The wine list at Spoon+
This review was first published in May 2000
Spoon+'s columnar menu, as Fay Maschler has outlined, is intended to be a kind of gastronomic Rubik cube. You select a main ingredient, then slide and click those accompaniments you fancy into place alongside it. "It's all about the freedom," explained our purring waiter. "You are the chef tonight."
Jolly good idea - though in the event we seemed to have an unerring knack of selecting the unavailable. "Sprouts of the day" (think beans, not Brussels) had failed to arrive from France, and apparently a sheikh had been in that afternoon with his entourage and they'd hoovered up all supplies of an intriguing dish of lentils, wheat and spelt. The grilled lamb saddle, when it arrived, proved to be spit-roasted veal, though the accompaniments were correct; and Spoon's "special doughnuts with a stew of red berries" were also off, for reasons which remained opaque. There were thus, last Friday night, limits to freedom. It wasn't as if we were tardy; we sat down at seven.
Sat down with two glasses of Spoon's Champagne cocktail (Purple Spoon, according to the bill): it's an unforgettable mixture of Champagne, almond syrup and vodka, served with a pink pansy flower floating in the foam. This contrives to make it smell like a garden centre on a damp day, while the milky fluid beneath, alcohol-stiff, tastes vaguely pharmaceutical. Terrible thing to do to champagne, though fun to drink and suited to the Ilfordmeets-Madison-Avenue surroundings.
Unaccountably, the free flow of the menu crashes into rigidity when the wine list is wheeled out. You'd think that this was just the place to serve a range of 50 wines by the glass, so that "the freedom" could continue to reverberate through multifarious wine combinations as diners "zigzag through the different columns and create the unthinkable" (as the menu puts it).
There's plenty of choice on the list, but no wines by the glass are listed, and no half-bottles either. Prices, needless to say, are as audacious as the lime-green walk to the lavatories or the lippy sofa in the foyer. "Inexpensive" wines log on at around three times their retail price, while a bottle of 1996 Stag's Leap Fay Vineyard Cabernet Sauvignon costs £187 in Spoon (or £215.05 after the 15 per cent service charge).
Waitrose Direct (0800 188881) will sell you the even better 1995 vintage for £39.95. Following short and emphatic negotiations, assistant sommelier Tony Batet charmingly agreed to supply us with a series of wines by the glass (we claimed we were the zappeurs incorrigibles which the menu solicits). Henschke's 1999 Louis Semillon was as subtle as this variety gets in Australia, and a fine partner for the truffle-sprinkled seasonal market vegetables served in a cumbersome stainless-steel saucepan, and my own prawn-cocktail thingie served in a glass flower vase. The 1996 dry white wine from Château Coutet will be good in 10 years, but didn't yet have much to say for itself.
From an interestingly large selection of Ribera del Duero reds (11 choices) we chose the 1994 Balbas Riserva. Bad idea: it proved so oaky that we swiftly gave up on it, preferring to drain our glasses of the superb, tongue-dredging, mineral-laden Ridge Vineyards 1996 York Creek Petite Syrah. I was by now zapping my way through rare pan-seared tuna with a fascinating crushed lemon confit and lumpy mash. That confit would have laser-shattered most wines, but the thunderous Petite Syrah stood its ground; good with the unexpected veal, too. New World wines far outnumber European selections on this list, which, given the spirit of eclecticism on the menu, is perhaps just as well.
I can't tell you exactly what these glasses cost, since Tony did us a kind of bulk deal. Chatting with him afterwards, I was given to understand that wines by the glass would begin to feature in the future, once the "wine room" (unfinished and at present curtained off like a crematorium oven) was complete. It seems logical.
Spoon+ at Sanderson
50 Berners Street, W1
