Hibiscus night

There is that dread (I've always felt it) of the waiter who wants to tell you what to eat.

In America the 'specials' are so often to me a special horror, delivered with menace by men who should surely have something better to do.

That is what I thought when I first met them and their wares thirty years ago. And I still think that - though it is not usually polite (no, not ever polite) to say so.

This week I had my first experience of what maybe many restaurant eaters always feel, the explanation of what I might eat by someone who lightened the experience instead of darkening it.

The place was one called Hibiscus, which I now discover is a much regarded eatery, just off London's Regent Street.

I am not qualified to praise the food itself, although the intensity of the tastes is still here now, of ceps, nuts, berries and smoke from an Autumn menu which seemed uniquely ( to me) worthy of the seasonal name.

What I can report more confidently was the Ariel performance of the man who told us what we were eating - so delicately that we hardly knew he was there except in the puff of his words.

He even told us how we should eat  -, how deep the spoon should dip in to the eggshell of forest things.

We were with the dearest of old friends  - and it would be wrong to leave readers with the notion that the meal itself was anything but dear too, the word once used for 'expensive' though less so now.

Worth the money?

Yes, I would say so - and not least, maybe mostly for me, for the way in which the light words of a waiter showed how so many had done it so heavily before..

 

   

Comments

[genevieve]

oh lovely!!

[Clayton Burns]

Perhaps there are many reviews of Siddhartha Mukherjee's "The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer," in the TLS and in The Times, but I have not seen them.

Given Sir Peter's brilliant meditations on Nero, perhaps the TLS could undertake a major encounter report before Christmas, by Sir Peter, for the WSJ and The Australian as well.

I certify this book as the very best new book that I have seen in the Christmas season for the past five years. If the TLS were to post video of Sir Peter interviewing Mukherjee, that would be powerful.

[Lord Truth]

Its curious how the word "dear'is used both as a term of endearment and "expensive" in many languages-chere in French and drago in Hungarian come immediately to mind...perhaps since as an endearment it was normally applied to women and as women are,traditionally,expensive things to maintain,there is a connection... Very sensible of Stothard,that greatest of human name droppers-,to move into the restaurant world-Free grub all round boys!!

[zhang]

Love this new feature! love this page.

[Roulette Software]

The experience of a restaurant is much to do with the waiter you have. If you go in again maybe you will have another waiter and your experience will be much better.