Admiralty is shipshape again!

This review was first published in August 2001

I know it is almost heretical to say so, but there are occasions when Paris does things better than London. It is particularly noticeable when it comes to galleries.

I adore Charles Saumarez Smith's National Portrait Gallery; the Wallace Collection is a gem and Tate Modern is a triumph of va-va-voom. However, until recently, we have had nothing to match the mixture of majesty and modernity of the Louvre. Now, at last, with Somerset House and its remarkable fountains, we do have something really quite special.

I am not the person to tell you whether the collections housed here are much cop or not (although I suspect they are), but the place does manage to deliver a sense of cultural maturity that hitherto has been the preserve of the French. Thankfully, we no longer have to rely on the flash-in-the-pan notoriety of the Saatchi Gallery or the Sensations show at the Royal Academy; this is a proper, grown-up monument, and the best thing about it is that it also has a truly top-grade restaurant.

The restaurant here is an Oliver Peyton operation. Peyton is constantly tinkering with and updating his places: he turned Coast into a second Mash, he transformed the smart but under-performing upstairs section of Isola into a bar, Isobar; and now he has installed a new, no-holds-barred, snails 'n' all French chef in the kitchens at Admiralty.

To be honest, Admiralty definitely needed tweaking. At the end of last year, the place was the venue for the Bentley party and I suggested that Nick Lancaster, owner of Bentley dealership Jack Barclay, try the restaurant. Sadly, one of the waiters denied him entry. I went along and tried to argue the case, but he flounced off into the night. Clearly something was wrong with Admiralty.

The place still looks the same: high ceilings, exotic ship-shaped chandeliers and orange walls hung with taxidermy and old engravings. But everything else has been overhauled: staff know what they are doing; moreover, they interact with the customers in a way that is hospitable rather than hostile, and the food has moved up a gear from good to outstanding. This is good, rich, tasty, chauvinistic French cooking - the sort that restores one's faith in fine dining French style. On this evidence, Admiralty should get at least one Michelin star, but the absence of all that fussy napkin etiquette will no doubt militate against the French tyre manufacturer marking the place too highly.

However, my Egyptologist friend could not have marked more highly the ravioli of snails in Chablis, with artichokes, poached garlic, red wine and lemon butter. He looked around the room, as if searching for some suitably laudatory form of words. In the end he decreed that snails had obviously been put on this earth to be made into ravioli. His film-producer partner was almost as enraptured by her ballotine of foie gras from the Landes region, with its wild asparagus salad, Beaumes de Venise jelly and compote of figs.

We strayed into Andalucia with a another starter of gazpacho, which came cutely served with an extra helping in a little jug, but then we were back in southern France with seared fillet of red mullet with Proven?al vegetables and a surprisingly tender bit of stuffed squid.

Eating at Admiralty is not the lightest of options: dauphinoise potatoes crop up as an accompaniment for both the roast Barbary duck, lacquered - I love the idea of 'lacquered' duck - with 'seven spices', and the pot-roasted rack of lamb.

However, the coup de gr?ce would have been the dark chocolate moelleux, armagnac ice-cream, and pistachio cr?me anglaise. I say 'would have been', as the 20-minute wait rather robbed this indulgence of its spontaneity. Instead, we took our coffee, tisanes, petits fours and bill (of about £40 per head) outside on to one of the little caf? tables in the courtyard and spent an entertaining half hour watching the fountain display being put through its computer-choreographed, multicoloured paces.

The Admiralty
Strand, London, WC2R 1LA