There was a time, not all that long ago, when a swanky new restaurant would open in London every day of the week. For the past year or two, this process has been reversed: every day a swanky new restaurant closes down or changes hands, or switches from Modern Italian to Tex-Mex to Indonesian, and then, after a further 10 days, to Sushi.
In 1994, whenever a brand new restaurant is opened, we restaurant critics tend to react like roving Bedouin spying a distant jug of iced water, all rushing to slurp and guzzle there within the first week. Such a stampede occurred when Stephen Bull opened his Fulham Road Restaurant a few months ago, on a site previously occupied by a plush French restaurant whose name I now forget. A roomful of restaurant critics is, I regret to say, not a pretty sight, calling to mind Mr Spike Milligan's memorable children's verse:
Sixty hairy savages
Sitting down to lunch:
Gobble Gobble Glup Glup
Munch Munch Munch
Anyway, at the end of all this chomping the Fulham Road Restaurant scored very high points with most critics, even gaining the ultimate accolade of being disliked by my unfortunate sidekick, Mr Winner. Any restaurant that can so publicly guarantee the future absence of Mr Winner is bound to be a huge success with the general public, and, sure enough, on the evening I visited the Fulham Road Restaurant it was completely packed out.
In his excellent Beefeater 2-Day Guide To London, Stephen Bayley neatly describes Stephen Bull's other two restaurants as being very good without being especially likeable. I think this is also true of the Fulham Road Restaurant. The food is, by and large, extremely good, the service highly professional, the clientele colourful and varied, yet there is something a little steely about its decor and general ambience, almost as though a very hip and stylish computer were in command.
The design is somewhat frosty and just-so, the sort of thing that looks marvellous in a photograph but still seems like a photograph even when you are sitting in it. The walls feature small squares of various shades of cream, which is all very tricksy and designer-ish, but which suggests a tremendously upmarket advertising office rather than a bustling restaurant. The pictures, too, have an air of business rather than pleasure, all solemn, grainy black-and-white photographs of architectural features like doorbells, statues and railings. This motif continues on the cover of the menu, which has the letters of F-U-L-H-A-M R-O-A-D all spelt out in separate photographs, giving the unintended and unnerving impression of a ransom note.
The menu itself is a model of enticement: everything comes in unusual combinations, all of which sound interesting without being babyish. The starters, for instance, included a risotto of walnuts, celery and gorgonzola and a broad bean mousse with serrano ham and gazpacho cream. There is also plenty for those, like me, with a penchant for offal and innards: pig's head faggots and black pudding all as one dish, for instance.
I started with tartare of veal, lemon and garlic, which I had never had before. It was uncannily delicious. My wife, who is convinced that mad cow disease transfers daily to humans, told me that I must be mad to eat what is, after all, raw cow. "But how do we know that there aren't just as many mad broad beans in our society?" I countered skilfully as she tucked into her broad bean mousse. "At least with cows, you know when they have gone mad, but broad beans are more secretive, and even the maddest broad bean could act perfectly normal for years with nobody being any the wiser."
When our tiff had subsided, my wife reported that her broad bean mousse, though intriguing, had been too salty. This charge of saltiness was to recur throughout our meal; it is hard to know whether this is restaurant policy or simply a lone madman terrorising the kitchen with his tin of Saxa: either way, I think the flow of salt should be stemmed.
The first of our guests had a crab, cardamom and orange salad ("the first two mouthfuls transported me to Mexican beaches but then I came up against the salt: it's really far too salty") and the second had hot foie gras with roast pears, which he described as not hot, and too small.
Around this point in our meal, a curious thing happened. Over the top of the 5ft-high curtain that hangs across the main window to the street appeared the leering face of a man. He stood absolutely still, staring through the window at the diners. After five minutes of this, the conversation in the restaurant began to falter, as everyone became distracted by his presence. Then "Oh my God," said one of our guests, staring at the silhouette of his body through the curtain, "he's got a sharp object in his hand." At that moment, I became convinced that we were all about to go down in history as the victims of the type of restaurant massacre that now seems so popular in America. Luckily, a few seconds later, the man raised both hands above the curtain: inexplicably, in one hand he held a five-pence piece, in the other a video of Abigail's Party. After another five minutes, all conversation had dribbled to an end, and the woman maitre d' went out on to the street to confront him: he was, he claimed, a Spanish interior design student, on the lookout for ideas.
Relieved that we were still alive, we tucked into main courses of roast scallops with garlic and creamed noodles ("Pasta dry, veg delicious, scallops far too salty"), cheddar souffle with pousse and rocket ("delicious but too salty"), breast of chicken with fondant potato and little bits of truffle stuck underneath the skin ("rather dry, and the potato was just roast potato cut into lumps"), and my own outstandingly tasty John Dory on buttered cabbage with morels, perversely served with its skin uppermost. Our puddings large and elaborate generally went down well, though one of the party complained that "nothing is to be gained from turning a banana into a mousse".
A mixed reception, then, for the Fulham Road Restaurant, though many of my foodie friends continue to rave about it. I would recommend it as a Winner-free environment to anyone with a sense of adventure and a pocketful of money (main courses are around £15, starters £7.50), but those in pursuit of the cosy or in flight from the salty might be better off elsewhere.
Fulham Road Restaurant, 257-259 Fulham Road, London SW3 (071-351 7823). Open seven days a week, lunch 12.15pm-2.30pm; dinner 7pm-11pm (Sun, 7pm-10pm)
