La Dame de Pic London
Tower Hill, London
Directly opposite the White Tower and floodlit as though for a televised awards ceremony, the Four Seasons at Tower Hill is one of the capital's stunning locations. A vast marble lobby opens out, and through one of its doors, a dimly lit vestibule ushers visitors into the transformative world of La Dame herself, Anne-Sophie Pic. With operations in Valence and Lausanne to tend, she is certainly fully occupied, but this enterprise (under the aegis of Marc Mantovani) could hardly be in safer hands. The hallmarks of Pic's restlessly innovative cuisine are exotically unfamiliar spices, floral fragrance, gentle textures, and flavours that build in intensity and delivery to cumulative effect, rather than blaring at you from the off and then having nothing further to say. Canapés might incorporate a lemony bao bun and a strawberry bonbon that explodes with fizzy sake, while the butter that comes with the sourdough is sculpted into the form of a rose and scented with rosewater. The menu looks like a bookkeeping exercise, the three columns corresponding to the three lengths of the respective tasting offers, with playing-card symbols against each dish denoting which ones it appears in. Even at the simplest level, Discovery, there is much to admire: Chancre crab in Madras spices with burnt lemon condiment; a serving of pastis-laced turbot with a pancake of red pepper and hyssop, plus a dressing of lavender and curry sabayon; red-rare Hereford beef fillet with its little basket of oxtail confit, and luscious baby aubergine tempura. What characterises these dishes is a confident way of using off-beam flavours and seasonings subtly, where 'subtle' doesn't just mean 'faint': layers of flavour really do build successively as the dish unfolds. A cheese course might see a disc of ripe Saint-Marcellin laid over fig and port chutney, while the famous white dessert, which appears to be a visual homage to a Rachel Whiteread cast, offers a large cube of vanilla meringue encasing proper millefeuille, layered with jasmine jelly, surrounded by four vaporous clouds of Malagasy voatsiperifery pepper, all in purest wash-white. Incidentals are all up to the same high mark, and staff are, without exception, flawless. As are the wine pairings, which set new standards of intuitive ingenuity in what must be a very demanding context.
Dining Information:
Accommodation, Separate bar, Wheelchair access, Credit card required
Four Seasons Hotel London at Ten Trinity Square, Tower Hill EC3N 4AJ
020 3297 3799
