Fay Maschler reviews Claude's Kitchen

Candles stuck in wine bottles encrusted with wax drippings — irony? A chef who gained experience cooking for a posh ski chalet in Val d’Isère — a Bodo’s Schloss-style joke? Parsons Green? — okay, yah, let’s head for Hoxton. You’d be making a mistake. Claude’s Kitchen, where all this and more applies — the chap running the bar taught surfing in Cornwall and sells bobble hats through his company Grannies Knitts (sic) — is providing exceptionally fine cooking and the sort of wholesome high spirits that suggests Famous Five in the ancestry.

Claude Compton has worked in various Michelin-starred kitchens including Petersham Nurseries — with both Skye Gyngell and Greg Malouf — and Club Gascon, neither of those the sort of prissy kitchens the Red Guide can imply. A chum from university and co-worker at Petersham Nurseries, Pete Hartley-Booth, is Compton’s right-hand man. The restaurant, which opened a month ago, is located above Amuse-Bouche, a champagne (and cocktail) bar known for its canny buying and ungrabby prices.

Up the stairs, past the confident calls of shrieking Sloanes, is the sort of timeless dining room with knockabout furniture that has housed Chelsea bistros for many a decade — but wait, here are filament light bulbs looped from the ceiling, a kitchen on view and a short menu that stops ordering in its tracks because you just want everything on it. Prices — £6 for first courses, £14-£16 for fully furnished main courses and £4-£6 for desserts and cheese — encourage the feeling.

To start, the two of us ordered all three options with the understanding that the wood pigeon (seared) was really mine, the mackerel (Cornish, line-caught) on the whole belonged to Reg and we would put the leek (charred) and goat’s curd in the middle. Two kinds of butter, one if I remember rightly flavoured with tomato, come with the bread. Putting together red grape, blood orange, beetroot and Bloody Mary sauce to accompany a fiercely grilled fillet of mackerel — its silvery skin criss-crossed with branding — points to a painterly eye as well as a sagacious palate. It was consumed incredibly quickly.

Flavours surrounding the pigeon came from celeriac in purée form, cardamom, slivers of pickled red onion, lavender and, in the mahogany slick of reduced sauce, honey and port. Scaled up it could have been a proud main course but as an opening salvo in the meal it was just wonderfully titillating. Outer leaves of leeks making a natural curl of wrapping are sometimes used by meticulous chefs around accoutrements for stock but here a neatly tied, mildly scorched leek cylinder held kabocha squash, tomatoes, chopped greens and walnuts. Onion ash was scattered on the plate around a triangle of goat’s curd. I now understand why it is that in some cultures kabocha is revered as an aphrodisiac.

On modern menus beetroot has become something of a menace. The suspicion that no one really likes it all that much is quelled and as often as not pieces of the root partner soft cheese in a first course salad that can be usefully filed under Vegetarian Option. Here a heritage variety takes centre stage as a vibrant curry served with toasted spices, scimitars of fresh coconut, torn coriander leaves, spiced lentils coloured a paler red, a slice of fresh orange and a wide spear of grilled flatbread. It is still a vegetarian option but not so that a meat-eater would necessarily notice.

Chargrilled whole megrim sole was served piled with a tangle of greens that included wild garlic and sprouting broccoli with almonds sprinkled through for crunch. New potatoes in their skins, shiny with butter and flecked with herbs, were served separately. It was a successful lesson in learning to love megrim — and we must.

Reg has come to believe that he invented affogato and always orders one when it’s listed. Here it is made with Allpress espresso. Sweet and sour rhubarb was as good as anything already described. Four tidy batons in a contradictory sauce were topped with posset flavoured with lemon and star anise — but not aggressively so — and balanced on top was a transparent tuile spiked with piquillo pepper. If you have ever wondered if rhubarb can be sexy, it can.

Claude’s Kitchen is evenings only from Tuesday to Saturday. I thought during the day that Claude was tending his Green Goat street food bus but that is currently in abeyance. The company does service the bar food at Amuse Bouche. “Banging Eats with a Conscience” is their slogan. I didn’t think I liked it — but it’s growing on me.

51 Parsons Green, SW6 (020 7371 8517). Dinner Tues-Sat from 6pm. A meal for two with wine, about £80 including 12.5 per cent service.