Putney Bridge-ing the wine gap

This review was first published in November 2000

If you're going to drink deeply at a restaurant, with all the expense, hilarity, and temporal dissolution which that entails, you might as well do it at a restaurant with a view. Putney Bridge (not the stone-balustraded A219, but an unmistakable steel-and-glass lozenge deposited on the river's south bank) offers one of London's best. The river was eerie with mist as we ate our first course; a milky sunlight sent it into languid Oxbridge mode for the main course; by dessert, the clouds had thickened, intimating the rain which fell with dismal predictability later that evening. A driftwood plank slid upriver, freighted by a bobbing wagtail; a couple strolled below, gathering fallen plane leaves. Meanwhile, the level in our decanted bottle of 1998 Domaine des Schistes "Les Terraces" sank like a shot duck.

It was that good. A modest C^TMtes du Roussillon-Villages, for which we paid £30 (plus £3.75 service), Jacques and Nadine Sire's wine was triumphant proof of the coming greatness of the South of France's AOC wines: all darkness, ripeness and mineral fire. It was actually our fifth wine, which for lunch is going it a bit, but then that's what a nice view, pleasant company, and the choice of three modes of public transport incites you to do.

We also, of course, wanted to put sommelier Kamel Thebib to the test. A lot of water has scudded under Putney Bridge since the lozenge opened, and its brasserie days are now far behind it. It's become a temple to high gastronomy and high art (a Frink man greets you; Picasso plates gleam from glass cases; and Guy Taplin's elegantly under-nourished bird sculptures eye the world from within and without). Anthony Demetre won it a Michelin star this year, and everything on the plate betrays fierce ambition.

There are about 400 choices on the wine list, which is mainly (though not exclusively) French. Thebib is a French Algerian from Gaillac who caught wine passion (always contagious) from sommelier Christian Lambert at Le Grand Ecuyer in Cordes; he's worked in the Jardin des Sens in Montpelier, as well as in truly exotic locations like the Norfolk Royal Hotel in Bournemouth and the Lord of the Manor in Upper Slaughter. He also found time to fit in an oenology degree back home in Gaillac. I found him extremely knowledgeable and intelligent about wine, though his innate softness and tranquil discretion means that you need to probe to access this. It would be hard, anyway, to find a less snooty or intimidating sommelier. He's chosen an excellent selection of 11 wines by the glass (plus two Champagnes, seven sweet wines and five ports); we were particularly impressed by a fine 1997 Meursault Vieilles Vignes from Denis Boussey, succulent yet fresh, with just a breath of oak; the gorgeously guava-like 1998 Mills Reef Riesling from New Zealand's Hawkes Bay; and the wonder-fully taut and intense 1996 Vin sec de Ch?teau Coutet. Prices, alas, are stern: £9 (plus £1.13 service) for a mere 125ml of Meursault leads to visions of banknotes floating downriver.

We wanted a white for some red mullet and John Dory; Thebib suggested a '93 La Tour Martillac. In so doing, he betrayed the courage of a Mameluke charging Napoleon's infantry squares at the Battle of the Pyramids; recommending this wine of spotty reputation in a difficult year like '93 was an audacious gambit, all the more so as it cost £42 (plus £5.25 to have the cork pulled). He'd come across it in a blind tasting, he told us. It had shone. We looked, we sniffed, we tasted. It was a lovely lamplight yellow, and smelled gratifyingly plump, almost Meursault-like; only the relative constraint and abruptness of its flavours indicated the fact that 303 per cent more rain than usual fell on Bordeaux in September 1993. Any lingering doubts we had were then chased away by the superb Domaine des Schistes, which we chose together, not feeling quite rich enough to go for Thebib's suggestion of the '96 Alion from Ribera del Duero (£65 plus £8.13 service).

To mention Anthony Demetre's dishes as a mere footnote seems most unfair, since hours of thought and frantic minutes of mound engineering, pile hydraulics, sprig scaffolding and sauce smearing go into each dish. In some ways, the very best of all was the simplest: a superb piece of Charolais beef en crépinette, unctuous and tender, with a subtle red wine and parsley sauce. This fine dish made, with the Roussillon red, the best food-and-wine combination I have enjoyed in any restaurant for six months or more. (Shame it was one of my guests' dishes.)

VERY nearly as good were pinkly flaccid, tepid slices of wild duck breast, the eating of which was like having someone slide their tongue onto yours; a first-course civet of hare (its jus with pomegranate) was movingly pungent, rousing and rural. The fish dishes seemed less successful, slightly over-wrought, though the fact that we all gobbled up the crisp sheath of John Dory skin as if it was Bombay-duck-flavoured crisps testified to something or other. Demetre's show-stopping dessert, warm Valrhona chocolate moelleux with almond milk sorbet, is perhaps better described as heart-stopping. I'm not a chocoholic, but I still raised my toupée to this roast-rich chocolate sponge which, when you stab it, spills its fragrant black lava all over your plate.

Three lunch courses are available for £18.50 (and when we visited this included both the civet and the beef); there's also a six-course tasting menu for £50 (or £90 with six glasses of different recommended wines). Wander into the carte, as two of us did, and you're up for £11 for the first course and £23 for the second. A three-course set dinner costs £42.50; an 11-course tasting menu £79.50; and the attentive service gives you little reason other than principle to decline the 12.5 per cent which will be added to all of these sums. Our lunch for three broke the £200 barrier. The room with a view has a price.

Thai Square
Lower Richmond Road, London, SW15 1LB