Augustus, 3 The Courtyard, St James Street, Taunton TA1 1JR (01823 324354). Starters £9-£14, mains £15-£32, desserts £6-£12, wines from £24
There are various things every town needs: a good bookshop run by people with serious reading habits; an independent mini-department store selling a seemingly random but vital collection of things for when you have to acquire both an emergency colander and a pair of leopard-print wellington boots at the same time; a well-positioned bus stop for bored teenagers to smoke in surreptitiously. And a restaurant exactly like Augustus in Taunton; a place which can serve for both special occasions, but also for an impromptu lunch with a mate; where the food is indulgent and diverting without being look-at-me showy; where the prices, while not exactly cheap, won’t make you gasp. In short, it’s a classy bistro that will look after you and make the world feel just that little bit better. You now want an Augustus in your town, don’t you? Quite right, too.
The temptation for the travelling critic is to make Augustus sound like some breathless discovery. As it’s been doing its thing very happily since 2011, thank you, that would be pushing it. If the restaurant is less than well known nationally, it may be because Taunton is dominated by the venerable Castle Hotel, where the late Gary Rhodes first made his name, later to be followed by Phil Vickery. On a recent trip to Taunton to thrill the town with one of my fabulous, feather-boa-ed and burlesque live shows – get that image out of your head – the venue offered me a room at the Castle. I declined out of good manners. Twenty or so years ago I wrote about the place in what some would call a disobliging manner. The service and the eccentric approach to customer relations of the man then in charge made it an ordeal rather than a delight. It’s still owned by the same family, so I thought it better that I slope off to one of those good beds at the Premier Inn; I like a Premier Inn.
After my extremely pleasurable lunch at Augustus, I looked back at that Castle review from 2000. I clocked the positive things I said about the food. Oh, the celebration of beef. I also clocked that the chef who cooked it all was Richard Guest. He subsequently left the Castle with his front-of-house colleague Cedric Chirrosel to open Augustus. It’s named not after Escoffier apparently, but Augustus Gloop, the chunky boy from Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, because he liked his grub. Why do the ones with a healthy appetite always meet a sticky end in fiction?
The restaurant is located in a quiet courtyard off one of Taunton’s pretty lanes, in a sleek space of painted brick and bare polished floorboard softened by strategic outbreaks of foliage and drapery. There’s a glass-walled extension out front and on a warm summer lunchtime the doors are thrown open. There’s a short à la carte with starters at around a tenner and mains about double that, supplemented by a fixed-price menu with two courses at £29 and three at £35, though you can mix and match.
One starter sums up the approach: a dome of creamy scrambled egg comes draped in soft fillets of room-temperature smoked eel, the boisterous oils encouraged out by the warmth beneath. On top is a teaspoon full of shiny smoked herring roe. It’s surrounded by pale green fronds of frisée, like a choir boy’s ruff, and dressed with dribbles of spiced oil. It is the intensely comforting and domestic, that scrambled egg, raised up to something so much more glamorous and downright sexy. The other starter is a generous portion of freshly made butter-yellow tagliatelle, the ribbons tumbling over themselves, spun through with heaps of brown crabmeat and a hint of chilli, and topped by a pretty dice of chives. The bread rolls are warm. The butter is salty and not fridge cold. The wine list is short and to the point. The customers are relaxed and cared for.
On the set menu, scribbled up on a blackboard, is the promise of “Somerset faggots”. I order them, even though I know it’s a promise which can easily be broken. The real thing is a product of domestic pig-keeping and the imperative to use the whole animal once slaughtered, which means they have to be big on the inner wibbly bits of the animal that the unenlightened run screaming from, and especially liver. The very best I’ve ever had came from Neath Market, south Wales. Historically, along with parts of the West Midlands, it was the focus for domestic pig keeping going back to the 19th century and beyond, so faggots became a speciality. The ones here were not some prissy, toned-down version. They were properly offaly and strident, and came with a glossy onion gravy and, to remind us of the chef’s classical chops, a beautifully glazed dauphinoise. Have some greens on the side to balance everything out.
The other main was a piece of turbot, cooked with due care and respect, with a gruyère and herb crust, and an honour guard of broad beans and new potatoes. It was all brought together by a thick, rust-coloured bouillabaisse sauce that was a proper whack of trawler and dock. In a good way. And so to dessert, where none of those well-juggled balls were dropped. A coffee, chocolate and hazelnut éclair was an elegant piece of patisserie, the work of a man who has made an awful lot of crisp, light choux buns in his time. There were the just-contained whorls of both coffee cream and vanilla, and the vital chocolate topping. Or have a scoop of their vanilla ice-cream, with meringue, chantilly and freshly glazed raspberries, for it is summer in one of the greenest counties of England, where the fruit and the dairy is in abundance and these things make total sense.
Which sums up the sweet joys of Augustus. It all makes sense. It is a quietly professional operation that does its job with grace and skill. I suppose if you wanted to rant at the terrible inequities of the world, you could go all 1968 and dismiss it as terribly bourgeois. To which I’d say: we’re in a courtyard in Taunton, opposite a hairdresser’s called Inside Out and a menswear shop called Astaire’s. Of course it’s bloody bourgeois, and so am I, your honour. Alternatively, you could just give yourself to it. Just come here to stop thinking about those iniquities, even if only for a couple of hours.
News bites
Oli Brown, chef founder of the Cantonese roast meats café Duck Duck Goose in south London’s Brixton, is undergoing a complete change of direction. Along with his partner Ruth Leigh, he is opening an outdoor restaurant with rooms at a farmhouse not far from Deal in Kent. From this month until the end of September, there will be a series of what they call ‘showcase events’ offering a hyper local, Italian-leaning menu. The restaurant proper will then open, housed under a vine and wisteria-clad pergola. There will be four bedrooms in the house (updownfarmhouse.com).
The Ottolenghi empire has added a Hummus at Home Kit to its mail-order offering. The kit boasts both dried and jarred chickpeas but, more importantly, to justify the £45 price tag, a set of other ingredients including Ottolenghi tahini, Aleppo chilli flakes and Palestinian za’atar. There’s also the option to add a branded gift box to the order. Visit ottolenghi.co.uk.
The famed le Manoir aux Quat’Saisons, chef Raymond Blanc’s luxury boutique hotel in Oxfordshire, has been granted planning permission for a major multimillion-pound development. There will be a total of 31 new buildings on the site, many of which will either house new suites or be part of a high-end spa. More intriguing for this column is the announcement that the development will include a new bistro. There is however, no firm date for when that will open (raymondblanc.com).
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or follow him on Twitter @jayrayner1
