Clarke's, Kensington Church Street

Mr Oil and Mr Vinegar have been to Kensington, or perhaps more accurately Notting Hill, to see if anything has changed at one of London’s most long-established fine restaurants, Clarke’s.

MrO: It is extraordinary how Sally Clarke maintains the standards she does. All around her, supposedly great restaurants have come and gone but she never seems to wobble.
MrV: That’s probably because she’s still quite slim.
MrO: Very droll, I’m sure. I wondered what would happen when she chucked out the no-choice menu a couple of years ago.
MrV: I assumed the quality would drop or the prices go up, or most likely both. It must have been hard on them going from producing four dishes a day to a dozen. They’d had it easy for so many years. Perhaps that’s why she resisted the change, initially.
MrO: I hardly think you could call it ‘easy’ maintaining a reputation as one of London’s best restaurants, no matter how many dishes you offer. The Tatler gave Clarke’s an award a while ago for being the most consistently excellent in London.
MrV: Of course! I should have known you were a Tatler reader. I daresay it helps keep you in touch with your feminine side.
MrO: What did you think of the food?
MrV: Well, I have to concede straight away that the ingredients are still as fresh as ever and of an extremely high quality. The stilton bread was extraordinarily good. The squid and pea risotto with thyme and purple cress was about the freshest thing I’ve ever eaten which didn’t still have earth stuck to it.
MrO: I know. The gnocchi with spinach and Taleggio cheese sauce was also full of lovely fresh flavours. She must have incredible confidence in herself. This is the only restaurant I know where the daily specials are more expensive than the rest of the menu.
MrV: But I have a serious complaint. What is the thing you never do with fresh, high-quality ingredients?
MrO: Muck about with them.
MrV: Exactly. So what the devil is Sally Clarke doing smothering some really first class, grass-fed Angus rib eye with a gravy so sticky and salty that it overwhelmes the flavour of the beef? It tasted like a Knorr cube.
MrO: That was a puzzle. You ended up leaving a fair bit of the beef, didn’t you?
MrV: I did. Which was disappointing. You seemed to relish your roast duck all right.
MrO: Yes, it was delicious and perfectly cooked. The gravy was slightly heavier than I’d like but duck can take that sort of treatment where the best cuts of beef cannot. What do you suppose went wrong?
MrV: I’ll bet she wasn’t there that night. Or she’s getting dementia. Or she just decided to be damnably irritating. You know what women can be like...
MrO: Well she didn’t let me down with the pudding.
MrV: It was just a plate of Eton Mess. Strawberries, cream and meringue.
MrO: It was so much more than that. The addition of spring rhubarb brought out the flavour of the strawberries quite astonishingly and gave it some real tang to counter the sweetness. And the meringues were slightly gooey to make the dish linger. If that was Eton Mess then it’s the finest I’ve had. I’m going to try it at home.
MrV: I have no complaints about the wine. That Leoville Poyferre 1999 was excellent, although it took a while to open up. Just as well the wine waiter decanted it or it wouldn’t have opened up until it was out the other end of me, which would have been rather a waste of £130. We were very restrained only having one bottle, weren’t we?
MrO: You appear to have forgotten that you were sucking it down across the road in the Kensington Wine Rooms for an hour before we went into Clarke’s.

Mr Oil and Mr Vinegar had two first courses, two main courses one pudding and a bottle of fine wine at a total cost of about £220.

Clarke’s
122 & 124 Kensington Church Street,
London W8 4BH
+44 (0) 207 221 9225
www.sallyclarke.com
restaurant@sallyclarke.com

To contact Mr Oil and Mr Vinegar please email us at mroilandmrvinegar@gmail.com