Marianne

Marianne Restaurant | Fine Dining Notting Hill, West London

http://www.mariannerestaurant.com

Marianne Restaurant | Fine Dining Notting Hill, West London

Marianne - London Restaurant Reviews | Hardens

Something else that we found unusual was a practice that more restaurants should think about following - if you add the amuse-bouche and the pre-dessert to the menu dishes, the advertised 6-course menu could actually be claimed to be 8 courses, which would actually make the price setting more realistic.

A trio of canapés, truffle popcorn, creamy vegetable soup and chickpea paneer preceded a sort of pre-amuse-bouche in the form of what was announced to us as white fish brandade, a dish which would normally be cod but my wife thought that it might be something else.

The amuse-bouche proper was a combination of sticky candied pecans and parsnip foam with slightly tart apple and provided a perfect demonstration of the balance of flavour and texture that chef is very keen on and which marked out most of the remaining dishes; it was again demonstrated admirably by a dish of Cerney Ash cheese, tomato gelée, sharpish turnip, a touch of lemon sorrel and lovely French smoked eel.

Lobster is always a favourite with us, and the olive oil poached native lobster, served cool, with carrot discs and purée went down very well, but the dish of the evening was the tender, tasty Gloucestershire muntjac perched on perfect cavolo nero along with pear purée and sichuan spice.

Areas where things could have been better - even the less expensive wine flight did not represent good value, there was a minimum of interaction with the waiting staff (although this was far from the case when we met the chefs in the kitchen), and the lack of buzz in such an intimate space was surprising.

Restaurant review: Marianne Lumb's bijou new venture is small but ...

Marianne, as the statuesque chef's new Notting Hill venture is called, is tiny – a nano-restaurant consisting of just 14 covers.

Before reaching the finals of 2009's MasterChef: The Professionals, Lumb worked for many years as a private chef – in the "Elton doesn't do dairy" sense – and is comfortable working at that scale.

The dishes on Lumb's short menu owe nothing to prevailing food trends, and everything to quiet good taste and premium ingredients.

And to call a dish 'Mr Pickwick's boiled dinner' when it is a limpid broth holding nuggets of braised chicken and beef fillet, a pot-au-feu in all but name, is a crime to enrage at least one of the MasterChef judges.

Once our neighbours had left (ie, were driven out), the intimate, beautiful little room came into its own, a convivial cocoon of talk and food and fun.

Marianne - restaurant review | London Evening Standard

It also means that every dish comes straight from the chef’s hand, for Marianne Lumb herself, tucked away in a compact kitchen at the back of the room, does all the cooking, with just one assistant.

Mille-feuille of cèpes with aged Parmesan was delicious — fried slices of fresh mushroom with flakes of cheese and a couple of little domes of crisp pastry, and a few scattered leaves of tangy red sorrel, a perfect autumnal arrangement.

A velouté of autumn squash with Taleggio was again a really seasonal taste, genuinely velvety, tasting quite purely of the squash and the melted cheese (with little pieces of the skin providing texture) — perhaps a little bland and oversweet, though?

The chips, quite browned, served in a little pot, weren’t quite crisped — perhaps very hot frying doesn’t suit such a small kitchen so near the dining room?

Three little slices of cheese were faultless, presented with sweet black muscat grapes, neatly halved — again, not a big serving, but then this was a lavish meal that left us feeling well afterwards and not overwhelmed as so many big-ticket places do, perhaps a lesson learned by Lumb from cooking consistently for wealthy private clients.

Marianne, London W2, restaurant review - Telegraph

E had rabbit and chervil ravioli with chervil purée; I had Orkney scallops with pata negra, pumpkin and apple.

However, with E's dish of Staffordshire red deer with celeriac, things became a little more unexpected.

When someone goes to the trouble of baking a vacherin (and in E's case, a reblochon), devising exquisitely thin, complicated crackers (mine was rye, technically a tuile), changing the way you look at these seminal, ubiquitous cheeses just by monkeying with the textures and introducing a trace of wine, then you have to say, fair enough: truly, there is passion in this kitchen, not just goody-two-shoes perfectionism and urbane professionalism.

OK, that's a buzzword of the past half decade, as adult and sophisticated as chocolate gets, but the rich, pared-down density of the pavé itself reminded me of those recipe books you'd see at your mum's house, never prouder than a dessert that contained only chocolate and cream and could drop a depth charge in your arteries.

The menu (£40 for three courses) stars brassicas from the raised beds and home-cured bacon from the estate's organically reared pigs – great with seared scallops This friendly bistro is a joy to discover, tucked down a side-street in an old brick stableyard.

Marianne | Restaurants in Westbourne Grove, London

So when Marianne Lumb failed to take the crown of the 2009 series of ‘MasterChef: The Professionals’, it didn’t matter – her genial personality and beautiful cooking had already imprinted itself on viewers’ minds.

As for the kitchen, Lumb and a single sous chef can be spied through a long, horizontal slot that lets you watch their nimble hands, but rarely their faces.

Despite having her name above the door, on our visit Marianne resisted the urge to come out and gladhand the room into declaring her cooking wonderful.

Wonderful.