A
Francophile's Putney dream
Reviewed by Fay Maschler (29 January 2002)
L'Auberge
22 Upper Richmond Road, East Putney, SW15
Cuisine: French
This review was published in January 2002.
The Phoenix restaurant, in the same ownership as Sonny's and Parade, is, with justification, wearing the Bib Gourmand for Putney. Another possible contender for the future is L'AUBERGE, which opened too recently to qualify for this year's guide.
L'Auberge is the little French bistro of our fantasies, or maybe our sitcoms. A pale and skinny young French chef alone in the kitchen without even a kitchen porter (he suddenly upped and left just before Christmas), his female partner struggling to work the floor alone, a fairly long à la carte to administer, plus a £15 three-course prix-fixe menu and, because the chef's training was as a patissier, seven desserts to produce including a tarte Tatin of the day.
Service was slow, but not because Pascal Ardilly could not cope but due to one of the customers thinking that long, loud, penetrating conversations with the manageress were just the right moments to practise the French she was learning. The future tense of "to go", which she felt she was in the process of mastering, was, unfortunately for the rest of us, still long to arrive. However, after we managed to give our order, first courses of grilled, honeyed goat's cheese salad, individual feuilletès of snails in a garlic cream, curry-flavoured cassolette of seafood and a terrine of pheasant all arrived quite promptly.
With the exception of the terrine, which was short on pheasant, long on lentils, they were fine, safe rather than startling, but, as such, in keeping with tradition. Rib-eye steak from the set menu was cooked as rare as requested and was a nice, flavoursome loosely knit piece of meat. Supreme of guinea fowl was more interesting than guinea fowl usually manages to be. Fillet of Scotch beef with a wild-mushroom sauce was also appreciated. He who had chosen the pheasant terrine then drew the short straw with braised venison which was dry-textured.
The typically French nod towards vegetables was in the
shape of batons of carrot and courgette.