Admiralty: Nick Foulkes' view

This review was first published in July 2000

Oliver Peyton is a genius. OK, like most men of outstanding talent, he has the odd blind spot. I think his taste in art is pretty ropey, for instance. But I admire the guy. He is an operator of some talent and a likeable man to boot.

I don't always get his restaurants. I once visited something he had in Manchester. In an effort to better understand the concept of a design-conscious restaurant in a part of the world that made Grozny look like Monte Carlo on a Saturday night, I consumed one too many martinis. I compounded the error by sinking a considerable quantity of the annual Riesling output of Alsace. I then decided to take a late-night/early-morning stroll through Manchester, an insanely large cigar smouldering in my jaw, pointing out to passing Mancunians how I felt that their city might be improved upon.

On reflection, I was lucky to escape Manchester with my life, if not my liver, intact. And I rather think that Manchester was fortunate to see the back of me.

However, other things Peyton does are easier to grasp. He has welcomed his old chef Stephen Terry back to Coast, one of my favourite ultra-modern restaurants, and I am beginning to have considerable respect for his Knightsbridge restaurant Isola. Then he goes and does something puzzling like open a restaurant called Admiralty in Somerset House.

I like to think I know Peyton reasonably well and he has always struck me as a thoroughly up-to-date kinda guy, so I was surprised - albeit pleasantly - to find that he had chosen a very Gothic script for the logo of his new restaurant. What is even more pleasantly surprising about Admiralty is that there is not a shred of art.

But then Somerset House is such an elegant building and is now home to a decent collection of proper art, so it would be inappropriate to stick Marc Newson-designed bits and pieces around the place. The vibe of Somerset House, at least when I turned up on one monsoon-like London summer evening, was of a stately home from which the furniture had been removed.

Admiralty is at the back of the courtyard of Somerset House and, given the scale of the building, the feel of the three rooms that comprise the restaurant is agreeably intimate. The bar is very green and then there are two dining-rooms, both taller than they are wide.

I sat in the last room, one wall of which was occupied by a giant stuffed reptile. The light fittings, too, were wonderful: three chandeliers in the shape of galleons dangled from the ceiling. Reminiscent of the cartoon adaptation of JM Barrie's Peter Pan, they were exquisite and just the sort of thing that Marie Antoinette might have shoved at the top of one of those towering hairdon'ts that used to be all the rage at the end of the 18th century.

My mind was allowed to run riot in these sorts of directions because I found myself in a particularly unusual situation: I was being kept waiting by the neglected common-law spouse of a well-known property developer. When she did finally emerge, she complained bitterly that the rain had damaged her pale eau de nil Prada handbag. Still, her arrival did at least mean that someone was smartly dressed.

The customer base of Admiralty is supplied by a sector of society with which neither I, nor the neglected common-law spouse, have anything to do. I thought I saw one man who looked vaguely like John Malkovich and that was about it. My sister, a lawyer whom I dispatched to eat at Admiralty the day before, said she saw Tom Hanks - sounds unlikely.

The menu is old-fashioned French; the sort of grub people of my parents' generation used to travel to France to eat before Tuscany had been invented. I must say that I felt a slight murmur of trepidation when I approached the menu at Admiralty, it made few concessions to modern mores: terrines galore, more foie gras than you could shake a stuffed goose at, pot au feu, veal chop, saut?ed black-leg chicken, pot-roasted squab pigeon and so on.