Grace Dent reviews Les 110 de Taillevent: 'Sommeliers – you people are my favourite emergency service after the fire brigade'

Grace Dent bonds with the sommelier at Les 110 de Taillevent: London
Mottled green stuffiness: Les 110 de Taillevent
Grace Dent5 November 2015

Evidence of my Saturday evening at Les 110 de Taillevent — the sleek new London outpost of the two-Michelin-star Parisian restaurant — has emerged slowly over the past seven days. Elegant cardboard name tags bearing the names of vineyards and vintages, once attached to glasses of wine, have been found strewn in my handbag lining and jacket pockets. A glass of Renacer Punto Final Malbec 2013, then a glass of Grüner Veltliner, to be specific. And some champagne. Les 110 de Taillevent offers 110 different wines by the glass, so these aides-mémoire are pretty damn handy the morning after.

Not that Les 110 de Taillevent is a rowdy, stained-mouth, pants-in-your-pocket-by-closing-time sort of a joint. This is the slightly more approachable version of a much-worshipped French fuss fest. Take your hen party and their condom-festooned deely boppers elsewhere. Still, I defy anyone to keep a sober track of their wine journey here after three or four spins around the enormous foldout menu. For example, I distinctly remember the sommelier telling me a fabulous story about how the South African Le Cap 2009 Klein Constantia I’d slightly fallen in love with was Napoleon’s standard tipple after doctors warned him to stay off Chambertin. However, I’d never have remembered this without uncovering the name tag four days later in the bottom of my tote.

There is much else to love at Les 110 de Taillevent. It’s a great spot to take clients, parents and those who love to blether about wine. But the mottled green stuffiness, the moneyed tourist clientele and the ease with which one can spend upwards of £25 on a glass of plonk will not be to everyone’s taste.

We began the evening plonked on a table close to the door, which was unbearable, largely due to the morose faces of the teetotal diners adjacent to us. They were the sorts who’d had such a terrific wheeze doing Sober October that they’d clearly moved the goalposts. However, we moved to the bar, which has much more buzz. These are the busiest sommeliers in London — they’re forced to work like cocktail bartenders. That’s got to be worth seeing. We all know sommeliers usually spend at least half of every evening warming their bums on the radiator and pointing sadly at the second least expensive Malbec on the wine list. This is a joke. Please don’t stop bringing me wine. You people are my favourite emergency service after the fire brigade.

London's best wine bars

1/13

So, the food: this is largely faultless, Parisian fine dining. I ordered crab with remoulade to begin, envisioning something a touch more rustique than the chilled Martini glass of delicate, pulped, pale pinkness that emerged. Still, it was delicious. The pâté en croûte was achingly old-fashioned but technically fabulous. It was inhaled by my dinner guest in a flurry of grunts of adoration for the chef who had wrestled with the aspic, pastry and troublesome bain-marie. Life is too short to do this sort of thing at home.

We shared the rib of Angus beef cooked rare — perfect — with decadent pommes purée and a side of market vegetables that looked like a wet weekend in Penge, but transpired to be adorable. A plate of Comté arrived with fine charcoal crackers and nothing else. Not a grape, not a stick of celery, not a jot. I battled on bravely — I’m yet to meet a piece of Comté I’m not enraptured by.

The rum baba arrived deconstructed in three bowls so as to delight the easily pleased who loved MasterChef in 2007. Thankfully, there was no accompanying explanation of how to enjoy it. We started drinking Krug at that point — it seemed impolite not to.

I know I left the restaurant at some stage because I woke up at home, having taken off my false eyelashes and applied a youth-activating vitamin C oil. On reflection, a blood transfusion would have been more useful.

Les 110 de Taillevent: London

1 crab remoulade £16

1 pâté en croûte£12

1 rib of beef Aberdeen Angus £75

2 sides £8

1 Vieux Comté£9

1 rum baba £9

2 glasses Billecart-Salmon Brut Réserve £38

1 Châteauneuf-Du-Pape Bonneau £54

1 glass Grüner Veltliner £5

1 glass Klein Constantia £18

1 glass Renacer Punto Final £9

TOTAL £253

16 Cavendish Square, W1 (020 3141 6016; les-110-taillevent-london.com)

Follow Going Out on Facebook and on Twitter @ESgoingout

Create a FREE account to continue reading

eros

Registration is a free and easy way to support our journalism.

Join our community where you can: comment on stories; sign up to newsletters; enter competitions and access content on our app.

Your email address

Must be at least 6 characters, include an upper and lower case character and a number

You must be at least 18 years old to create an account

* Required fields

Already have an account? SIGN IN

By clicking Create Account you confirm that your data has been entered correctly and you have read and agree to our Terms of use , Cookie policy and Privacy policy .

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

Thank you for registering

Please refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged in