My wife turns thirty at the end of March. Yes, she is younger than me, and no, that is not a humble brag, it’s facts. We have a big trip for the big birthday to celebrate it, all based on dishes she really wants to eat. In brum we’ll be at Opheem for crab crumpets and hopefully Bengali fish stew. Some days later A Wong will dish-up the king crab and Szechuan aubergine dishes she wants, before it’s off to Paris and San Sebastian for the langoustine at L’Ambrosie and Nestor tortilla respectively. Sophie picks dishes over complete menus; singular items that she craves and studies until she gets them. It’s how we ended-up at Woven by Adam Smith and Chapter One. It’s why we booked Corenucopia. She saw the reel of Clare Smyth piping the lobster mousse in between the dover sole and siphoning the batter around it. Nevermind if it was £54, what Sophie wants, Sophie gets. Exhibit A: Me.
We go to Corenucopia with my great friend and his soon to be wife, Luca and Jess. Walking through the backstreets of Chelsea post morning Bloody Mary’s to the small townhouse near Sloane Square. The tables are a little cramped, yet comfortable enough. There are a lot of menus. A lot of menus. Menus for the food and for the wine. A separate negroni menu. A potato menu. Even a vinegar menu for the chips. It’s all quite exhausting and we settle into a selection of negronis that differ in success. I tell Luca that the coffee negroni I have isn’t as good as the one he does when the campari is infused with coffee beans, he tries it and agrees. At £19 it is double what he used to charge. With these we have the skewers of Core fried chicken with caviar. Luca thinks the oil needs refreshing, whilst Sophie and I both agree that they aren’t quite as good as the ones we had at Smyth’s Whisky and Seaweed bar, which isn’t surprising given it shares the same kitchen as the 3* Core.
It’s at this point that lunch starts to take a tumble for the worse. My negroni is long finished but I find myself eating the starter with neither of the bottles of red poured, whilst the starter of chicken parfait is pokey and wouldn’t be in the top ten of parfaits I’ve eaten in the last year. I tried Sophie’s guinea fowl consomme, delicate and kissed with madeira, nice, but not as nice as the one Luca’s mother makes. Jess loves her scallop, whilst Luca’s lobster bisque with thermidor toast is tasty but not on the same level as the one at Bentley’s two days later which is far braver with the brandy and intensity. Expectation is the root of all heartache said Bill Shakespeare. He ain’t wrong.
Which is a shame because three of the four mains are seriously good, though to let you in on a little secret, it’s Sophie’s dish – the reason we are here – that disappoints. My toad in the hole is incredible; lovely peppery sausage and black pudding in a batter that makes use of the siphon gun again, with a kind of porky jus loaded with piggy bits. One of the two boulangere potatoes we order works wonderfully with it. Luca loves his rump steak, Jess adores her mushroom pie, whilst Sophie’s fish has to go back immediately in a situation that is hairy for both us and the kitchen. It happens, I get it, but it’s hard not to be annoyed when it arrives fifteen minutes later with the second boulangere they forgot, leaving the one person who doesn’t like being watched eating to have to eat her dinner by herself. Maybe I’m just hypersensitive because it’s my wife. Actually, scrap that, I’m not. The situation was dealt with appallingly regardless of the star on the door and the £54 on the bill. The chips, by the way were really good, the fish underwhelming. The dover sole is cooked well but the mousse needs more lobster flavour. Only in Chelsea is this worth that kind of money.
Sophie doesn’t want dessert, but she gets one regardless as a gift from the kitchen, along with four glasses of dessert wine they give to us despite the fact that we still have half of a £175 bottle of rioja on the table. All excellent, from the instantly instagrammable sticky toffee pudding that has two sauces cascading down the ridges, to an excellent £22 profiterole with intense chocolate and vanilla notes, and the rhubarb crumble perked up with pink peppercorn and a perfect custard. The bill is £700 between four, with the fish and chips on there, and the late boulangere, and the service. We pay it first before I put it to them that it could have been a much better experience with how they handle some pretty glaring errors on their part. They shrug it off. At this level and this price point a meal is much more than just the food which arrives at the table.
7/10
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