The Escoffier Rooms

Benedict Randall Shaw

№2, Volume V

The Escoffier Room is one of two restaurants under the ægis of Westminster Catering College, established to provide training and practice for the students thereof. It is located on the northern side of Vincent Square.

This restaurant serves tasting menus, of eight courses¹, the entire menu costing £27⋅50. The adjacent restaurant has an à la carte menu, which is also rather economical. The tasting menu would likely command a significantly higher price in other restaurants, and rightly so.

Due to the educational nature of the establishment, meals are rather economical; however, the waiters consequently seem to lack a little confidence, and were sometimes not completely composed—this was not of significant import.

The meal started with a ‘Summer Lobster Salad’, comprising several rather succulent small pieces of lobster, served in a rich tomato sauce, alongside pleasant little vegetable items all served within a glass, and consumed with a long spoon; the flavours coëxisted harmoniously, though the edible flowers served with it were somewhat superfluous.

We proceeded thence to the ‘Chilled Leek, Potato, and Chive Soup, Meadow Salad, and Crispy Quail’s Egg’; the egg was cooked very well, such that it was on the point of runniness, wrapped in strands of potato crisp. The soup was delicately balanced, and the dish worked as a whole, though the edible flowers reäppeared.

The third dish was ‘Corn — Fed[sic] Chicken and Foie Gras Terrine, Roasted Fig Chutney, Brioche’; the terrine was pleasantly rich, though the choice of vegetable—sweetcorn—was a little odd, and taken together with the fig chutney, possibly made the dish too sweet. However, texturally, the crisp brioche successfully offset the terrine.

The first and only fish of the meal appeared in the fourth dish—‘Seared Seabass, Asparagus and Broad Beans, Pea, and Mint Veloute[sic]’. The seabass was cooked well, though the provision of accompanying vegetables was perhaps excessive, and they themselves had not particularly been elevated from the state of nature whence they came. However, the velouté was pleasantly fresh, and performed its rôle admirably.

What came closest to a main course was the ‘Pan- Roasted[sic] Veal Loin and Madeira Braised Cheek, Roasted Cauliflower and Charred Cauliflower, Tempura of Tender Stem Broccoli, Bitter Lemon Puree, Jersey Pearls, Madeira Jus’, which surpassed our already high expectations. The loin was optimally cooked, almost, though not, falling apart on the fork. The jus complemented the meat well, and the cauliflower also matched it (and this time, was in reasonable proportion to the meat); the sole imperfection was that the cheek had a little too much bite.

We now proceed to pudding (or ‘dessert’ in their words²). The ‘pre-dessert’ was a ‘Peach Melba’³, constituting a scoop of vanilla ice cream, served with slices of fresh peach and raspberry, and a raspberry coulis, all topped with spun sugar; despite the relative simplicity of this dish (the sugarwork notwithstanding), the flavours, being a familiar combination, were not unsuccessfully combined. The spun sugar was a good addition, in that it increased textural variance.

The final proper dish was ‘Strawberry “Mizi” Ice Cream Sorbet, with Lavender Meringue, and Gin Jelly’. The ‘Mizi’ turned out to be a cylinder of vanilla ice cream, with a strip of sorbet running through it, and a wooden stick wittily protruding from the end. It was served with a possibly damson gin jelly, a crumb, lavender meringue, and a tempered chocolate helix. The flavours combined well, and the textural contrast between the ice cream and sorbet was an interesting and pleasant feature.

The ‘petits fours’—an array of sweetmeats, including, inter alia, a macaron, a tweel, some fudge, a lemon mousse, and a fruit jelly—concluded the meal pleasantly⁴.