Mirabelle

If you have any doubts that Marco Pierre White is a phenomenon, his relaunched MIRABELLE will dispel them. A lot of nonsense is talked by new age people about individuals who possess an old soul but, in restoring and revivifying what was one of the great gastronomic addresses of London, Marco has proved that at some point he must, for a while anyway, have been Napoleon, Careme and Fred Astaire.

When I went to Mirabelle, indecently early in its new life, he was on his hands and knees rubbing polish into the herringbone-oak parquet floors, as were the troops, his members of staff. When the food arrived it was as steadily brilliant, as delicate in its revelations, as only culinary knowledge won through years of hard graft can produce.

The various rooms, which have been woken from a long, dull sleep into a kind of beauty, provide a definition of glamour. Glamour is a rare and elusive quality in restaurants. The Ivy has it; Mezzo doesn't. St John discovered it in fundamentals; Rules dissipated it in folklore. The Connaught will sell it at a price; Claridge's would like to have it but mislaid it several years ago.

Glamour depends utterly on someone's passion and whether that person is Chris Corbin, Jeremy King, Fergus Henderson, Michel Bourdin or Marco Pierre White. It is the addiction to the job that leads to the faultless footwork which dazzles.

The Mirabelle was a gift - it was, I believe, even quite cheap - to someone (like Marco) who had proved he could cook but wanted to demonstrate that he understood how to eat. The two activities are often strangely separated in the minds of chefs. Few - in fact it is hard to think of another - who perform alchemy in the kitchen also think about the way daylight will gleam on silvered wallpaper or understand how the scent of a leather floor or the slide show provided by mirrored doors can contribute to the enjoyment of being in a room.

The extensive basement premises have been turned into a large bar, an elegantly plain restaurant seating about a hundred, two private rooms of completely different mood and a wonderful courtyard surrounded by soaring buildings, staked out by cream canvas umbrellas. The elements of chinoiserie in the decoration and the use of the colour of jade in the details make reference to the era of the building and the heyday of the once, and now again, famous Mirabelle.

Marco wanted it to be accessible. To this end the long menu of what are now his own classics has first courses priced from £6.50 for, say, truffled parsley soup with poached egg (brilliant by the way), or omelette Arnold Bennett, and main courses from £11.50 for smoked haddock with Jersey royals and beurre blanc.

Dishes I tried included roulade of smoked salmon where the description "Mirabelle" presumably accounted for the jewels of salmon eggs and the black currency of caviare which garnished the rolls; steamed seabass, the fish cut vertically and delicately stuffed, served with steamed fennel stalks, potatoes imbued with olive oil and saffron and a light Bearnaise; cr?me br?l?e Granny Smith where thin slices of the apple, interestingly petrified, provided a ruff around the crispened cream; and a tiny cr?me caramel served as a pre-dessert dessert.

I also tasted, from others' plates, the parsley soup made smoky with a bacon broth; an extraordinary confit of salmon cooked in caul fat, salmon transported into almost another species; a dramatic caramel souffl? amandine with a tiny scoop of caramel ice-cream served alongside in an old-fashioned ice-cream dish.

The two head chefs at Mirabelle have been with Marco for eight years and 12 years respectively. The crack team of waiting staff includes one of London's best sommeliers, Claude Douard, who worked for some time at Les Saveurs when Joel Antunes was in residence. London has been given back one of the glories of its restaurant history.

Mirabelle
56 Curzon Street, W1J 8PA