AUBERGINE'S
NOT an ounce of fat" pretty well sums up everything about Aubergine - menu, cooking, staff and philosophy. Maybe this is a funny thing to say about a luxurious restaurant and a chef with aspirations; it's certainly not the first thing you think of. But spend a busy morning with Gordon Ramsay at his seven-month-old restaurant and you begin to understand.
Aubergine has the warm, sunny glow of the Mediterranean with just enough to keep the eyes interested. The same can be said of the cooking. Ramsay has just brought out his second menu at the restaurant. It is an intriguing read, confidently promising to deliver more than is printed on the page. When you read an item such as: "Roasted langoustine and salmon with ratatouille en gelée, sauce gazpacho", you begin to believe there is more happening than meets the eye.
"This is a progression from the first menu," Ramsay says. "As my cooks are feeling more assured, I can afford to be a little more daring - we can turn out dishes that are a bit more involved." There is a kitchen staff of only seven, including Ramsay. "I had to play it safe at first and be able to do it all quickly. But now I'd rather take an extra two or three minutes with each dish."
Ramsay is excited about the quality of the new season's produce and his new menu is a response to that. The range of the menu is deliberately limited. "With just four dishes in each section I can control the way things go out of the kitchen so that I'm totally happy with them all. I'm actually bursting with enthusiasm and want to do as much as can be done."
Two-and-a-half years as Marco Pierre White's sous chef at Harvey's and 18 months at Le Gavroche prepared Ramsay for two years' cooking in Paris for both Joâl Robuchon and Guy Savoy. He says he went "begging for as many menus" as he could lay his hands on, and worked on understanding what they were about. "Now I want my cooking to be able to say ‘that's me on the plate'."
He regards Savoy of the eponymously named restaurant in Paris as his mentor and cuisine legäre as his metier. The hallmarks of this light style are evident throughout the new menu.
"People come here for a three-course meal but I don't want them to feel heavy and overly full at the end," he says. To this end, he uses minimal amounts of fat in cooking and aims to keep flavours light and natural.
An integral part of this lighter style is a move towards fish and away from meat. "I have a knack for fish so we do lots of it." Customers seem to like it, with 70% of them choosing fish.
Many of his dishes have great layerings of flavours, but he also recognises that this is not always appropriate. "We don't mess around with beef, it's cooked classically and simply." So there is a ribeye of Scotch beef on the menu. On the other hand his crepinette of oxtail from the first menu, which has a very elaborate preparation and is flavoured with five spice powder, was so popular customers are still asking for it when they book.
Many plates are elaborately composed, but not for elaboration's sake. "I believe in taste first and foremost, but if you offer a well composed plate customers taste it with their eyes and enjoy it before they've even tried it."
Being talked through some of Ramsay's favourite dishes on his new menu is instructive. The salad of red mullet with fried artichokes, sauce antiboise has all the flavours of the south of France. The mullet is cut in squares, seasoned with saffron and roasted in olive oil. The saffron, he says, not only gives taste but also enhances the effect of roasting on the skin, giving the red mullet skin a gilded colour.
Whole artichoke leaves are lightly fried and mixed in with salad greens. The sauce antiboise uses a fresh tomato purée. "And when I say fresh, we bake it in the oven for three and a half hours with garlic and herbs," Ramsay explains. The sauce is based on vegetable stock and finished with olive oil, coriander and black olives and is topped with deep-fried red basil leaves.
The roasted langoustine and salmon with ratatouille en gelée, sauce gazpacho is visually stunning. Long batons of salmon are roasted briefly with the langoustine so that it is cooked on the outside and still pink inside. The salmon and langoustine is mixed with aubergine, courgette, fennel and red, yellow and green peppers. Stock for the gelée is made from the langoustine heads and is flavoured with saffron. Ramsay slices this terrine himself for each order with an electric knife so as not to break the gelée.
The sauce - a puréed gazpacho made with very sweet cherry tomatoes, liquidised with lots of salt so it becomes very frothy - is topped with olive oil. This separates and has the visual effect of pink marble on the plate. It is served with little quenelles of a tapenade of olives and fresh anchovies. The whole is a brilliant combination of cool and warm flavours.
With fillet of sea bass with braised salsify jus vanilla, the fish is roasted on the skin side to make it crisp, and is served on a bed of braised salsify. The sauce is two-thirds fish stock, made from the sea bass bones flavoured with vanilla pods, and one-third vegetable stock. "It's finished with a hand mixer and we put the froth on top of the fish."
Escalope of salmon confit served in a soup of spring vegetables and basil is a main course not a soup, and is not as wet a dish as the word soup implies. "We take a nice large tranche of salmon cooked in goose fat - which is rather naughty, but then the salmon is very healthy - at 70ºC for seven minutes," says Ramsay. It is finished for a further two minutes and is served with a soup of spring vegetables, like a pistou. There are baby navettes, carrots, leeks and pencil watercress. It's all arranged around steamed spinach in the centre with the salmon on top and the soup is put around the edge.
Pigeon poche grillé, purée of swede and wild mushroom ravioli, jus Madeira is every bit as complicated as it sounds. "The pigeon is poached and then grilled; this renders the fat content and it is then finished on the grill," explains Ramsay. Stock for the sauce is made from the carcasses and is quite intense but not much reduced. It is, however, enriched with Madeira which brings out the sweet quality of the pigeon. They are served on purée of swede and braised shredded cabbage. A very light ravioli filled with wild mushrooms bound with a light mousse accompanies this, resting on a bed of steamed spinach.
Cräme brulée jus Granny Smith is a dish Albert Roux said couldn't be done. "When I did my menu for Albert Roux he said to me you can't do a cräme brulée out of the mould," says Ramsay. But when this cräme brulée was made, they broke the mould.
Ramsay's version is made with UHT milk because "it is denser and means fewer egg yolks need to be used and the brulée will be lighter. It tastes more of brulée than egg." The brulées are cooked in small moulds and turned out one hour before service and glazed to order. They are served with very thin slices of dried apple, left in the oven overnight with just the pilot light on so they dry completely while retaining their flavour. The sauce, done à la minute, consists of unpeeled, juiced Granny Smith apples. "Doing them at the last moment keeps the beautiful, pale green colour and gives a very clean, bracing and refreshing sauce."o
