10 April 2012

This article was first published in December 1999

Chef Paul Merrett had the discomfiting honour of being awarded a Michelin star at a restaurant (Interlude in Charlotte Street) which was closed by its owners a couple of months before the 1999 guide was published. Currently he is heading up the kitchen at THE GREENHOUSE bringing a colonial flavour to what was originally Gary Rhodes's modern British style through a love of spices he apparently acquired while growing up in Zanzibar. For example, the main course I chose, was pan-fried seabass on sag aloo (curried potatoes and spinach) with onion bhajee and tomato pickle.

Not everything is quite so blatantly Easternised and, I would say, to its advantage. Blackened chicken salad with saffron-roasted artichokes and ham and corn beignets, my first course, is US, specifically New Orleans, influenced. It was fine, the chicken tender, coming down on the side of spice-seared rather than burned, and the artichokes a treat. My companion said she loved her roasted partridge on a bean and wild mushroom cassoulet with truffle jus. Since my companion is PR for The Greenhouse, I had to taste it myself and snaffled a leg of the bird.

It was indeed very good. I was less enthusiastic about her first course choice of smoked eel terrine, interleaved with raw tomato and baby leeks, served with a strident piccalilli. She, of course, loved it. We both found no fault with the deeply lemony glazed lemon tart. The Greenhouse at lunchtime still attracts a sea of suits but I can report that another PR girl, the Countess of Wessex, and Mrs Betty Kenward (once the redoubtable Jennifer of Jennifer's Diary), also graced the tables.

The Greenhouse
27a, Hays Mews, W1G 5NY

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