A notable recent trend in London, particularly among high end restaurants, has been South Asian chefs who have trained at celebrated Michelin star restaurants across Europe rediscovering their heritage and combining South Asian ingredients, dishes and spicing with the exactness and precision of (often) French cooking and saucing. I’m thinking of the truly exceptional Avi Shashidhara at Pahli Hill Bandra Bhai in Fitzrovia, formerly of the River Café, or the wonderful Shilpa Dandekar at Pravaas whose journey has taken her from the Taj group to Quilon to Gordon Ramsay.
To this list we must now add Larry Jayasekara, who was head chef at Petrus and worked at some serious kitchens in his career, such as Michel Bras and Le Manoir au Quat’ Saison, as well as with Marcus Wareing. He comes from Sri Lanka but let’s face it, he’s worked at a wish list of some of the best restaurants in the country and you don’t survive, let alone thrive, in those environments without being able to produce some seriously precise and wonderful food. And now he has his own, very high end, place in Mayfair, The Cocochine.
The Cocochine is on Bruton Place, the adjunct of Berkeley Square that for ever has meant going to The Guinea Grill for supper. So a bold place to site oneself, but that’s ok. That is ambition. It’s a bit like tournament football. You have to play Brazil at some point – get over it and get on with it.
And they have. The four-storey townhouse that La Cocochine occupies is the epitome of high end Mayfair luxury, and with some thought behind it. Take the private dining room on the second floor. They thought about it. And included not just the obligatory dining table but sofas, and spaces for people to mingle. So that the evening can be an entire one rather than the stilted lottery of with whom you are seated. I like that a lot.
One of the best private dining rooms I have come across
But skipping past the chef’s counter on the first floor (maybe next time) we were seated at a corner table on the ground floor main dining room. Albeit “main” sends the wrong message. This room has the luxury of space – I have rarely seen so few covers in a room of this size, and that is before considering the area set aside for bathrooms, champagne baths etc. The privilege from this is that you can sit at your table and have a normal conversation, in a normal voice and neither intrude on any other conversation or (most importantly) be intruded upon by the conversations of others. Bliss. You take a friend out for dinner to talk to them not a bunch of investment bankers at the next table.
We had the set menu for supper, which is at £145, priced at the high end, but here turned out to be more than justified. I have spent sums in that region for pretty ordinary food – think pretty much every steak restaurant in Mayfair. Yet the food here is far from ordinary.
We started with a amuse bouches of tomato and burrata tarts alongside truffle doughnuts with comte cheese. A marvel that was a cheese and onion cracker topped with golden oscietra caviar. It’s hard to explain how perfect this was, but I will try. It starts with mashed potatoes spread very thin in trays and dehydrated, then cut into strips and deep-fried. To these are added cream cheese was seasoned with home-made onion powder and the whole thing is topped with caviar. Bonkersly delicate and almost annoyingly delicious. I could spend a year trying to make these and would not even come close.
These were accompanied by a sourdough that with a 27 year old starter was senior to several of the (obviously) beautiful people that filled the room. Then an onion brioche, together with Normandy butter with sea salt and whipped brown butter with crème fraiche and black truffle. Happy, happy days.
Then came the revelation. I had lobster wrapped in a banana leaf and then grilled at the table, on a wonderful makeshift barbecue that brought images of being an island castaway to mind, while at the same time being glazed with ginger and lobster sauce and woken up with fresh lime zest. The lobster was then plated with a tomato, lobster and fresh tamarind sauce. Really very, very good indeed, and it pulled off the trick of being both precise and perfect, yet every mouthful brought images of sunset on a windy Sri Lankan beach to mind.
But to be clear, that was not the revelation. The revelation was my wife’s dish of Rowler Farm garden salad with wild garlic pesto. Twenty or more ingredients, assembled with carefree precision that melted through the palate. We spent twenty minutes trying to work out what they all were before the Maitre’d explained that the constituent parts of the dish varied from day to day depending on what the chefs thought was perfect to pick that day from Rowler Farm. Very occasionally it is dishes like this that knock you sideways: no scallops or langoustines or iberico pork. Just leaves and flavour and the confidence to put them all together. I could eat this every day of my life.
It also brings me onto the subject of Rowler Farm, which is under common ownership as the restaurant. I know the place as it is almost next door to my wife’s family farm at the eastern edge of the Cotswolds, and has become a serious place, with a serious commitment to the very best of produce from berries to beef. I know this kind of thing sounds pretentious and maybe improbable, but again just taste some of the produce here and you will see what I mean and why it matters.
Main courses were equally delightful (don’t you sometimes find them a let down after the appetisers?). I had wild Scottish turbot with morels, white asparagus, cloudberries and pandan leaf sauce. Grief I loved the pandan leaf sauce: shallots, bay leaves, thyme, garlic and fennel cooked in butter, with white wine and fish stock, then infused and combined with coconut milk and thinly sliced pandan leaves. Rich and complex, I’m still licking my lips at the echoes of this flavour days afterwards.
Emily had 40-day dry-aged Rowler farm sirloin of beef with garden rocket puree, coconut sambal, miso hollandaise and a green peppercorn sauce. The coconut sambal was inspired, and the sirloin quite exceptional.
Both dishes were precise, measured and at once both high end French in execution and technique, and utterly Sri Lankan in flavour. Combine that with produce that is simply the best you can get and, well, you’ve got a very, very decent supper in front of you.
For pudding, Emily had a wonderfully acidic and tart yuzu, lime and lemon mousse, with a raspberry, lime and mint jelly, fresh raspberries and a strawberry and java pepper sorbet. I had what can only be described as a Sri Lankan Run Bhaba: a savarin of exotic fruits including Sri Lankan arrack, pineapple diplomat, wild green cardamom from Sri Lanka and Alphonso mango sorbet. Soaked in citrus and Premium VSOA arrack syrup this was, to put it simply, a proper pudding with which to finish a proper meal.
Serious food this is, from a serious chef, and in a beautiful space with absolutely top-drawer and utterly charming staff. It’s what high end Mayfair dining should be: a great space in which you are served careful, precise, delicious food made from great and well-chosen ingredients. Yet also different and interesting. The price of admission gets you dishes and flavours unavailable anywhere else. So I think you have to try it, and of the tasting or a la carte prices make you pause, why not start with the lunch menu. It is £55 for three courses and generous extras. That’s insanely cheap for food of this quality. You could spend that at Cote for goodness sake and the food there is complete rubbish! So, come to The Cocochine for lunch and once you have tried it I bet you will be back for dinner.
The Cocochine 27 Bruton Place, London W1J 6NQ – 020 3835 3957
Opening hours: Monday 18.00—21.45 ; Tuesday to Saturday 12.00—14.30 and 18.00—21.45; Sunday – Closed
Related post: Restaurant review: Pravaas