Style -- 10 days ago
Make Mondays your favourite day of the week with Lobster night at Villandry
Words: Gentleman's Journal
By Tatiana Hambro
Price: £30 Per Head | Where: 170 Great Portland Street, London, W1W 5QB | Tel: 020 7631 3131 | villandry.com,
Rumour had it over the weekend that the newly refurbished Villandry Bakery was doing something special on Mondays. On discovering that “special” meant lobsters for £15, I absorbed all the Olympic spirit our metropolis could offer and threw myself, like a javelin, toward this new-found lobster-land.
You can’t miss Villandry’s signature olive green canopy – the restaurant covers a large stretch of Great Portland Street. This unique space is so-called a ‘Food Emporium’ and offers diners a wide variety of options: choose between the romantic restaurant or buzzy bistro, sit outside or in? We (myself and some lady friends) chose out, café style, because we wanted to see the sun and one wanted to smoke.
Foregoing the booze due to the fact it was a school-night and the majority of us have new jobs to wake up for and bosses to please, I opted for a red berry iced-tea, which tasted like somewhere refreshing between a Shirley Temple and a Virgin Pimms. More mature customers will be pleased with the modest pricing: Grilled lobster with a glass of Chablis is £19; with champagne it’s £21.
To start we ordered the Mediterranean mezze platter and a portion of salt & pepper squid that vanished from the plate as quickly as the time it took to arrive. Ask for the mixed beet carpaccio with home-made ricotta – it really does taste as pretty as it looks. A resounding call for “grilled lobster and chips” bounced out from our mouths, off our menus and into the ether and we patiently waited. The grilled, medium-sized, slippery suckers arrived bathing in butter and offering themselves with an eroticism almost akin to Natalie Portman during that scene in Closer. Don’t order the salad at the expense of the fries unless you want the green, leafy equivalent of “anti-climax” served up on your plate. It spoils all the fun. Take things one-step further instead and get dessert.
Deciding what to order from the thirteen choices of dessert took a while. There were four mouths to feed, two of which require chocolate daily (else the world may rotate west on its axis) and one that just doesn’t really ‘get’ chocolate. Apart from a few curious situations in my life, given the choice, I’d just always rather have sweets. I ummed and ahhed over the apricot tart (why not?), tarte tatin (classic) and baked lemon tart (risky) before taking a shot at the pear and raspberry crumble. The other weirdoes shared a brownie. It looked good in the same way that a man in a tailored suit looks good: rich and dark. With nuts.
The crumble, however, was something quite special. And almost certainly gendered female. Served in her very own canister, the actual crumble sat loosely atop the fruity base and was mellifluously wanton. The perfect epilogue to an evening that turned out to be as naughty as it was nice. Very Natalie Portman, indeed.
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