Category: Restaurants

With the leaves turning and the evenings darkening, we introduce the autumn tasting menu at Le Saumon: eleven courses, ninety minutes and a deep sense of loss. It opens with a chilled pumpkin consommé served in a teacup and ends with a bonito tart that tastes like a long goodbye.

Highlights include a seared scallop on a bed of smoked chestnut, a dish called Memory of Rain and a cheese course so aggressive that we provide a lie down room. The menu costs 142 treats per head, or 210 with the pairing. Reservations are open until the end of the year, with a waiting list that now stretches to 2029.

Le Saumon opened in 2018 with a single ambition: to serve salmon in a way that made people forgive their past. We chose a space on Harbour Street, painted the walls the colour of low tide and installed a chandelier made of 400 cutlery forks.

Our opening night had 84 reservations and a power cut at 7:45. We served the tasting menu by candlelight, and guests described it as ‘intimate, hungry and slightly flammable.’ The salmon, cured in beetroot and gin, was the star. Since then we have served 142,000 guests, lost three chandeliers and received a letter from a pigeon who wished to apply for a position.

It was 2016, and I had an idea: a restaurant shaped like a giant teapot. The spout would be the entrance. The lid would be the skylight. The handle, I reasoned, would be a bar.

It cost 410,000 treats to build and opened to a flurry of excitement. On the first night, a table of eight cats got stuck in the spout. On the second, it rained, and the lid leaked. By the end of the month, the critics had named it ‘the saddest vessel in the district.’ I closed it after 91 days. The teapot still stands, now a pet hotel. I have never forgiven myself, nor the lid.

In 2014, I opened a small trattoria on Maple Row with eleven tables, a wood fired oven and a mural of a dignified tomato. I called it Trattoria Whisker. The first night, we served 31 covers and I wept in the larder.

The menu was short: linguine with clams, a fish of the day, a tiramisu that I still dream about. The reviewer from the Hollow Oak Gazette called it ‘a revelation, but with too much garlic.’ I framed the review and hung it by the bathroom. Today the trattoria seats 64 and serves 190 on a Saturday, but the tomato mural remains. It is the only part of the place that has never asked for a raise.