Cord

This restaurant is associated with the Cordon Bleu cookery school. This institute was established in Paris in 1895 and it taught culinary luminaries such as Julia Childs and Mary Berry, amongst many others. There are now 35 linked Cordon Bleu schools, of which London is just one. The restaurant, which opened in 2022, can be accessed through the café on Fleet Street and has an open kitchen. The head chef here is Karl O’Dell, who joined here in 2023 from Park Row in Soho. He was formerly the head chef of Texture. The dining room, searing fifty or so diners, is smartly decorated with a view into a large open kitchen. The tasting menu was priced at £118, but there was an a la carte choice also. Starters were priced at £21- £29, main courses £28 to £42, side dishes £6 to £9 and desserts £14 to £16. There were nine chefs in the kitchen today.

The wine list had 120 labels and ranged in price from £30 to £600, with a median price of £85 and an average markup to retail price of 3.1 times, which is not bad for central London. Sample references were Touraine Gamay Domaine de la Brossette 2020 at £45 for a bottle that you can find in the high street for £18, Albariño Genio Y Figura Bodegas Attis Rías Baixas 2022 at £66 compared to its retail price of £28, and G.S.M The Steading Torbreck 2019 at £96 for a wine that will set you back £34 in the high street. For those with the means there was Sandraia Bolgheri Poggio al Tesoro Superiore 2017 at £165 compared to its retail price of £74, and Chateau Mouton Rothschild 2007 at £600 for a wine whose current market value is £488. Corkage was £40.

The meal began with a trio of canapes. Crab and Chalk Stream trout tartlet had a delicate base with fresh crab combined with trout tartare and a subtle touch of chilli. This was a pleasing combination of flavours and textures, even if farmed river trout like this is never thrilling. Slightly less good were cylinders of pastry containing goat cheese mousse with black and green olives. The pastry was just a touch overcooked and the dish was a little salty even to my taste. Perhaps another balancing element to the richness of the cheese might have improved it. The best of the three canapes was Iberico ham with mustard and dill pickle resting on a hash brown potato base. The ham and potato worked very well together their flavours lifted nicely by the bite of mustard (average 15/20 canapes). 

Breads were all made in-house. A “nearly brioche” bread was made with brioche and pastry mix and flavoured with smoked butter. There was also baguette with fennel seed wholemeal sourdough. These were high-quality breads, having excellent texture. They were served with a choice of butter smoked with salt or butter flavoured with wild mushroom powder (made with shimeji, chanterelle and other mushrooms) and tarragon.

Ravioli of lobster from Scotland and sea urchin from Iceland was coloured black with vegetable charcoal rather than squid ink, and had good texture. This was served on a bed of spinach and came with a veloute made from lobster shells, ginger and lemongrass. On the side was a lobster bun with French Sturia caviar, a rather low-quality supplier. The seafood flavour came through well and the velouté was rich and enjoyable, but this would be even better with a higher quality caviar, say from a company like Kaviari or Kaluga Queen or N25 or Petrossian (15/20).

Next was a pretty artichoke dish. The artichoke was lightly pickled and came with mustard seeds and cockles, along with a watercress broth flavoured with cockle broth. On the side was breaded artichoke and tarragon that had been deep fried, along with a dipping sauce made from mascarpone and Madagascar Voantsy Perifery pepper. Although nice to look at, the dipping sauce was too acidic to my taste, while cockles are hard to make anything other than chewy. The pickled artichoke itself was pleasant, but this dish wasn’t in the same league as the others (13/20).

Monkfish was barbecued and glazed with soy. This came with avocado and a dressing of basil, dill and tequila, the monkfish jus bones being deglazed with tequila. There was also a triangular cake of monkfish trimmings with torched avocado. The sauce worked well, though for me the monkfish was cooked just a fraction longer than ideal. Monkfish is a tricky fish to work with, and gets overcooked if you as much as look at it the wrong way, and I wonder whether the dish might have worked better with a different fish, such as sea bass (14/20).

The best savoury dish was Scottish venison en croute, along with a morel mushroom stuffed with bacon and chicken mousse. There was also a cabbage mousse with dill oil, pear chutney with port and red wine and a choux farci with bacon and pickled cabbage. The venison itself was flambeed in olive oil and cinnamon, and presented on a basket of hot stones before being plated. A rich venison jus completed the dish. The puff pastry around the venison was lovely and delicate, the venison cooked lightly and having plenty of flavour. All the other elements were classy too, with the cabbage providing an earthy foil to the richness of the meat (16/20).

A gin and tonic pre-dessert was a bubbly gin and tonic with aloe vera jelly, crushed ice and lemon juice. This was pleasant, though maybe a touch more lemon to might have been useful, as a pre-dessert should above all be refreshing (14/20). The main dessert was a modern take on Black Forest gateaux.Black Forest “cherries” appeared, some real and some artificial. The latter included a notional cherry made of vanilla skin with a base of white chocolate mousse, the other with a core of cake made from kirsch and base of feuilletine confection made from flaked caramelized crepes. This all worked very nicely, the chocolate’s richness nicely offset by the sharpness of the cherry (15/20). We finished with the lovely Blue Mountain coffee from Difference Coffee.

Service was excellent, with a helpful French waiter and a highly qualified sommelier, Jiachen Lu. She won both the Gosset Matchmakers and Copa Jerez UK competitions in 2023. The bill came to £212 per person, but you could eat for around £125 if you went a la carte and shared a modest bottle of wine. Cord was a really nice surprise to me, as it is not a restaurant with a high profile. The culinary technique on display is classy, the menu is appealing and the service lovely. Although there were one or two dishes that could be tweaked to improve a little, this restaurant is already operating at a level that is at least as good as many places with Michelin stars. It deserves to do well.