Generations Come and Generations Go
Oh. Em. Gee. Whizz. After months of talking about going, we simply rock up on a random Wednesday night with a zest for life but no booking. Reservations at the tiny restaurant (just 40 lucky customers at any given time) are infamously hard to come by. We’re in luck. No tables free, but the bar along the window is ours. We’re perched on stools like Nighthawks. Perfect for spying on our usual Shepherd Market hangout Le Boudin Blanc. Skipping the light fantastic cocktails (Good Kitty, Bad Kitty but no Hello Kitty) we head straight for a bottle of Voignier Le Paradou 2015 (£30). Dry with a hint of honeycomb.
Kitty Fisher’s is all about plates. Courses are just so passé. The menu is concise: five small plates | five medium plates | four large plates | four sweet plates | one cheese plate. Yet there’s plenty to satisfy a pescatarian and carnivore. Whipped cod’s roe, bread and fennel butter (£7.50) is chef Tom Parry’s four fingered salute against mediocrity. A textural contrast of creaminess and crustiness. Taleggio, London honey, mustard and black truffle (£9) is a bitter sweet symphony of wood fire grill smokiness. The last of the savouries arrives. Burrata, beetroot and radicchio (£12.50) is a colourful collage of purple and white. Cambridge burnt cream (£7) isn’t an undergrad’s baking error but a Cointreau and cinnamon crème brulée smoothly nestling under a crackly golden lid. These plates aren’t for sharing. They’re far too good for that.
Named after a Georgian lady of the night, the restaurant is aptly boudoir-like with dark purple walls and red lamp shades and background jazz music. Dining extends underground, down the dogleg staircase, past the pumpkin stacked kitchen window. Trumpers accessorised loos are at the far end. Incidentally, we note that currency signs have vanished from fashionable menus as swiftly as pounds disappeared out of the wallets of Kitty Fisher’s gentlemen callers. Laterally, history repeats itself.
