Jimi Famurewa reviews Sketch Lecture Room & Library: Perplexing kind of awful provokes exhilarating anger

Like an illuminati clubhouse: The spectacular interior of Sketch Lecture Room & Library
Jimi Famurewa @jimfam13 February 2020

Ambience: 2/5

Food: 2/5

Let the record show that it was all going pretty well for 20 minutes or so. Having stepped beyond the scaffolded exterior of Sketch and through the neon-lit, whumping gloom of a busy foyer, we were ushered into the Lecture Room & Library, a plush, grandly domed sort of illuminati clubhouse, and basically spent the first moments just laughing at the mad, hushed spectacle of it.

Being entirely too much, of course, is precisely what you want from Sketch: restaurateur Mourad Mazouz and chef Pierre Gagnaire’s cheerfully exorbitant, 16-year-old gastroplex and Fashion Week favourite housed in an 18th-century Mayfair townhouse, the former site of Christian Dior’s London atelier. This particular kitchen (not to be confused with the ’grammably pink Gallery) was recently awarded a third Michelin star, which felt like reason enough to relax into its high-grade silliness because whatever we thought of the clenched atmosphere, gaudily blinged toilets and unconscionable prices, we at least knew that those stars pointed to a certain quality level. We knew, didn’t we, that what awaited us would be unquestionably good?

Reader, it was not good.

It was, in fact, the perplexing kind of awful that causes you to question both your sanity and basic culinary instincts, as if you’re being systematically gaslit by endless jellies, foams and lobes of foie gras. Do crêpes really gain something when they are served fridge-cold and smeared with an acridly soapy curried endive filling? Should a truffled black rice mousse have the bilious, rubberised consistency of a hurriedly microwaved mug cake? These were the questions my friend and I asked ourselves — again and again — as we watched other lunch-time diners pick at sterile miseries so far through the diamanté looking glass of fine dining they barely looked like food any more.

Sterile miseries: Dishes at the three Michelin-starred Mayfair restaurant 

There are two, seven-course tasting menus here and my £125 veg-focused one (chosen for variety’s sake) unfurled as a sustained, merciless attack on the entire concept of vegetarianism. ‘Spiced vegetable consommé’ was a performance art piece of raw veg scraps arrayed on the edge of a bowl of very salty bouillon powder-level broth (‘They’ve forgotten to cook yours,’ noted my mate, with grim relish). Salt-baked leek brought a single baton of veg, black, bitter and sludgy like something prised from the bottom of a crisper drawer. By the time my equivalent of a fish course was revealed to be a very small, single quenelle of white wine sorbet, I honestly didn’t know whether to cry or grudgingly applaud the audacious brass neck of it.

The meat menu, which did actually feature a perfectly cooked, butter-seeping piece of wild turbot amid the palate-deadening buckets of premium ingredients, was, I suppose, marginally better. And the concluding banquet of miniature, afternoon tea-style puddings mostly reminded us, after three painful hours, what mild satisfaction at a restaurant table could feel like.

But then came the bill, which arrived in a hollowed-out copy of Moby Dick and was the sort of thing to make you want to fling a harpoon. Nearly £400 after service, for two people to drink almost nothing and be scantly fed very slowly. Even writing it down I feel myself vibrating anew with an almost exhilarating anger. But look, if just one person now rethinks a plan to go here, it will not have been totally wasted. If you’re the type of person who has always longed to sit down to a three-star culinary splurge, the Lecture Room & Library may offer a very expensive means to feel better about yourself. But for me, it is an example of the worst kind of brazen restaurant, a culinary carnival game to be avoided at all costs.

Sketch Lecture Room & Library

1 Tasting menu £145

1 Vegetarian tasting menu £125

2 Glasses of Breaky Bottom Cuvée Reynolds Stone Brut £51

3 Bottles of still water £15

2 Espressos £10

1 Charity donation £1

Total £347

9 Conduit Street, Mayfair, W1 (020 7659 4500; sketch.london)

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