Claridge's, Brook Street, London W1 (020 7107 8888). Meal for two including drinks and service: £300
I can't understand why people are making such a fuss about how tough it is to get a table at Simon Rogan's new restaurant, Fera, at Claridge's. Yes, the hold music punctuated only by the filthy lie that a real human being will be with you shortly – I gave up repeatedly without speaking to anyone with a pulse – is trying. Likewise being offered a 10.45pm table sometime in 2017 by the online booking system can cause you to stab your hand with a pen. But that, I realised, was the wrong approach. All I needed to do was find a friend with enough dosh to bank with Coutts, which runs a killer concierge service and can get tables anywhere. Or someone who does a lot of business with Claridge's. Which amounts to the same thing.
That's how I did it. And yes, I could have got a table using my own name, but to reiterate: I always book under a pseudonym. Like Monty Python's Spanish inquisition, my chief weapon is surprise. The fact I had to avail myself of services available only to the wealthy to visit Fera tells you an awful lot about what we are dealing with. (NB However you get the table they will still take your credit card number and threaten to hit you for £100 a head if you attempt to cancel within 24 hours of the booking.)
Rogan made his name at L'Enclume, in the Cumbrian village of Cartmel, in a gnarly, Hobbit-house-like dining room with whitewashed, undulating walls, bare tables and polished flag stones. There, his gloriously idiosyncratic style of cooking with its use of fresh and bitter herbs and smoking, flowers, meat from the hills above and fish from the sea below feels as close to an expression of landscape as any I have ever experienced. Dozens of chefs mouth dreary platitudes about expressing a sense of place through local produce; at L'Enclume Rogan, using both a unique palate and palette, has done this.
But now he's at Claridge's, in the space once occupied by Gordon Ramsay, and we are not in Cumbria any more, Dorothy. An ante-room is walled in red velvet and feels like a womb with a view. It shouts bordello more than restaurant. That leads to a redesigned dining room. At its centre is a bare spindle tree. The walls are shades of grey and green, and a few dishes are delivered on smoothed pebbles. This is rustic, by way of Chanel. Fera is Latin for wild which is hilarious, because this restaurant is as domesticated as my cat. There is a semi-open kitchen and most dishes are, pace Noma in Copenhagen, delivered to the table by the cooks themselves.
As at L'Enclume, the tables are bare. This has been sold as a mark of informality, but a clothless table does not informality make. This is still a grand, formal restaurant in the Mayfair tradition, the sort where the sommelier looks hurt when you tell him you will pour your wine yourself. Reminder to waiters: it is not my job to make you feel comfortable or enfranchised. He gave in only after we emphasised the point twice, but couldn't help himself mopping drips of water off the table after we'd poured as if to say "If only you'd left it to me…"
The à la carte is £85, with a first tasting menu at £95, and another one which is so long it reads like the credits to Star Wars, at £125. We ran up a bill for £306, with the lower-priced tasting menu, a bottle of skanky rosé from the section marked "cheapskate restaurant critics" – it still cost £37 – and two poor cocktails. One with egg yolk and bourbon came with a dusting of ash which made you choke as you drank. Once I'd stopped coughing I clocked the flavour: it was a spit for Bailey's. For £15. A rhubarb cocktail was just an indistinct fruity something.
After this everything picked up. For all my doubts about the restaurant's premise, there is no doubting the brilliance of Rogan's cooking. There is a crisp wafer made with pea flour with a thick foam tasting of the essence of peas, laid with the anise kick of fennel. A dice of raw mackerel is dotted with caviar and placed on a soothing "seawater cream". It is a day at the beach with the wind in your face, in just a few mouthfuls. From the luscious side of the menu comes a dice of long-braised duck hearts, beneath a thick cream of foamy mash flavoured with the salty hit of Winslade cheese.
There are brilliant green sauces and gels flavoured with lovage or borage or even something as humble as broccoli, but still punching above its weight. Sweet, raw prawns are laid with warm, just melting pork fat. A tranche of crisp-skinned brill is accompanied by blewit mushrooms and a purée of the same which could take down porcini any day in the ring. A soft piece of pork cooked sous-vide is left pink with an ivory layer of fat which won't be to most tastes but is to mine. It sits alongside more pig that is braised and seared. The only dish to fail is a dice of raw rib-eye steak in a dressing of green apple juice that completely overwhelms the beef's flavour.
But there is another problem, the one I whined about a few weeks ago. This is a tasting menu and none of the things you really want to eat – the duck hearts, the prawns, the brill, the pork – turn up in the portions you hope for. They are here and then gone.
Dessert is the one universal let-down. At this point you want something big and brash that your pancreas won't thank you for. Instead there is a worthy mess of apple and sorrel and a sweet cheese ice which feels like an admonishment. A chamomile milkshake is the sort of thing served at the Dun Roamin' rest home before bed. I'm only 47.
Simon Rogan is a clever, driven, stubborn man with ambitions, all of which I am sure he will achieve. The prizes will come, as will the punters who can afford a bill of £300 for two. But I always ask myself a question at the end of a meal. Would I come again on my own dime? The honest answer is no. I'd prefer to put that money and effort into a trip to Cumbria. That way I could eat Rogan's magnificent food at source.
Jay's news bites
■ If you're up for the challenges of a tasting menu, then you want a restaurant that knows what it's doing. Restaurant Sat Bains in Nottingham is that place. Bains's dishes have innocent enough names – "lamb sweetbread, puy lentils, mint" for example, or "asparagus, lemon" – but what arrives is never less than complex and diverting, without being overwrought. The 10-course menu costs £89, but it's a real once-a-year splurge (restaurantsatbains.com).
■ Last year I wrote about the box-chicken project in London's Newham, run by We Are What We Do, the not-for-profit behaviour-change company. It was an attempt to wean schoolkids off fried-chicken shops, via a street-food van selling nutritionally balanced chicken stews. It is being trialled in six other locations from September. Now they need willing street food vendors. Go to wearewhatwedo.org for more details.
■ Further proof of the growing might of China in the food market: a deal has been signed to sell £50m of British pork to China – mostly the parts foolish consumers here do not want.
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or visit theguardian.com/profile/jayrayner for all his reviews in one place. Follow Jay on Twitter @jayrayner1
