, great friends, great convo, great food. Hey and btw thanks for getting away from the TFL hell and reporting on things that matter!
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