26 The Times Magazineo be honest, it wasn’t quite what
I expected from my first three-
Michelin-starred dinner of the
year. From the lag between
courses it was clear there were
problems in the kitchen, and the
service was, frankly, all over the
place: cutlery dropped on the floor
and simply brushed on a sleeve,
plates left uncleared... At one
stage, I could swear our waitress abandoned
us to go and cuddle a small dog.
That’s always the danger with eating at
home. You just can’t get the staff. But you
won’t hear me complaining about the food,
because when it arrived it was nothing short
of perfection. Scallops the size of your hand
were baked in the shell with black truffle and
cauliflower puree; pearlescent fillets of sea
bass sat in a perfumed bath of cockles, clams
and coastal herbs; a duck breast was garnished
with grapes so thinly sliced, it was as if by a
surgeon’s hand.
On the Monday, Core restaurant in Notting
Hill had been awarded its third star. Normally,
that would mean the restaurant instantly
being booked up for months on end. Yet
here I was, four days later, eating some of the
dishes that show why Clare Smyth is a name
to be mentioned alongside the world’s greatest
chefs. What’s more, the following night I’d
be dining courtesy of another newly anointed
three-star chef, Hélène Darroze, who has just
claimed top honours for her restaurant at
the Connaught hotel. Overexcited? Goodness,
I almost resented myself for my good fortune.
The two meals are the ultimate
representations of the year’s biggest restaurant
development, the arrival of the “finish-at-
home meal” kit. Obviously, it is one born of
the most hideous of circumstances and not
something that either Smyth or Darroze
would have embraced willingly, yet with
restaurants closed, their “at home” offerings,
which were both up and running before
Michelin came knocking, has put three-star
cooking in front of a new audience.
Well, a comparatively new audience.
I wouldn’t go so far as to suggest these
five-course kits are a great equalizer. At
£175 a head, Core at Home is pretty much
what it would cost in the restaurant, although
obviously you won’t need to add wine mark-
ups or service charge to that. (I got away
simply with offering to double my daughter’s
pocket money. Ha! That’s still not even
minimum wage.) Darroze’s À La Maison is
£195 for two. You also need to live in London
for delivery (or risk a lockdown-busting trip
to pick it up in person).
So can you really replicate three-star
dining at home? I’m sure both chefs will
tell you not, but I found it near-miraculous
how well the dishes travelled. They werecertainly the best meals that have ever graced
my kitchen table.
Darroze’s menu was perhaps slightly simpler- if you can call a menu that comprised foie
gras terrine with forced rhubarb, scallops
with truffle and hazelnut, tandoori spiced veal,
Stichelton cheese with dehydrated grapes, and
chocolate, chicory and coriander mousse simple.
Only the scallop and veal needed cooking
and it included the most striking course (an
additional £85), in a tin of caviar that concealed
a tian of crab, pink grapefruit and radishes
beneath the glistening pearls of sturgeon roe.
The Core menu was more hands-on, calling
for more accurate cooking – the clue was in
the tweezers and digital probe thermometer
included in the bag. There were spring onion
flowers to place on top of the gougères (one of
three canapés), fish to be cooked to 60C, drops
of lovage oil to drip into the cockle broth. The
duck course required three separate timers
and two temperature readings, and then the
honey syrup, the grapes and more herbs to
delicately place.
It’s a leap of faith for chefs of such calibre,
who like to control every process in their
kitchen, to risk us cackhanded amateurs
mucking up their creations. “At the beginning
of lockdown I said it was too risky because
it could never match the expectation of fine
dining,” says Darroze. “But in the second
lockdown we thought again. I knew the foie
gras dish would work because the jelly on top
will stop the oxidisation. And cooking the
scallop in the shell is easy to control.”
In hindsight, I wish I hadn’t followed
Smyth’s first instruction, to pour myself a
large glass of wine, quite so avidly. Or indeed
attempted to cook supper for my two children
at the same time. It all got a bit confusing at
times. But for a special occasion? Just the two
of you spending a few hours together cooking
and chatting? I can think of few better ways of
spending the evening.
Which is just as well, because it doesn’t
sound like we are going to be eating in
restaurants any time soon. Meanwhile, the
finish-at-home options are increasing with
every week. Missing your weekly visit to
Petersham Nurseries Café in Richmond,
winner last month of Michelin’s new green
star for sustainability? Have them deliver a
pumpkin, chard and goat’s cheese pithivier to
your door. Can’t survive the weekend without
Phil Howard’s daube of beef with glazed winter
root vegetables? His team at Elystan Street
will drop it off for you, along with a selection
of cheeses and their famous date and walnut
bread. “Finish at home” is the new going out.
Various companies have sprung up,
hoping to do for meal kits what Deliveroo
has done for the takeaway. Dishpatch.co.uk,
for example, has a roster of a few dozen
restaurants, including Yotam Ottolenghi’s
Rovi, Fergus Henderson’s St John and Angela
Hartnett’s Café Murano, and can send three-
course meal kits for two nationwide for
around £60. Bignight.app does something
similar, mainly for Londoners, and has Jeremy
Lee’s Quo Vadis on its books.
The question is how many of the smarter
restaurants will continue with their online
business once they can re-open. It’s unlikely
the three-star ones will do so. “It’s a lot of
work,” says Darroze, “and it takes up a lot of
space packing up the boxes. We can’t possibly
manage the restaurant and the takeaway at
the same time.”
That’s something fine-dining delivery
specialist Finish & Feast seems to have
anticipated, in that it uses its own in-house
chefs to make meal kits based on menus and
recipes provided by familiar names. I can vouch
for Tom Aiken’s menu of ricotta with pickled
mushrooms, braised short rib and chocolate
mousse (£98 for two), which didn’t suffer for
not having been made by the man himself.T
Instead of service charge I get
away with offering to double
my daughter’s pocket money
Clare Smyth
preparing a dish
at Core in 2019ROMAS FOORD, GETTY IMAGES