London's celebrity chefs have an uneasy relationship with London hotels. They open up a new hotel restaurant with a fanfare loud enough to be heard from one side of Hyde Park to another. Tables are impossible to get unless you say your name is Lady Gaga and you'd like a table for you and the Queen. Sometimes these joints last. Often they don't. Sometimes the said celeb chef stays involved. Often they don't.
So I'd like to mark a small act of longevity in the hotel restaurant world. This month Theo Randall celebrates his fifth anniversary in charge of his eponymous restaurant at the InterContinental on Park Lane.
Who? you might ask, followed by why? — why are you bothering to mark such an insignificant event when there are so many exciting/groundbreaking/celeb-tastic events happening on the capital's culinary scene?
The 'who' first. Theo Randall has a CV few British chefs can match. After an upbringing in which trips with his food-obsessed parents to Italy in a Citroen DS were a major feature, he started work with Max Magarian of Chez Max, one of the founding fathers of the British food revolution of the 1980s. He then joined a start-up in Hammersmith that went one to become the star restaurant of the 1990s: the River Café.
While his fellow River Café chef Jamie Oliver was starting to make TV programmes, Theo took himself off to California where he worked in the holy of holies of the new Mediterranean cooking: Alice Waters's Chez Panisse.
He became head chef at The River Café on his return. Eventually, in 2006, he decided to do his own thing and the newly refurbished InterConti pounced.
Theo Randall at the InterContinental has many of the drawbacks of the hotel restaurant. You don't know it's there unless you know it's there, if you see what I mean. It's uncomfortably distant from the fashionable centres of Knightsbridge and Mayfair. The interior is swish and Noughties-loungey — but maybe a little anonymous.
The good news — and it is very good news in my book — is that you can always get a table. It may be even a little too quiet, especially at lunchtime. But take a friend here who cares about their food, not which reality TV star might be at the next table.
I took such a friend for a hurriedly arranged lunch the other day. You know as soon as the olive oil oozes off your bruschetta onto your lips that this is no ordinary assembly of Italian ingredients. He may not travel in a classic Citroen any longer, but Theo spends a lots of time with his Italian suppliers getting the very best stuff. He once spent 10 minutes telling me about where he gets his spinach from; and I can safely say it's the most interesting 10 minutes I've ever spent talking about spinach.
I had anguilla affumicata — smoked eel with red and golden beetroots, rocket and fresh horseradish to start. On a grey London day, it did me more good than a bucketful of melatonin. To follow we kept it simple with pasta. Not that tagliatelle con gamberetti e carciofi (fresh pasta with prawns, artichokes, chilli, parsley and butter) was simple, exactly. But it tasted, as all Theo's dishes taste, right — right in the sense you admired the parts, then you admired how the whole came together.
If you want to see what the man can really do, try his special 'Best of...' fifth anniversary tasting menu. (His Burrida di pesce — fish stew of Dorset blue lobster, red mullet, sea bass, vongole, tomato, saffron potatoes and parsley — is probably the Stairway to Heaven from the repertoire.)
But principally I'd go there to celebrate a great London hotel restaurant that has survived fame, fashion, PR blitzes and seen off a whole succession of more glam places that perhaps invested too much capital in those things.
Visit www.theorandall.com
