Review at a glance: ★★★★☆
Chefs: duller than you think. Sporting rumours of delinquency still propagate — ’shrooms at award shows, clingfilm hijinks — but the naughty boys and girls are largely a lost breed. For the best, probably. Still, there used to be more to kitchen drama than cooking courgettes out of season.
Dullness is not a charge that could be levied against Chris Denney. He too is a chef from a time before, but of a different kind. Denney is the sort with mad, gas-lamp eyes, with a maniacal devotion to his stoves. The kind that is Trainspotting thin but looks as wiry and strong as a winch. He quivers, Denney, as though he were permanently at breaking point. Perhaps he is. At 39, until then unknown, he answered a Gumtree advert and made his name at 108 Garage, partly because of his cooking (the real deal), and partly because headlines said the place was backed by “the mafia’s banker” (very much not the real deal). In an interview I suspect he regrets, Denney told The Standard that if he didn’t win a Michelin star, “I’ll go upstairs and blow my f***ing brains out”.
A star did not materialise but neither did a Smith & Wesson. Ups and downs have followed in the years since. Now he has found money in George Bukhov-Weinstein and Ilya Demichev, who made their millions with Burger & Lobster but today play in rather fancier ranks — Marylebone’s terrific Lita, Holland Park’s giddily priced Belvedere. They have chauffeured Denney to Chelsea, on the corner opposite pretend-pub the Cadogan Arms.
Denney always needed this neighbourhood’s spending power. His food obtusely rebuffs classification and so is not an easy sell. He needs the sort of people who’ll walk past a tempting frontage, not blink at starters nearing £30, and go in on the off-chance of something to crow about at the school gates. Is the frontage tempting? Well, there are half-drawn curtains and a red neon sign in devilish handwriting; the suggestion is an upmarket brothel. Staff in leather continue the theme.
Inside is what I imagine Jeff Bezos’s panic room looks like. It appears very expensive and at the same time like an abandoned diamond mine: it is all rough plaster, muddy colours, peasant lampshades. It is dark — the pizza oven in Denney’s open kitchen provides the most light. But it is attractive and so are its diners. You will feel stylish for being here. At least until the reggae version of A Whiter Shade of Pale comes on. That was a mistake.
Denney’s menu is divided into what looks like bites, starters, mains and puds, but does not operate as such. This will not be explained but demonstrated, plates arriving at random and set down in the middle, no matter how often you plead with staff about not sharing. Pleading with staff is, in fact, a hopeless endeavour; I suspect the many waiters do not speak to each other. Service was a gentleman thief: genial but lawless, stealing something from the evening.
Denney is a chef of endless imagination and uncommon talent
But Denney hasn’t lost his way with food. This is a chef of endless imagination, uncommon talent and an explorative, expert palette (except with puddings; I would have preferred gobbling the candle to the spiteful cherry sorbet with horseradish). But everything else? Foie gras sat on a puck of pancake, topped with rhubarb relish, its acidity shearing the fat of the foie gras down to size and drawing out a maltiness in the base. I’ve never had anything like it. Then came fried sweetbreads, as crisp outside and soft inside as potato cakes, their coating of soy sauce, garlic and ginger sticky and familiar. “It’s sort-of posh Wagamamas,” said my chum, not unhappily. Sauerkraut affirmed Denney’s inclination for balance.
John Dory arrived with an alarmingly slug-like length of aubergine on top. But it was a beauty in every other sense, aubergine as gooey as puppy love, the Dory cooked with precision and intuition. Squab pigeon wanted less salt and more time by the heat, but otherwise offered a pile of treats, of lardo melted into a thick mole sauce peppered with carrot and swede. We sighed, content.
Fantômas has a chef as rigidly put together as his team is undone. Find a manager whose operational skills measure against his kitchen nous, and the restaurant would be among London’s very best. Denney deserves that, I think.
300 King’s Road, SW3 5UH. Meal for two about £280; fantomas.co.uk
