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An awesome and ridiculous film that leaves you thrilled beyond the point of your natural endurance
2012
Theatre
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Blood Brothers
Music
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London,
Fay Maschler's rating
Reader rating
Description: "The most splendid setting, especially on a sunny lunchtime" -- plus "one of the best wine lists in town" -- makes the airy first-floor dining room of this "heart-of-Chelsea" landmark a firm favourite for many reporters; the food is "nothing exceptional" though, and "very expensive" for what it is.
Food: 
Service:
Ambience: 
Phone: 020 7581 5817
Website: http://www.bibendum.co.uk
Open: Mon-Sat 12-10.30pm, Sun 12-10pm.
Dress code: None
Good for: Romantic meals, Business, Good food, Ambience.
Payment options: All major credit cards accepted
Gold standard: Sir Terence Conran with Monsieur Bibendum
Back in 1987 an ambitious, young, chisel-cheeked man called Marco Pierre White became chef at Harvey’s restaurant in Wandsworth, where he went on to be awarded two of an eventual three Michelin stars.
In the same year Rowley Leigh opened Kensington Place, a restaurant designed to look and be, quite literally, egalitarian — everyone was on view from the street and the necessarily shouted conversations were the property of all.
And Terence Conran resumed his role as a restaurateur when, in partnership with publisher Paul Hamlyn and chef Simon Hopkinson, he opened Bibendum in the Michelin building in Chelsea.
Some people talk of 1987 as the year that marked a change for the better in the world of London restaurants. Harvey’s is now Chez Bruce, its chef-proprietor Bruce Poole having started out working in Hopkinson’s kitchen at Bibendum.
Kensington Place is these days owned by D&D London (formerly the Conran Group) and Rowley has his own place, Le Café Anglais, with general manager Graham Williams having joined him from Bibendum.
It’s Happy Birthday, Key of the Door, Never Been 21 Before, strictly only to Bibendum. A handsome book has been published to mark the milestone.
The Bibendum Cookbook (Conran Octopus, £25), beautifully photo-graphically illustrated, is the next best thing to visiting the remarkable building, designed by an obscure civil engineer called François Espinasses and opened in 1911.
In his essay in the book on The Special Marriage of Tourism and Food, Stephen Bayley comments: “Michelin House was a bravura demonstration of untutored genius, a brilliant exercise in an indefinable style: part Nouveau, part Deco, entirely Michelin”.
The ground-floor mosaic with its depiction of Monsieur Bibendum, the jolly soul fashioned from tyres who, as Bayley observes, was one of the most inspired branding exercises of all time, the ceramic plaques commemorating historic cycle and motor rallies and the huge stained-glass window in which our hero is shown raising a glass under the words Nunc est Bibendum (“Now is the time to drink”, from Horace’s Odes) were crying out for a restaurant.
Such a building housing an offering of food and drink was a happy marriage waiting to happen. Conran is a designer who could wittily extract from the surroundings inspiration for details in furniture, crockery, waiters’ stations, ashtrays et al that delight the eye and satisfy a sense of correctness.
With his love for noble, time-honoured French cooking Simon Hopkinson was the ideal gastronomic ally. A chapter of his Bibendum “classic” recipes is another good reason to buy the book.
I have loved Bibendum over the years, valuing particularly Saturday lunches and Sunday dinners, the latter a service when few salubrious restaurants stay open. Sunday evenings always attracted an agreeable mix of people, the hallmark of a fine restaurant.
I went back last week on a Tuesday evening to see how the place is doing after what is in restaurant age (as with dogs, you multiply by seven) nearly 147 years. The tradition of changing the loose covers on the chairs according
to season meant we coincided with Dijon mustard yellow, presumably signifying early autumn, but not an alluring hue. The patina of age, which Conran evokes with pleasure, doesn’t flatter cotton drill.
Something that won’t flatter your credit card is the price of dishes, which seem too high in a building where the restaurant owner is also the landlord.
Head chef Matthew Harris, who joined Bibendum as chef de partie when it opened, has, mercifully, continued the Hopkinson tradition of uncluttered cooking, but the cost would seem to have outstripped the concept.
I started with cream of celery soup, the cheapest option at £8.50 plus 12.5 per cent. What can be one of the best and most subtle of soups seemed more like a purée of spinach and was mined with huge croutons. Would Simon have put slices of star fruit on the otherwise delectable Thai crab salad? Maybe, but I doubt it. They added nothing.
Many of the assemblies are served in soup plates with varying appropriateness. In the case of warm summer vegetable salad with ham hock, it needed such a dish and the composition was excellent. But serving butter in what were the iconic ashtrays is just horrible. However long it is since anyone was allowed to smoke, ashy memories linger on.
Main courses of poached salt duck with beetroot and broad bean broth and sauce paloise and roasted grouse were splendid. The sauté of rabbit with borlotti beans, anchovy and oregano looked wonderful but the creature lacked flavour. “I feel as though I am eating with a cold,” said its recipient. Dessert of soufflé glace aux framboises was much loved. The wine list compiled by Matthew Jukes is an (expensive) work of art.
Although prices make the tyres screech I still think, as Michelin would have it, that Bibendum is vaut le détour. The same could be said for the restaurants of the chefs who went forth from there and mesmerised, such as Bruce Poole’s Chez Bruce, Jeremy Lee’s Blueprint Café, Philip Howard’s The Square and Henry Harris’s Racine.
Details are correct at the time of publication - please check with venue before booking.
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