Fay Maschler reviews Antidote: Michael Hazlewood branches out

Michael Hazlewood's new venture served Fay Maschler some eerily outstanding food and has charming, wine-savvy staff 
Full service: Antidote has a busy bar as well as its restaurant
Matt Writtle
Fay Maschler29 November 2017

A Sunday newspaper reporting on the “dire shortage” of chefs across the industry “from chefs de partie in brassieres [sic] to sous-chefs in the trendiest new London ventures” made me smile. But the picture it conjures up of younger, lither versions of Lord Sewel, sweat runnelling into their bra cups while working in restaurant kitchens, deflects serious attention from what can be termed a crisis. There are not enough chefs to go round.

Instead of moaning and keening, some chentrepreneurs (my word) are setting up their own training schemes or going out to schools and colleges to describe alluringly the rewards in hospitality — and there are many beyond appearing on Saturday Kitchen. Meanwhile, Twitter is littered with slightly desperate messages.

One is from Michael Hazlewood, a chef who reverses the more usual talent drain. He is New Zealand-born, Aussie-experienced (at Melbourne’s Attica), and has come to the UK. I first tasted his cooking two years ago at Toasted in Dulwich and was bowled over. Having eaten his dish of English peas with molten egg yolk, curd and nibbed almonds, there was nothing else to do but order it again. Alongside many other items.

“Hazle” as his friends and maybe even his wife know him is, as of last week, head chef at Antidote wine bar off Carnaby Street. Consultant there is Mikael Jonsson of Hedone in Chiswick, where Hazle has been spending time.

The premises owned by biodynamic wine mavens Thierry Bouteloup and Guillaume Siard first traded as La Trouvaille, which means a lucky find. Punters are even luckier now. The ground-floor bar offers charcuterie and cheeses as well as the menu for lunch and dinner and there are seats outside that beckon on warm evenings, but I want to eat in the first-floor dining room — so I can concentrate.

Tear-jerking tenderness: Ryeland Lamb, yoghurt, beetroots and blackcurrants
Matt Writtle

In the past I have compared the upstairs rooms to an interrogation suite. Two stark paintings that seem to have been recently added make it look no less unloved. But the waitresses are charming and also wine-savvy.

With a busy ground floor, a sizeable party in the first room of the upstairs, the kitchen located in the basement and awareness that Hazle is short-staffed, we expect longueurs in service, but that doesn’t happen. Four options in each course — apart from dessert — and four of us eating together mean that we investigate exhaustively.

I even stray into the tasting menu displayed on a blackboard, and ask if I can start with the small course of turbot cooked on the bone with shallots and lovage. The à la carte first courses are memorable for reasons I will go into in a minute, but this turbot, its virginal probity in a sauce of glossy glabrous green — British racing green, car lovers might call it — is eerily outstanding. I pass it round. We take pieces on our tongues like communicants.

To put the bonbon crunch of sweetcorn croquettes with the damp forest-floor woodsiness of girolles and underscore the combination with pungent black garlic is a wild, witty, totally successful notion. Ducks’ hearts, anchovy, mint and broad beans; just think about the mix of those textures, flavours, origins and personalities. Again, the organisation is enlightened. To all those people who have over the years tediously informed you that tomatoes are not a vegetable but a fruit, you can now say: “I know. That is why they go so well with strawberries”. And they do. Dried olives and Westcombe ricotta here urge them on.

Chorizo added to a broth that my young chum Adam thinks must be dashi, contributes a smokiness that wreathes together finely cut squid tumbled with peas as one of the main courses. He adds that seaweed butter with its rush of umami is one of the simplest but most delicious sauces for fish — as demonstrated by Stephen Harris at The Sportsman — and is perfect with the monkfish, spring cabbage and pickled radishes.

Year-old Ryeland Lamb (that’s almost hogget) and also 75-day aged beef rump are cooked slowly, assiduously to render them pink slices of almost tear-jerking tenderness. Beetroots and blackcurrants, baby carrots and gooseberries are the respective accompaniments, straight from Jollity Farm.

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The three desserts have fruit as starting points — raspberries, cherries and peaches. Black cardamom makes a weirdly medicinal ice cream accompanying the cherries but there is also vanilla vinegar (a new one on me) within the flavours. Panels of dried milk looking like an interesting but failed attempt to be meringue cover raspberries and crème fraîche, where meadowsweet, used in healing, adds its fragrance.

Wines are marked up with too much alacrity and it’s wise to seek advice. My instinct is to look to Germany and Eastern Europe, although the French organic Barbaste from Mas des Agrunelles, a blend of roussane, marsanne and chardonnay, combines intricate deliciousness with a price (£39) that is at the lower end. Or eat on Mondays when wines are sold at retail price.

Hazle’s latest recruiting tweet asks for a sous chef and a chef de partie stipulating as (very fair) conditions four doubles, three days off. Anyone who wants to learn from the best — and I dare say Hazle is also unusually amiable when not delirious with tiredness — apply now. And get your mates to consider the cheffing business. It has a wide-open future for which not everyone needs a brassière.

Lunch Mon-Sat noon-2.30pm. Dinner 6pm-10.30pm. Lunch menu £19/23 for two/three courses. Tasting menu £40. A la carte, a meal for two with wine, about £120 for two including 12.5 per cent service.

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