IT’S the first time I’ve reviewed a restaurant you can’t even go to. Such an enthusiastic review, too, though I’m not alone in my admiration for The French, of course. Just look at the amazing dessert of macerated strawberries, yoghurt mousse, strawberry glass, toasted oats and sweet cicely. Beautiful but beyond your reach... for the moment.
The good news is that Simon Rogan’s Manchester flagship will reopen on Tuesday, August 18, after its two week break for ‘improvements’. TOM will be there to show you the changes, which will entail four extra tables and 15 covers, allowing it to meet customer demand which has seen weekend waiting lists stretching months ahead. It will also gain a new lounge area for pre and post-prandial drinks, a new restaurant entrance in the foyer of the hotel and direct toilet access.
Restaurants of this class never crowd tables together, but the slight feeling of exposure suffered by customers seated in the centre of the dining room should be eradicated by the creation of booths there. The carpet, aping broad wooded floorboards, which has always divided opinion, remains. Ditto the two huge glittering globe lights that lighten up a space that still carries its ghosts of different culinary times past.
Who cares about floor coverings, mind, when the food is this good? Rogan’s head chef Adam Reid won chef of the year at the 2014 Manchester Food and Drink Awards and a recent lunchtime visit showed it still on top form.
Lunch, Wednesday to Friday, can cost you £50 for three courses plus, a sparkling cocktail, a glass of wine and a half bottle of water. Alternatively there’s the six course tasting menu for £65, or the 10 for £85. We went for the six, accompanied by a Marzemnio red from Italy’s north eastern Trentino region, cherryish, acidic and light, perfect for lunch.
It was perfect with all the five courses and that final, strawberry dish which confounded a long-held feeling that L’Enclume/French puds were never on par with what preceded. The crunch of toasted oat, the brittle texture of a sliver of ‘strawberry glass, the anise flicker of sweet cicely, the intensity of English strawberry in season. Magical.
This unforced yoking together of disparate ingredients, often foraged, that suddenly makes sense on the plate applied throughout the lunch. I didn’t recognise the presence of pineapple weed and sea asters too didn’t register, but it was exciting to know they were there in dishes. Lovage I know and use – as a counterpoint to smoked eel it worked to perfection. Similarly I often cook saltmarsh lamb from Holker, but the very young, suckling lamb (15 weeks?) Rogan sources for the meat main is a different beast altogether, light pink with the softest of textures (pictured above).
All this is food that gives pleasure that makes you think, too – there was residual guilt about relishing lamb barely out of the ewe. The French, in the unlikeliest of urban settings does promote this field and farm to table cuisine, seen through the prism of immense culinary invention. And no amount of new booths and lounge areas is going to alter that ethos.
WHAT WE ATE
Crispy pig trotter and belly, hay emulsion
Beetroot with goats cheese, walnut and pineapple weed.
Broad beans and peas, egg yolk, nasturtium with truffle and turnip juice.
Smoked eel in cultured cream, potatoes, lovage, sea herbs.
Plaice and smoked scallop, onions, roasted bone sauce and sea asters.
Holker suckling lamb with lamb sweetbreads, chard, carrots, lamb juices with garlic.
Macerated strawberries, yoghurt mousse, strawberry glass, toasted oats, sweet cicely.
Don’t miss one of the highlights of the Manchester Food and Drink Festival – A week of Michelin Magic from Simon Rogan and his top chefs.
Simon Rogan at The French, The Midland Hotel, Peter Street, Manchester, M60 2DS. 0161 236 3333, www.the-french.co.uk