Yes, the portraits are good, but for me the most exciting thing in Tate
Britain’s Holbein exhibition is a clocksalt, formerly owned
by Henry VIII, which is not by Holbein at all. It is a staggeringly
intricate, glistering thing in silvergilt, nearly 2ft high, with clawed feet
perched on agate spheres, a hexagonal box base featuring ivory cameo heads
mounted in its six blue enamelled faces, a clock above it, and above that a
writhing mass of figures in the then fashionable arabesque style.
Despite appearing in the 1649 Inventory of the Rebels (dread document), this
clocksalt somehow survived Cromwell’s puritanical meltdown of all things
shiny and is included in the exhibition to complement Holbein’s famous
design for Anthony Denny’s clocksalt of 1543 (commissioned as a New Year’s
gift for Henry), which survives only as an ink sketch. It is here so that we
might have some idea of what Holbein intended. Of what, indeed, a clocksalt
was. For in terms of the public imagination, the last 463 years have not
been kind to clocksalts.
According to the exhibition catalogue, Holbein’s clocksalt “was a complex
instrument. In the centre was an hourglass, its doors open to show a satyr;
two more support the base, while on top two putti hold curved metal sheets
forming sundials. A clock, a blazing sun at its centre, rests on their
heads, surmounted by a crown. A compass would have been placed above the
hourglass…”
Can you tell what it is yet? Can you tell what these clocksalts were for?
They were for holding salt. That’s all. Huge, massy, golden instruments,
incorporating the latest technology and designed by the greatest artists in
the kingdom, to hold a little salt well so that when his majesty needed a
pinch of something to season a dreary egg, it would be close at hand on the
table in something that looked nice.
While Henry’s celebrated girth tells us how much he liked his food, these
clocksalts give us, I think, some notion of how he valued his seasoning. It
wasn’t just a mad grab and gobble that got him the way he was. He wanted his
scoff just right. Indeed, in a proposal for an Anglo-French treaty in 1527,
Henry offered his daughter Mary to the King of France in marriage and
suggested, to seal the matter, that: “The French king bind himself and his
successors to pay a certain amount of salt and money annually to Henry and
his successors.”
In other words, Henry VIII offered to swap his daughter (and heir) for a
condiment. And he planned to put that condiment in a salt cellar built by
(possibly) the greatest portrait painter in history. He loved to make a big
deal of the little things, did Henry.
And so, once upon a time, did Joel Robuchon, who was crowned “Chef of the
Century” in 1990 (the sort of vain, grandiose title that our Hal, made Lord
Lieutenant of Ireland at the age of three, rather went in for himself), and
then retired, having had enough of all the glittering Michelin guff, only
agreeing to return to the trade at the behest of his former colleagues (it
says in a missive I have here from his court), “On the basis that he open a
more casual eatery concept”. And so (says the scroll), “L’Atelier de Joel
Robuchon is based on simplicity.”
It’s as if, across five centuries, Henry VIII were crying, “A pox on
clocksalts! Fie on these silvergilt fripperies! Give me the simple things!”
But L’Atelier de Joel Robuchon is not “simple” in any sense that you or I, or
even Henry, would understand. Guarded by two prowling, gigantic security men
(who made me wonder if I hadn’t accidentally arrived at some roiling
Stockwell nightclub), this three-tier palace of shimmering black granite,
lacquer and gleaming glass, a couple of doors up from the Ivy, is deftly
conceived to appeal to the wealthiest, flashiest, most preening of people
(that the Robuchon Atelier concept started in Tokyo, Paris, New York and Las
Vegas and is only now being rolled out here, was not, in my opinion, a good
sign).
Downstairs, one sits on tall stools at what seems a very chi-chi sort of
sushi bar, although the food in the glass cases (perfect little red, yellow
and green peppers arranged at geometrically perfect intervals) is not for
eating. It is Hakkasan with highchairs. And after 7pm it’s no booking, so
you have to queue. Which will be popular with the WAGs.
Upstairs is La Cuisine, which, according to the court circular, “can be
compared to actually dining in a kitchen”. Not dining in my kitchen.
Black-and-white tiles wittily move the chequered-floor idiom to the wall,
fantastically wrought breads plume from silver buckets, and the shiniest,
state-of-the-art, never-to-be-used kitchen equipment gleams just out of
reach on glass shelves, punctuated with baskets of garlic. The first item on
the “to do” list of the lowliest person in the kitchen is no doubt “dust the
garlic”.
Service is a little overbearing. Dressed head to toe in black, the flights of
waiters swarm and muster like traffic wardens in Hampstead on Christmas Eve.
And the menus are not simple. There are seven or eight starters and seven or
eight mains on the right, and then all the dishes again on the left, in
tasting portions, of which each person should have three or four (the ones
best eaten as starters being marked with an asterisk). And then, “to make
things simple”, the waiter says, he hands us two more menus, incongruously
laminated, offering a multi-course tasting menu and a set lunch. We take
five and five from the tasting set and await our simple repast.
To cut a long story short (“Too late!” you cry), each dish is beautifully
conceived, precisely executed, presented with restraint and delivered in
good time. I forgot to take menus away (I doubt I could have got them all in
my cab), and yet I remember every dish, every detail. That has not happened
to me in a long time.
There was an amuse (of course) of foie gras in a shot glass sealed with a
port reduction and topped with a pale, eggy foam. And it wasn’t just the
crappy slug of goose gack I’m used to. There was an aubergine mash – they
call it a caviar, I’d call it a baba ganoush – that sat in a little moat of
perfect gazpacho with deep-fried courgette cross-sections studded into it,
which were perhaps a little daft. If anything, some of the presentation here
is a teensy bit puerile – as if it has been done for dollies by a precocious
seven-year-old girl.
There was a lush, crunchy, raw vegetable tart and a less successful,
uncuttable tart of mackerel redeemed by beautifully fresh, petrol-skinned
fish. There were langoustines rolled into perfect filo cigars, ungreasy and
crisp like the best dim sum, which the waiter suggested I dip, “Wiz your
finger, just like at ’ome”, into the shimmering blob of emerald pesto. So I
did, just like I always do at home. There was an oeuf-en-cocotte with wild
mushrooms which, this time, didn’t quite work – it seemed a warm goo waiting
to become an omelette.
A good chunk of very fresh sea bass was served with large macaroni, each tube
stuffed with green and red pesto (that precocious child again). And then
big, sticky, roasted sweetbreads, and really juicy free-range quail, and
some breast and leg of duck served very rare with a glaze that was perhaps,
in truth, a little too sweet for grown-ups. And then three beautiful lamb
chops with thyme, very plain, served with the famous Robuchon mash, into
which truffle slices were studded in the now- familiar stegosaurus style. It
really is good stuff, though, this mash. So buttery it’s as if it were a
roux made with potato flour.
And then pudding: lemon sorbet served, oddly, in a half-lemon, like in a
Seventies curry house (the kind of pud you see on photo menus); and a really
dazzling presentation of bitter chocolate sorbet and chocolate mousse,
served in a square bowl under a thin wafer of chocolate whose central
porthole allowed the mousse boule to poke through, and the under-plate
rolling with little biscuity ball-bearings, tasting of Oreos, and with a
Japanese-style lacquer spoon dusted with something coppery. Daft but fun.
But not simple at all. In fact, about as simple as a clocksalt for a fat and
very silly old king.
L’Atelier de Joel Robuchon
13-15 West Street, WC2 (020-7010 8600)
Meat/fish: 8
Cooking: 9
Simplicity: 6
Score: 7.67
Price: £150 for two, easy.
E-mail feedme@thetimes.co.uk if you know somewhere Henry VIII
would have liked
Book
a table at L'Atelier de Joel Robuchon
