Is this where I fall back in love with fine dining?

I finally lost it in September 2022. It had been a long time coming. In the aftermath of lockdowns, the critics universally abandoned their taste for blood. Nobody wanted to give a struggling restaurant a public kicking, and I’d developed the habit of tearing up the bill and forgetting about the place if it wasn’t good. But, over two months, I’d torn up four, from high-ticket, foam-and-smear joints, so I filed a rant. I didn’t name the restaurants, but I took advantage of my platform to cathartically trash them and their whole ridiculous species. Judging by the comments, I hit a nerve.

The restaurants had all been in provincial towns or out in the backwoods. All led by young chefs whose PR ran ahead of them, shouting. The menus were indistinguishable, overpriced and derivative. All featured a standard list of prestige ingredients, a ridiculous “flight” of wines, “umami” played repetitively as the sole note and theme throughout, something local, something foraged . . . oh and something fermented. I wasn’t just angry, I was incredibly sad. It honestly felt like a generation of young cooks was being recruited into a cult. The echo chamber of “Chef Instagram” and the dreary backslapping of our appalling competitive food shows, creating absurd menus of flash “nibbles with narratives” without ever having roasted a leg of lamb or built a decent daube. Above all, I mourned the total loss of deliciousness.

I knew I hadn’t been alone in this, so I took an off-the-clock, social lunch at The Ritz with Marina O’Loughlin, ex-restaurant critic at The Sunday Times. She’d been one of the first to turn, and if my memory serves, coined the term “fain daining”, which so eloquently damned the style. Her disenchantment with ridiculous multi-course numbers “probably started with a second visit to El Bulli, where the food was so tortured and denatured, it had utterly lost sight of deliciousness”, she said.

That cut straight to the heart of it. It sat so well with my own experience, I felt vindicated. And yet, as the first elements of a set, seven-course “Epicurean Lunch” menu arrived, any high ground we might have occupied slid away beneath us.

There were three small amuses bouche, one elevated on its own silver plinth. Coronation chicken, they proclaimed, in a crisp tuile, which cunningly contained some of the traditional elements; a subtle curry flavouring and a bit of mango chutney. It had every kind of twattery required, deconstruction, a “witty narrative”, a pointlessly novel presentation of a weary classic. It dabbed every cliché on the bingo card. Also, frustratingly and thanks to the talents of John Williams (MBE), a classically trained and fully adult chef, it was bloody gorgeous.

“I’m not fully out of love,” O’Loughlin allowed. “Despite the critics’ carping — and we are famously jaded — there’s nothing that delivers a restaurant sense of occasion, celebration, opulence quite like fine dining. But diners are getting cannier, and in search of places that are all about them and less about ego trips for the chefs.”

A ballotine of foie gras in port jelly ticked the box for status ingredients, but was rendered superb by clever marinating and a slice of fresh brioche, cooked in and served in the Hotel’s own ancient moulds. In case, perhaps, we need reminding that these were the very kitchens where Auguste Escoffier “wrote the book” on fine dining. Where artistic, luxury food and service were first codified.

The main course was Anjou pigeon, crushed tableside in polished silver presses mounted on gueridon carts. It’s hard to imagine a more impressive old school hospitality flex, particularly as, with two presses and a sauce station in action, there were three carts and six staff in attendance to serve a single dish. We laughed as they circled the wagons, but it was out of sheer nerd joy. The caisson was bang on target, the sauce beautifully assembled and the dance of service choreographed with greased precision.

Every course was faultless, not a beat was missed. The menu comprised mainly ancient classics, but the invisible kitchen brigade reimagined each, fresh and bright. In one of the most sumptuous dining rooms in London, this was everything that Le Grand Vefour (where I began this tour) had ever been, or aspired to. It was the finest of fine dining and we were both enjoying it fully.

Was there a problem? Of course. A few, in fact. All flaws in service, where there simply weren’t enough highly skilled people on the floor to deliver on the promise. Wine took too long to arrive because only certain ranks of the Front Of House brigade are qualified to deal with wine. Attracting the attention of staff when they were dancing with pigeons on another table was next to impossible. The only thing that arguably made the dining sub-fine was the impossibility of delivering a 19th-century service model with the skills and the number of people one can afford in the 21st.

The Ritz had me even more conflicted. Fine-dining deniers both, we seemed to love it. The quality of the cooking is so high it confounds my distaste for the idiom. Many have called this the best restaurant in London. The Ritz advertised the meal explicitly as “fine dining”, yet, incredibly, Michelin have only seen fit to grant it a single star. With my most cynical filters installed, the only faults I could find with The Ritz have been where they strove to reach absurd and arcane standards that I don’t actually demand, and fell short.

I’m having increasing difficulty isolating what Fine Dining actually is. O’Loughlin’s working definition of “Tweezers, multiple complex techniques and hushed reverence” will have to do for now, but next week I need to dig deeper.