Voyage with Adam Simmonds, London NW1: ‘A bit like eating at a weight-loss camp’ – restaurant review | Grace Dent on restaurants
It takes thousands of hours in a hot kitchen to cook like thisKing’s Cross in London is a place where a million voyages begin and end, each and every week.Which may explain why so much cash has been thrown at the area around the station to turn it into “an aspirational lifestyle destination”, rather than somewhere to stomp through grumpily while dragging a suitcase.By and large, however, this proposed glow-up has failed – the Euston Road will always be an unlovable, multi-laned traffic snarl-up – although now, if you creep into the Megaro hotel, you’ll find a minimalist Scandi restaurant, Voyage with Adam Simmonds.This plain, dark brown, oak-panelled room sits rather incongruously inside the recently restyled Megaro, which now has a Britpop, Austin Powers-esque, rock’n’roll theme and suites boasting names such as Groove Britannia and Pop Diva; Backstage Britannia comes complete with acid smiley face pillows.If the Megaro is a celebration of the 1990s London party scene, however, Voyage is a post-party detox in Gällivare, Sweden.
Dinner is a five- or seven-course tasting menu of painstakingly prepped gastronomical visions,Take our first course, named simply “Oyster”,One word, no clues,Fancy, Scandi-influenced menus – and I have seen many – never reveal what you’re ordering, although the portion sizes are almost guaranteed to be minute, as if they’re designed to feed psychic hamsters,That “Oyster”, by the way, turned out to be something very delicious indeed: a bivalve mollusc from France with teeny-tiny flecks of compressed granny smith apple, white asparagus, wood sorrel and tapioca pearls, which a flurry of chefs in the open kitchen assembled meticulously with tweezers.
Similarly, when Voyage’s menu reads “Sweetbread”, you can expect a single veal sweetbread perched on a delicate plinth of kohlrabi served two ways – raw and salt-baked – with a dash of onion puree, a pied mouton mushroom and a whisper of chicken jus in its yellow mustard seed sauce.Voyage’s journey might, to some diners, feel like a trip to a weight-loss camp, although admittedly we were on several occasions offered some good rye bread with whipped butter.Even so, you should expect dinner here to be light and dainty, so on no account take a fine-dining refusenik who will pine for a side of buttered spuds with the “Venison”.That aged venison comes with a slice of salt-baked beetroot, another slice of raw beetroot and a puree of spinach, parsley and juniper.Adam Simmonds spent his formative years at Le Manoir aux Quat’ Saisons, so his style was always heading towards the precise, refined, faultless and crisp.
Voyage feels like a journey through all the various stoves behind which he has stood over a long career – at Le Gavroche, the Ritz and the Halkin, let alone the Lanesborough and L’Escargot.It takes thousands of hours in hot kitchens to cook like Simmonds does.For me, the highlight of our meal was “Celeriac”, a bowl of cubed, salt-baked, roasted and fermented celeriac with truffle, plus some pieces of shiitake mushroom and walnut, all finished with celeriac broth.Celeriac cooked in five different ways in a single dish is as time-consuming as it sounds, but it’s worth it for this level of vegetarian joy.Also stridently finickety was “Lobster”, in which a forkful of lobster meat sat in a clear broth with some razor clam and squid.
Like all fancy hotel restaurants, Voyage’s clientele included several guests who had possibly ambled in hoping for a caesar salad and a side of fries and were now knee-deep in a Noma-style nosh-up.And if the celeriac and the lobster dishes had puzzled them, they hadn’t seen pudding yet.A bowl of pale smears and creams of varying textures eventually revealed itself to be compressed pear infused with tea and kombucha, some koji ice-cream and some chocolate ganache with a few chestnut drops and a hazelnut cream.Not over-sweet and, in fact, by some interpretations of the word, not really dessert at all.Voyage is not for everyone, sure, but others will love it.
The service is warm, knowledgable and determinedly proud of Simmonds’ hard work, and they sent us on our way with delightful rosebud tea bags that had the look and feel of something I might have made at Brownies.These were packed into a homemade envelope, complete with a letter from Simmonds himself, and sealed with wax at the table, as if they were issuing me with a medieval death warrant.None of this, as far as I remember it, felt remotely normal at the time, and the whole experience becomes even weirder in its retelling.Voyage is definitely a trip.Voyage with Adam Simmonds 23 Euston Road, London NW1, 020-3146 0222.
Open lunch Thurs-Sat, noon-2,30pm, dinner Weds-Sat, 6-9,30pm,From about £65 a head à la carte; five-course tasting menu £85; seven-course tasting menu £115, all plus drinks and service,The next episode of Grace’s Comfort Eating podcast is out on Tuesday 1 April – listen to it here
UK politics: Unite hits back at Starmer over Birmingham bin strike, questioning Labour’s backing for ‘working people’– as it happened
The war of words between Keir Starmer and the Unite union is escalating. After No 10 issued a strong statement criticising its conduct in the Birmingham bin strike (see 1.32pm), Unite has hit back, questioning Labour’s commitment to “working people” and saying the government should intervene directly in the dispute and force the council to settle.In a statement issued in response to what Downing Street said earlier, Sharon Graham, the Unite general secretary, said:It is not surprising that many workers in Britian question the Labour government’s commitment to working people when it issues a statement clearly blaming bin workers in a dispute not of their making.The bottom line about this dispute is that these workers woke up one morning to be told they would be taking up to an £8,000 pay cut
Downing Street says Trump’s tariffs signal ‘new era’ in global economics
Donald Trump’s tariffs signal a new global economic era, Downing Street has said, as economists warned that the British government would probably have to raise taxes in response.No 10 said on Friday the prime minister believed that this week’s trade announcement by the US president, which has started a global trade war and sent stock markets tumbling, marked a turning point in history.Keir Starmer is due to speak to European and Commonwealth leaders in a series of calls over the next few days before setting out on Monday how he intends to respond more fully.Senior MPs have called on him not to give too much ground to Washington in trade talks, cautioning against trying to become “the 51st US state”.The prime minister is expected to say next week that he wants to cut red tape and remove more planning restrictions in order to boost growth, but experts say this is unlikely to fill a new black hole in the autumn budget
Emails reveal extent of peer’s role in asking minister to commercial event in parliament
New documents reveal the extent of a Labour peer’s involvement in organising the attendance of a minister at a commercial event in parliament.Emails show how David Evans contacted officials working closely with Sharon Taylor, a housing minister in the House of Lords, who was to be the keynote speaker at an event on housing that Lord Evans of Watford was hosting in parliament.Evans is under formal investigation by the House of Lords watchdog after a series of Guardian stories revealed his involvement in an apparent cash-for-access venture. He hosted commercial events in parliament, similar to the one to which he invited Taylor, on behalf of his son Richard’s company, which was charging up to £25,000 for sponsorship of the events. Evans owns a one-third shareholding in the business
Shabana Mahmood: lord chancellor with political nous unafraid to shake up system
Shabana Mahmood’s potential as a future cabinet minister was first noticed by the former deputy Labour leader Tom Watson in the 90s over tea and samosas at her family’s end-of-terrace Birmingham home.Watson, a seasoned fixer, had become a close friend of her father, Mahmood Ahmed, the chair of Birmingham Labour party. When political problems arose, Watson and fellow Labour party organisers would be guided through to comfy sofas in the family sitting room.He said the group, nearly all middle-aged men, would “start babbling” about the latest ructions and discuss how to negotiate multilayered West Midlands politics involving factions and complex community alliances.Inevitably, Ahmed would turn towards his daughter, who had appeared with a fresh pot of tea
UK politics: Starmer warns Trump’s US tariffs not just ‘short-term tactical exercise’ – as it happened
Some commentators have assumed that President Trump is just using tariffs as a negotiating ploy. Given that he has announced tariffs on Canada and Mexico, only to cancel them very quickly, there is a theory that he is doing the same thing again, only on a global scale. Alternatively, there is a view that a prolonged, negative reaction – falling share prices, rising inflation, higher unemployment? – could lead him to change his mind quite soon.During the Q&A at the Labour local elections campaign launch earlier, Keir Starmer in effect rejected all these theories. He said that what Trump was doing was the start of “a new era”
After Doge come Doze and Dope | Brief letters
Two further UK government departments to add to the list, the first of which appears to be in operation already: Doze (the Department of Zero Effort) for managing communications and Dope (the Department of Preconceived Expectations) for managing disillusioned MPs.Dr Anthony IsaacsLondon In terms of art therapy, half an hour spent in the Rothko room at Tate Modern at least once a year has done wonders for my mental health (Take two Van Goghs daily: the growing popularity of museum prescriptions, 31 March).Peter de VoilKing’s Cliffe, Northamptonshire In responding to Nels Abbey’s article about racial slurs and hate crime, your letter writer is right to note that “many lesbian and gay men object to being called ‘queer’” (30 March). I would add that many of us bisexuals object to it too.Ria HopkinsonHolloway, London I do so hope that the story about a coffee-cup-shaped bag was an April fool (Letters, 1 April)
‘Too sticky. Too saucy. Too weird’: could I persuade my son to eat the food of my heritage?
How to turn excess egg yolks into an umami-packed flavouring – recipe | Waste not
Benjamina Ebuehi’s recipe for double chocolate brownie tart | The sweet spot
Voyage with Adam Simmonds, London NW1: ‘A bit like eating at a weight-loss camp’ – restaurant review | Grace Dent on restaurants
Get a head: brassicas top Australia’s best-value fruit and veg for April
How to cook the perfect roast whole new potatoes – recipe | Felicity Cloake's How to cook the perfect …