On the table next to us at the glamorous World Boutique Hotel Awards, Francisco Seresina, owner of the sublime Villa Sostaga on Lake Garda, shared his insider knowledge, “Good Italian sparkling wine is from Franciacorta and also Trento.” Yes, “The point is these sparkling wines are made from the Champagne method. They take from 24 months to 10 years to mature whereas Prosecco is very quick. The best ways of making sparkling wine are the Champagne method by French inventors or the Martinotti method by Italian inventors.”
When pushed, Signor Seresina confided, “My favourite wine depends on the period of the year. There’s a perfect wine for many different moments. Italy has the largest variety of indigenous wines in the world. There’s life after Chardonnay and Merlot! Italy is geographically a very long country with mountains and seas which allow for many different wines in varying soil expositions.” Franciacorta is a small wine producing area in Lombardy, northern Italy.
Jan Konetzki steps in: “The general perception of rosé is not very serious. A copperish colour isn’t good. But the more vibrant colour rosé is, the more it merits attention. Rosé Rare Millésime Champagne 2008 is the best.” He adds, “And some of the finest French wines are from Northern Rhône.” Jan should know. Based in London, he’s one of the world’s leading sommeliers, on speed dial to triple Michelin star Chefs Clare Smyth and Anne-Sophie Pic. We’re chatting to him in the latter’s eponymous restaurant in our favourite Four Seasons Tower Hill.
Later, Maud Rabin, Global Director of Rare Champagne, the world’s most expensive and exclusive bubbly, will smile over drinks with us in the eternally divine Hôtel Meurice, “C’est la vie! That’s what we say in Paris. We always mean it in a positive way. Rosé Rare Millésime Champagne 2008 is a thrilling vintage. June and July of that year were very cool before favourable weather returned in August. Warm dry days and cool nights continued through to the mid September harvest, resulting in Champagne with great finesse and ageing potential.” Now is a good time for the lengthily refined Franicacorta Ca’del Bosco from the Vintage Collection Satèn 2015 en plage. Isn’t it always?
There’s nothing wrong with a pint of cider and scampi fries in your local. But we’d prefer the pescatarian tasting menu with Berry Brothers and Rudd of St James’s wine thank you. Fordwich, eight kilometres north of Pett Bottom in Kent, is apparently England’s smallest town. Fordwich Arms is a gorgeous 1930s mock Tudor brick without half timber building. It looks like one of Walter George Tarrant’s houses on St George’s Hill Estate, Weybridge, Surrey. A curvilinear gable over the entrance is a welcome whimsical touch. The pub is opposite the 1540s real Tudor brick with half timber Fordwich Town Hall, apparently England’s smallest and oldest town hall in use. The Norman Church of St Mary behind the pub walled garden complements this tranquil grouping.
We’re lunching in the dining room accessed through the main bar. Cast iron framed windows are open to the walled garden on one side and the riverside terrace on the other. In good ol’ Tudorbethan style, the room is linen fold panelled with a stone fireplace. Fashionable visible bulb lights are the only wall decoration. The dining room is simply furnished: Ercol chairs and matching table tops balanced on cast iron legs on a timber floor. No boozer clut here: not a Toby jug or faded photograph of the high street in sight.
The serving staff possess encyclopaedic knowledge of each course and micro course. It’s the catering version of old masters dealing – they’re heavy on provenance. Just as well the pub backs onto the Great Stour River and the north and east coasts of Kent are five kilometres and 17 kilometres respectively away as all the savoury courses are a hymn to seafood. Getting even more local, their bread and butter is churned on site. A kitchen favourite is soda bread (very Northern Irish!) but we’re served rosemary focaccia with garlic cloves as well as wheaten bread made from the Chef’s mother’s recipe. Mrs Smith senior is from County Wexford.
Top London chefs love their signature dishes (think County Antrim born Clare Smyth and her potato) and Daniel is no exception. While he manages to sneak in a perfectly formed potato mound side dish, it’s the Snickers bar pudding that’s his pièce de résistance. Delicately deconstructed then rigorously reconstructed as a sponge log with its skin of hard chocolate removed and ingredients (peanuts and caramel) placed on top, it’s gastronomy’s answer to the Centre Pompidou in Paris. Gold leaf is a nice reference to chocolate box wrapping.
The primacy effect (start of a meal) and regency effect (end of a meal) tend to stick in our minds. Not so, this lunch. Every morsel is memorable. We’ve eulogised for seven paragraphs now on the glories of Fordwich Arms; the Michelin Guide (the pub gobbled up a star almost instantly) is more succinct: “High quality cooking, worth a stop!” It’s a long stop for us: we reluctantly depart at 4.30pm as our car pulls up outside. A golden retriever keeps watch at the entrance. There mightn’t be a beer stained carpet but Fordwich Arms has kept one pub tradition going: it’s dog friendly.
Crowned the world’s best female chef, even before she rustled up the wedding supper for Prince Harry and Baroness Kilkeel, it was only a matter of time until Northern Ireland born Clare Smyth MBE would put her own name above the door. “For about 15 years of my life I’ve spent working in three Michelin star restaurants,” Clare recalls. “The last 10 years I spent heading up Gordon Ramsay’s flagship restaurant – I was a partner with him. It was a very traditional style of cooking with beautiful ingredients. I just had a burning desire to do something new, a new challenge for me, and it became Core. Core meaning my heart, the seed of something new. It was a very special moment for me.” Previous experience included working for Alain Ducasse, Heston Blumenthal and the Roux Brothers.
Core by Clare Smyth is in the heart of Notting Hill. Kensington Park Road bisects this stunning stablished stuccoed world of terraces and crescents and circuses. “People offer you glass boxes in the City but I wanted something with character,” she says, “I’ve always had a passion for neighbourhood restaurants.” Her space occupies the ground floor of a block of three terraced houses. “We found a building that was built in 1861,” she explains. “It had lots of Victorian character but it was a shell; it was a mess. We had to do so much work to the building; it was a disaster, but a great journey! Inside, it had lots of beautiful features but as we started to pull it apart, the foundations crumbled, the drains fell in. It got very very delayed. This was my first project. It was a big project to take on. I started this from writing the business plan myself all the way through to going to the bank – concept, everything.”
As far as neighbourhoods go you don’t get much better than this. Next door to Core is St Peter’s Notting Hill. Like much of this swanky area’s architecture, the Grade II* Anglican church (designed by Thomas Allom) dates from the mid 19th century. It’s still an active contributor to the community. Vicar Pat Allerton says, “Whether you’re a lifelong Christian or just asking questions, you’re really welcome. We’re a church family doing our best to follow Jesus Christ, love one another and offer hope to our local community.” Jonathan Aitken, MP turned Prison Chaplain, recently preached at St Peter’s.
A more recent architectural addition to Notting Hill – not that you’d guess it at a glance – is architect Demetri Porphyrios’s residential building behind Core. Chepstow Villas, as you’d imagine, are chunky detached houses and Demetri’s infill looks like its neighbours, both in scale and style. Number 48 is stuccoed with two chunky bays rising through three lofty storeys to prop up an open pediment. But it was only completed in 1989 and is actually a block of purpose built apartments. Then of course there’s Portobello Market… so little time, so many distractions… but we’ve swashbucklingly swept into W11 for the Portobello mushrooms.
Booking three months ago, the last available table was for noon. Maybe that’s what happens when a restaurant’s so current it swoops up two Michelin stars a year after opening. And now she’s the star of a Netflix series, Clare Smyth has swiftly migrated from a name to those-in-the-know to the household variety. She’s upbeat about her industry: “The culinary scene’s phenomenal. Right across the UK we have brilliant world leading restaurants and we have a generation of chefs that have really made it their own.”
Clare has certainly made it her own. “I’ve worked very hard, it’s not just happened overnight. I don’t pinch myself and think ‘I’m lucky’. I think ‘I left home at 16 to become a chef and I worked for it’.” Indeed. “You want to be successful, you want your business to be successful, so you’ve always got to make sure you stay ahead of the game. I try to be better every day.” As to be expected at three figure prices per head, there’s a high sommelier to consumer ratio and even higher waiter to waited on quota. It’s a 54 cover dining room. We’re at Table Five: there is no Siberia. The beautiful people are here and there are some quite attractive couples at the other tables.
Upon arrival, Clare herself – tall, blonde, elegant – stands smiling waving at us from behind the kitchen window. After lunch we will chat to her in the kitchen. Like everything about Core, the menu is beautifully presented with great contents and a personal touch; it’s signed by Clare and her Chefs. The plates are decorated with her fingerprint, reflecting the Marc Quinn giant fingerprint pictures hanging on the walls. Naturally lit by two arched windows, the dining room is comfortably luxurious and luxuriously comfortable.
And so to the menu. “The beginning: lobster and black truffle thermidor gougères. Pepper and olive tart. Veggie Core Fried Chicken and caviar. Core Caesar Salad.” The tart shell is made of crab stock. “Colchester crab: black truffle, celery and red apple. Potato and roe: dulse beurre blanc, herring and trout roe. Seabass: oysters, cucumber and caviar. Celeriac: roasted over wood with black truffle and hazelnut. The other carrot. Snow ball: chestnut, vanilla, pine, eggnog.” The seabass is line caught from Cornwall. The celeriac is soft baked for four hours. The other carrot is posh carrot cake in the shape of a carrot. “The end: white truffle and hazelnut choux. Champagne jelly.” Shoot the moon, the food is fabulous, utterly knockout! It surpasses our wildest expectations and our expectations are pretty wild. Culinary art beautifully sculpted.
Clare hales from a farm near Bushmills, County Antrim. The north coast has two native delicacies: yellowman and dulse. The former is a chewy toffee textured honeycomb. The latter is a purply edible seaweed. Yellowman might not make an appearance on the menu – “I’ve made it once!” Clare admits – but dulse does. In fact, dulse beurre blanc is part of her signature potato dish. It’s good to see that a chef of such international standing hasn’t forgotten her roots. When Michel Roux Junior had Clare’s “potato and roe” he called it “divine”.
In fact Clare declares, “Core is all about being British as much as we can right through to the core, so I really wondered why in my career we were using everything coming from France? I really questioned everything before we opened. I thought, well, why can’t we use British plates? Why can’t we use British designers? We had a 300 year old tradition of making the finest bone china in the world in Stoke-on-Trent but when you go there now there’s huge unemployment and those cultures and traditions have almost died out.” She’s on a mission: “So I was like I’m going to have them make my plates; I’m going to use Sheffield steel; I’m going to use British wood. We source our scallops from The Ethical Shellfish Company on the Isle of Mull. The millers than make the flour for our bread, Wessex Mill, are a fifth generation family owned business. So Core is very much a project from the heart.”
When pushed, Signor Seresina confided, “My favourite wine depends on the period of the year. There’s a perfect wine for many different moments. Italy has the largest variety of indigenous wines in the world. There’s life after Chardonnay and Merlot! Italy is geographically a very long country with mountains and seas which allow for many different wines in varying soil expositions.” Franciacorta is a small wine producing area in Lombardy, northern Italy.
