London,

Corrigan's Mayfair

Your rating

Click on a star to rate

Cuisine: British
A meal for two with wine about £120 including cover charge and 12.5 per cent service.

28 Upper Grosvenor Street, W1k 7EH

Nearest Tube: Marble Arch

Fay Maschler's rating
Reader rating
 Add your review

Phone: 020 7499 9943

Open: Open for lunch Mon-Fri noon-3pm, dinner Mon-Sat 6-11pm, Sun 6-10pm (from 7 December).

 

 

• 
• 

No messing with Richard Corrigan

 

Country boy: Richard Corrigan’s upbringing on a farm in Ireland shines through

Look here too

• Rotunda review
• Ito review

The first person I ran into at Richard Corrigan’s new restaurant was Rowley Leigh, chef/proprietor of Le Café Anglais and, to my mind, author of the most alluring menu in London. “I saw Corrigan’s menu and I had to come,” said Rowley. It is indeed a work of art. And artlessness.

Corrigan was raised, one of seven, on a small farm in the middle of bog land in County Meath. He describes it as the last gasp of a rural area that in most places in Ireland had disappeared 20 to 30 years before. Childhood was hard work. Vegetable plots had to be weeded, fruit picked, cows brought in, pigs fed, ducks and chickens secured against the foxes, turf cut and logs split. The rewards were love at the hearth and exemplary food on the table, some of it poached for the pot. It has been a long journey for a boy whose family didn’t get electricity until 1973 to the bright lights of Mayfair, but a rural sensibility and an appreciation of simplicity shines through in the dishes at Corrigan’s.

Late autumn is a grand time for the launch. The game season is in full flow and the potential of wild birds is seen not just in their roasted glory but also as game broth with chopped and seasoned game livers spread on accompanying toasts, as the basis for a terrine and in a salad of various birds with Catalan romesco sauce. A little canny housekeeping is also in evidence.

Crustacea and seafood, the driving force at Corrigan’s Bentley’s, is also given pride of place. The menu kicks off with native oysters, clams and herrings cured in-house but the poetry of the menu lies in dishes where imagination and exuberance have been tempered by maturity, wide reading and a tablespoon of nostalgia. In his most recent book Corrigan writes: “The older I get, the more puritan I become about food, the more I want to leave it alone… What interests me is giving respect to the farmers and producers of good food by not messing around with it too much.”

A judicious amount of messing around from Corrigan and his head chef Chris McGowan — enough to push domestic cooking into the posh restaurant sphere — was apparent in first courses of Cornish crab jelly with Melba toast and ox tongue and cauliflower with Reform sauce. Suspending crab in a shallow dome of jelly the colour of sunrise was a clear, clean and clever conceit. Slicing the tongue and cauliflower wafer-thin and poaching the vegetable for seconds, leaving it crisp enough to provide contrast with the meat, was as bright an idea as resuscitating Reform sauce in which port, gherkins, mushrooms and hard-boiled egg white bolster a classic poivrade.

Next visit I’ll try octopus carpaccio with clementine and almonds, or linguine cooked in red wine with pecorino and bone marrow, or crubeens with beetroot and horseradish. You can see Rowley Leigh’s point can’t you?

Chris McGowan has significant pastry skills as is evidenced by grouse pie with ceps, roe venison in pastry with pickled cabbage, and game suet pudding with mashed swede and carrot. My friend, who chose saddle of hare with roast pumpkin and sprout tops, where a thin layer of pastry made an unannounced appearance, described it as “a miniature rustic beef Wellington, the texture and density of the meat akin to the best fillet steak, the flavour rich but not oppressively gamey”. And in case I hadn’t got the point, he added: “It really was a top treat.”

A different kind of treat was the purity, of steamed sole fillet with ceps served decorously with just the cooking juices. Corrigan talks of the special window of opportunity at the end of the wild duck season when mallards coincide with the first of the Seville oranges. That window is not yet open so the bird came with pieces of sweet orange in the sauce and the bitterness of braised chicory to offset that sweetness.

Proust was inspired by madeleines. According to the menu it was Madelaine who led Corrigan to combining spiced ice cream with macerated figs and little shell-like sponge cakes but she was nevertheless a fine remembrance of things past. Rhubarb and custard would have done better to obey the strictures on simplicity.

The comprehensively annotated wine list is strong on organic and biodynamic producers. Sommelier Andrea Briccarello got into my good books by suggesting a Château Plaisance at £24 rather than the Marcillac I had my eye on at £26 and proving correct about its suitability to the dishes we were eating.

I am thinking of moving in with Martin Brudnizki. I already spend so much of my time in restaurants he has designed — recently Scott’s, St Pancras Grand, The Club at The Ivy, Jamie’s Italian, Côte, Ito, Tierra Brindisa. He has pulled off another appropriate, comfortable and glamorous interior at Corrigan’s with nice little jokes at the expense of the macho tweediness of hunting, shooting and fishing. A long bar provides places for just putting a toe in the water but I guarantee you will want to sit down at a table and spend a long time and probably quite a lot of money.

Another worthwhile investment is Corrigan’s recently published The Clatter of Forks and Spoons (Fourth Estate, £25) with its extraordinarily evocative photographs by Kristin Perers.

Details are correct at the time of publication - please check with venue before booking.

What's on today   What's on tomorrow

Receive our newsletter