The best of all worlds

I dare say that Peter Gordon, Anna Hansen, Jeremy Leeming and Michael McGrath, self-styled The Providores, were just a teensy bit more put out than I was when the opening of their already long-awaited Marylebone High Street restaurant was delayed by a few days more.

They have had builders and licensing magistrates to deal with; I only had to pick up the pieces of a carefully laid plan for an article.

I had been hoping to write about the first-floor restaurant, The Providores, at THE PROVIDORES AND TAPA ROOM but, although both parts of the venture were scheduled to open on 15 August, late last week food was being served only in the ground-floor wine bar/cafe which is the Tapa Room. No bookings are taken there. Peter's friends were obviously similarly impatient to try out the new venture.

On the second evening of business we were lucky to find a space at a small table which we shared with two others. They soon became our new best friends, not least because I was keen to monitor what they had chosen from the list of small dishes which roams the culinary world with the insouciance of a gap-year traveller with straight As.

New Zealander Peter Gordon, formerly chef of The Sugar Club, acknowledges that fusion food has taken a bashing from critics. In the wrong hands it can be an incoherent, dishevelled mix of ingredients and influences, gobbledegook on the plate. But approached with the sort of understanding that Gordon and his co-chefs Anna Hansen and Lindsey Schwab possess, it has the potential to offer the best of all worlds.

In fact a freewheeling menu of small plates, as offered at the Tapa Room, is probably the best way to enjoy and digest the sort of culinary enthusiasm that can promote steamed edamame (fresh soya beans) as well as spiced pecans as a savoury bite with drinks, or make the soup section a choice between chilled roasted tomato, smoked chilli and ginger with Argan oil, and grilled baby octopus, tomago noodle and crispy shallot laksa.

The purist eater could decide on a theme, for example South-East Asian, and stick with it faithfully to the end, concluding the event with green tea pannacotta with lychee jelly and sesame wafer (shimmeringly delicious, by the way), or the more feckless might do as we did and cherry-pick whatever seems appealing, an approach perhaps finally less satisfying.

The laksa - Malaysian noodle soup - was beautiful, carefully spiced, its coconut creaminess mined with crisp shards of sweet, fried shallots. What I chose to follow - roasted, boned corn-fed chicken leg flavoured with preserved lemon on chorizo-and-chickpea stew - was also very good but required a grinding change of gears on the palate.

It might have been better preceded by the plate of Teruel jamon, butter-bean puree, guindilla chillies, olives, candied figs and tetilla cheese. The other "meal" tried had the unifying factor, of fish but the bowl of mussels, some of them barnacle-encrusted, in a punchy tomato sauce spiced with cumin and coriander outclassed and diminished the suddenly vapid-seeming organic salmon sash- imi with yuzu (citrus fruit), sesame and soy dressing.

From their array of dishes that were fighting for space on the table, our neighbours were best pleased by deep-fried egg with chilli, coriander, mint and crispy fish, and smoked foie gras on bruschetta with mango and-pomegranate molasses, another combo which requires a stomach of steel.

The Tapa Room - the name refers not to Spanish snacks but to the Polynesian bark painting which hangs on one wall and is pronounced tar-par - is open for breakfast and weekend brunch when you could greet the new day with tea-smoked salmon, two poached eggs and spinach on toasted walnut bread with yuzu hollandaise or something altogether more British-nursery, such as coddled eggs with Marmite soldiers.

The Providores restaurant, where elements of the assemblies mentioned above reappear, sometimes with different partners in the waltz of the flavours, opened yesterday. It should be a calmer, although more expensive, environment in which to analyse what mixes and what matches when cooking skills are highly tuned, and to enjoy the well-considered wine list, strong on bottles from New Zealand and on that accommodating grape variety Riesling. Waiting staff will doubtless be as polite, cheerful and unflappable as they are on the ground floor. Watch this space for a review.

The Providores & Tapa Room Restaurant
Marylebone High Street, London, W1U 4RX