From a certain angle, Mayfair’s restaurants are best understood as one babying tableside preparation after another. Lemon soles are surgically filleted on your behalf; crepes Suzette are finished with leaping flame; and, at Bacchanalia, the toga-clad waitstaff spend so much time cutting food for you that, after a while, you start to assume they are going to ferry a forkful towards your mouth while doing aeroplane noises.
But at 20 Berkeley, a shimmering new dining labyrinth just along from Berkeley Square, the first piece of theatrical razzle-dazzle does not actually involve anything edible. A little black dish is set before you. Lemon-infused boiled water is poured from a ceremonial tea pot. And then you look on as the warmth turns one or two nubby white lozenges into magically expanded miniature flannels. “This is to wipe your hands if they get sticky after the dinner rolls,” says the server. And as a demonstration of this venture’s core appeal, of its enthralling dichotomy, it could hardly be more perfect.
Because, yes, 20 Berkeley — the latest opening from the team behind Sumi and HUMO — is a laser-targeted exercise in coddling, high European luxury and 120 quid porterhouse steaks. But it is also a restaurant with a few idiosyncratic, forward-thinking touches, a witty take on hyper-seasonality and an engaging feel for real-world appetites.
Simply put: it is a place where, for all the sophisticated gentility and quasi-rural grandeur, they fundamentally understand half the pleasure of eating often involves getting your hands dirty. Right away, 20 Berkeley strives to evoke a more subtle form of whispered wealth. It’s an amber-lit warren of distinct zones (multiple private dining rooms, a clubby basement bar called The Nipperkin) with stained-glass dividers, rolling green banquettes, glossy wood, and staff in floral-print shirts touring the room with baskets of produce.
They fundamentally understand half the pleasure of eating often involves getting your hands dirty
The sense I had was of bucolic luxury; a kind of turbo-Daylesford for those without the diary space or wherewithal to pop to the Cotswolds. However, if there is lightly wearying familiarity to the menu concept — it is, like practically every second opening in the city, described as “British produce-led” — then it is energised by the skill and imagination of executive chef Ben Orpwood.
Those dinner rolls, for instance, were quite the opening: a glossed, buxom six-pack of miniature buns, shimmering beneath their sticky glaze of London honey, and paired with a bolshy whipped marmite butter. Fried courgette blossom salad, spurting smoked ricotta-ish cheese and trickled with a bright slash of walnut vinaigrette, had similar command of balanced sweetness and savoury.
A specials board (or, well, basket) dish of monkfish, lavishly ladled over with a frothed lemon and thyme veloute and tumbled with sexily charred girolle mushrooms, was steadily spectacular. And a little later I couldn’t quite stop picking at the “Cambridgeshire patatas bravas”: a little Jenga-pile of confit potatoes dribbled in aioli and a mellow, spiced salsa.
True, the effortful playfulness of a New Forest Gateaux — a fussy, white chocolate-coated layer cake laced with blackberries — wasn’t quite as effective. And there is the heavy caveat that, this being both Mayfair and the age of price-creep, absolutely none of this is cheap (the wine list has bottles starting at around £50).
But there was something curiously appealing about this place’s straightforwardness; something almost radical about its desire to evoke, not the French Riviera or a spuriously Japanese fantasia, but stolid, satisfying Britishness. Not every opening needs to mint an entirely new way of eating, mash two dining cultures together, or boldly move the needle on the broader gastronomic consciousness. And neither does every restaurant in Mayfair have to pander to the brashest or snootiest excesses.
20 Berkeley is a timely, if pricey, reminder that you don’t necessarily have to shout loudest to be heard.
