Restaurant review: AA Gill at Ambassade de l’Ile

117-119 Old Brompton Road, SW7; 020 7373 7774

Lunch, Mon-Sat, noon-2pm; dinner, Mon-Sat, 7pm-10pm

5 stars: Ile of paradise; 4 stars: Ile of plenty; 3 stars: Ile of Wight; 2 stars: Ile of Man; 1 star: Ile of Dogs

The mousseline de brochette et grenouille. Try to picture it. Sitting, nay, levitating in the centre of a circular white table big enough to play Olympic blow-football on. This dish is deceptively simple. It looks like a gateau for the type of woman who says let them eat cake. In fact, it’s savoury: a fish mousseline, as smooth as a warm Baileys enema administered by Charles Aznavour by candlelight, with the wobbly texture of a contemplative nun’s genuflecting buttock. The flavour is pale and interesting; a clear whisper of dark, chalky pools and shimmering, placid, terror-faced pike, a taste emphatic and resonant and round, but at the same time restrained, elegant and intimate, like the gesture of a hand laid on the back of your neck, or the shadow glimpsed under a summer bridge. This emulsion of silky profundity, this boneless evocation of memories, scents and savours is one of the most difficult things to accomplish in all gastronomy: that delicate line between bland and bold, and only the haute French can really be bothered to find it.

But we’re not finished yet. Interred inside the mousseline are the boned and poached legs of small, green Jeremy Fishers. Their flavour, too, is ambivalent; caught between the earth and the water, they owe a little something to both. And they are, of course, the natural dinner of the pike. They go so well together, an antipathy in life that becomes harmony in death.

And that’s not all. Around the edge of the mousse, there is a thin and crispy nougatine that you’d expect to find on a cake: a confection of splintered, crisp caramel, it’s sweet — brazenly, stridently sugary — but, this time, the pale mosaic isn’t almonds, it’s garlic. Sugar and garlic with eggy pike and poached frog. Now you’re not going to find that on any other menu in the country tonight. And it was peerless. Number one in a race with no other contestants. A dish that is original, contradictory, but also makes complete gastronomic sense, constructed within the etiquette and conventions of French cuisine. Whatever comes next in this review, whatever else I have to tell you, never doubt that this is truly brilliant French food. (It is also a taste of things past. It whisked me back 30 years to the last, confident moment of French cooking. Hardly anyone outside the stuffy, effete, liverish demimonde of provincial Belgium and France wants to eat this sort of stuff any more.)

Ambassade de l’Ile is the oddest restaurant I’ve reviewed all year. I truly believed I would never see this sort of place again outside of France, or the kitscher Gulf hotels. This site was famously Chanterelle, an airy, light room, beloved of cultured and passive gay men. Then it was the friendly and worthy Danish restaurant Lundum’s, and now it’s this, what can only be described as a French theme restaurant. The makeover has been radical, ruinous and hysterical. Everything the food is, the décor isn’t. I never cease to take pleasure in remembering that the French, for all their many, many trumpeted civilised gifts, have not produced an interior that doesn’t make you snigger behind your hand, since they cut the heads off everyone with taste. Empire furniture was the first vibrant, screaming example of Le Chav, an explosion of cash style and arriviste bling. And it’s been pretty much downhill ever since.

Ambassade de l’Ile is, indeed, a plenipotentiary representative of the laughable, ghastly interior design of la belle France. The colour scheme is — how heavenly is this? — aubergine and white; the accent, and our talking point, standard lamps that exude a gloom I expect is supposed to be dramatic, but is more emergency. White buttoned-leather room dividers cleverly mimic Austin Powers’s headboard, and hints of brushed steel scream black American Express card. But my favourite de trop moments — and there were so many to choose from — were: runner-up, the purple shag-pile carpet. Oh, mon giddy Dieu, when was the last time you saw a shag-pile carpet? Can’t remember? Well, I bet it had a naked Oliver Tobias on it. Shag-pile — such an evocative name. The number one was the wall decoration. Where there should have been prints by Vasarely, there were, ta-ra, television screens, broadcasting CCTV from the kitchen, so you could watch kids with knives.

It is impossible not to be drawn to the flicker of a screen in a room, so whatever your guests are saying, you are constantly aware of cooks mooching about, one of them, blissfully, the doppelgänger of the boy in Ratatouille. In all the time we were there, I never saw an ingredient or actual cooking as we know it, but there was a man who seemed to be directing. He had his hand in his pocket. After a bit, I realised it wasn’t in his pocket. It wasn’t even in the kitchen. This was the famous one-armed chef Jean-Christophe Ansanay-Alex, proud juggler of two Michelin stars back home. He came and asked if everything was all right. You tell me, I wanted I say. Just imagine how many more stars they would give you if you had double the arms and half the names.

This folly has been financed by a pair of French bankers in that bit of London that is temporarily Carla Bruni’s knicker drawer. With the Lycée down the road, it has a large, Louboutin-heeled expat community who may fill up this temple to Gallic gastro-culture. The menu has a purple mission statement in French and English, which would make you weep with laughter in Tagalog or Braille. It’s short, complicated and with too many dishes that have to be shared. My boy and I split a pigeon; I’ve never been offered half a pigeon in a restaurant — certainly never a whole one for £62. It came stuffed so fat it was a Mr Creosote pigeon, but was utterly brilliant, deliciously flavoured with spices and forcemeat that were reminiscent of the Maghreb. The côte de veau with girole, for two, was £66. The Blonde, who was trained to make this sort of food, said she thought the seasoning was two notches too high. I disagreed. I thought it was precipitously spot-on. All the cooking, whoever or wherever it’s done, is craftsmanlike, considered and thoughtful. I had two tiny pieces of cheese from the cheese board, served by a garçon whose grasp of English was so tenuous he imagined he spoke it like a native, but that I spoke it like a Latvian. But he knew more English than he did about cheese. I was charged £15 for solidified cow juice that wouldn’t have covered a Ritz cracker, if they’d served anything as useful as a Ritz cracker. And that remains the most breathtaking, boldest rip-off I’ve seen since an evening in a Moscow lap-dancing club.

The service is as effusive as it is unhelpful. When they want to give you things, tell you things or make you do things, they’re all over you, with scrapers, napkins, endless table-rearranging; when you want something, they are blind, deaf and on a mission. The bill comes rolled up and glued with monogrammed purple sealing wax. I handed my credit card over without looking at it, so the waiter had to peer up its little, tightly rolled end to get the money shot.

I smirked — until I saw that the amount for five people, with three glasses of the cheapest wine (the list, incidentally, is repellently expensive) came to £527.06. This is a restaurant where the food is four or five star, but the room barely earns one. It’s rather gratifying proof that the French are as strange to us as any South American tribe. The service charge was £58.56. I asked, as I always do, does this go into a tronc for the staff. Non, said the manager. So, you use it to make up the wages? Non, said the manager. We don’t give it to the staff at all. He said it with the insouciance that has made the French loved and respected all over the world.

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