Viajante

The first thing worth mentioning is that the place looks pretty good. It is definitely a nice change from some of the other, more stuffy places in Mayfair. More modern, cooler, but still very warm and welcoming. Someone has put some thought into the design and the lighting and – this is a first – there even was music. Not too loud, not intrusive, at just the right volume.

We got a table just in front of the open kitchen. Both chairs facing the action, so that you felt like you were sitting in a theatre watching a show. A bit awkward at first, to be honest. But they had asked us if we were comfortable with this table, so we couldn’t really complain.
And once you got used to it, it was actually quite interesting.

It didn’t have anything to do with the scenes you are used to seeing from one of Gordon Ramsay’s shows. No one was cursing, no one was sweating, no one seemed stressed. It all seemed extremely composed and almost choreographed.
At Le Gavroche we had a table close to the kitchen door and heard much more banging pots and plates and order shouting.

Nuno Mendes was working with the team, occasionally making a remark on one of the plates prepared by the other chefs, supervising everything, but also helping with the table service. You got the impression that he’s a really nice guy and that he has a good team working with him.

As for the food, Viajante has no à la carte. For dinner it is either a 6 course or a 12 course tasting menu. The 12 course menu has to be booked in advance. On the evening they offered us the option of a 9 course menu, including two more meat courses and a desert course, but we were happy with the 6 courses and matching wines.
What’s a bit odd though is that you don’t get to see what’s on the menu. It somehow felt a bit pretentious and patronising. I’m not going to ask for any changes to the menu, but I quite like to see it, so that I can look forward to whatever is coming next.

6 courses didn’t sound like much, but there was quite an assortment of different amuse bouches, five in total, and some very nice bread an butter to start with. The potatoes with yeast and black olive were lovely.

The first actual course was rather strange though. Mackerel with lettuce and blackberries. Mackerel again. This time though it was raw. I quite like raw fish, but Mackerel has a very strong, fishy taste even when grilled. Raw and with the skin on, this was a bit much. The six large chunks of Mackerel were sitting on a green sauce, lettuce sauce, I assumed. Next to it some blackberries and a whole load of frozen raspberries. Whenever you got the right amount of each component into your mouth it was kind of OK, but generally just a really weird dish, too fishy, too cold and too much of it.
Good thing that the Riesling that came with it was excellent and helped to wash it down.

The highlight for me was the bread porridge with sweet corn, langoustine and girolles. Nuno’s take on a traditional Portuguese dish, Açorda. This was superb, interesting, different, unusual flavour combinations but at the same time really comforting. The kind of dish you wish would never end.

Excellent was also the cod loin with a stew of tripe, parsley and potatoes or Portuguese fish and chips as the waiter called it. Simply delicious.

A real surprise was the pre-dessert. Pickled and raw cucumber with reduced milk sorbet. Doesn’t sound very appealing, but I thought it was absolutely brilliant. The cucumber came in three different ways, pickled, as a jelly and as a granitá. Great flavours and really refreshing. Who would have thought that cucumber makes for such a good dessert.

Overall the food was very good, interesting, but some of the taste experiments did not quite work for me. The thought of the raw Mackerel with frozen raspberries still makes me shiver a little bit.
The whole experience though was very nice. Excellent, very friendly service, nice ambience, a bit of background music, the view of the kitchen, it all made for a really nice evening.
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The bill came to £280, despite having a cocktail to start with and the 6 course menu with beverage pairing (£115 each). Still or sparkling water is included, which I thought is a nice touch, and so were coffee and petit fours.

Would I go again? I think so. But I might just go to the bar, which looked really cool and do the cocktail tasting. 4 cocktails, each matched with a tapa. Sounds pretty good to me.

We’ve still got a couple of weeks left of the year, and a few more restaurants to visit! But I would call Viajante my restaurant of the year.

There is no menu per se as they tell you what the food will be, you simply choose 6 or 9 courses (12 by prior request) with a caveat of them asking about dislikes and allergies.

We opted for the 9 courses with matching wines, but with amuse bouche, pre deserts and petit fours it was more like 15 courses, and too many to detail on a review. The courses did range from very good to excellent though, and ever the only problem with a tasting menu is that there is too much (the delicious bread and flavoured butter at the start you must resist to gobble it all up!)

The kitchen is totally open and the front row of tables have their chairs positioned to watch the theatre, which is a calm well run and efficient machine with all the chefs working in harmony. No Ramseyesk outbursts here! My only grumble is that why wasn’t it open when I lived in East London!

“Gourmet Sunday lunch in period environs of Bethnal Green”

We had booked just earlier that Sunday morning and were fortunate enough to take advantage of a cancellation, to what has been one of the more recent celebrated “hot bookings” of Central London, Viajante. Nuno Mendez, of ex El Bulli lineage has been talked about sufficiently that bookings, especially to the reasonably priced Sunday blind tasting lunch were hard to come by.

Though it was a bit of a drive to the East End of London, finding convenient parking just alongside was a breeze and very welcome at a Sunday lunchtime, as was entering the period setting of Bethnal Green townhall and finding some exquisite design touches that have transformed the interior into a relaxed but interesting venue. The interior has some clean almost Scandinavian touches and the tables are in two mid sized rooms, one of which share and open onto the kitchen of Viajante.

We had the accompanying wines with our lunch and both turned out exquisitely. Certainly there were hints of a tapas type influence, but also textures and blends were quite original with courses punctuated by petit fours at first and later appropriate amuses bouches and sorbets. It has to be tried rather than described to fully appreciate any blind menu, as it is a style and shape as well as the various flavours, which are presented integrally as in renditions of music, artwork or theatre.

The crowd that day were of a diverse mix and seemed quite international especially in this East End setting, and it apppeared this was very much a destination venue for many. We finished our lunch with a very pleasant feeling of well being, and found the menu just right and satisfying for a Sunday, leaving us with a positive and not excessively lethargic approach to the afternoon. Nuno himself came over and we spoke about the experience and his food as well as his other venue just at the other end of the building.

All in all we will definitely will return for more !

Looking at Viajente’s website, I thought that I was going to hate the restaurant. It is full of that pretentious crap that curators insist on putting next to a picture in a gallery. You know, that sort of: “the artist was trying to show, through the subject’s nudity, the essential frailness of life; her fragility, yet hidden resolve”. Bollocks: he wanted to paint a girl with no clothes on. Nuno apparently wandered around a bit on some quest for enlightenment and interesting things to cook, all explained in flowery twaddle.

Whatever the myriad annoyances with the website, the restaurant is terrific: imaginative, inventive, achingly cool and stuck on Cambridge Heath Road, opposite the Probation Service and Bethnal Green & Bow Labour Party HQ. It is not, as advertised on that sodding website, on Patriot Square, for the simple reason that there is no such address. I know this as not only did the cabbie not know of its existence but, as he said: “it’s not on Google Maps”. The Knowledge be damned: if it’s not on Google Maps, It Does Not Exist.

Once found we were whisked into the dining room. This is split into two sections, the one that we were lucky enough to be seated in also containing the kitchen, where there seemed to be but three chefs, unhurriedly, unfussily going about their task. Actually “containing” doesn’t do the room justice: about half of the room has seats and the other is the kitchen. I am pretty sure that one of the chefs was Nuno himself, but I didn’t want to ask, just in case he actually spoke like the website is written.

From being seated and with a bottle of pink fizz opened, the dishes came thick and fast. Before the first of the six real dishes, we had six amuse bouche. Yes. Six. It sounds as though that is taking things a bit far, but each was half a mouthful no more. In fact, what with one of the amuse bouches and one of the real dishes each coming in two parts, and the obligatory pre-desert and petit fours, there were actually 16 different servings. I loved every single one.

The universal favourites were the peas with parmesan and the Iberica pork loan. The former came with a tube of pea mouse, wrapped in soy-milk skin (or yuba, as we found out it was called). Simple, intensely flavoured and clean. A truly splendid dish. The pork came with a succulent (and gritless) razor clam and barley. Again, truly excellent tastes, textures and combination. There were then foams of this, smears of that; there was also salt cod two ways (one an homage to Japan, the other to Nuno’s country of birth; Portugal), shrimp soup, paper thin slices of duck “ham”, crab croquettes and much more, each component inventively playing with the main ingredient, but each helping to enhance it, rather than overpowering it.

For our little group the oysters were the least popular, but only amongst the two who just don’t do oysters. It was their own fault: having been told at the outset that there was no menu and the meal would mainly be fish, and then being asked was there anything any of us didn’t eat, they could have piped up. They didn’t, so more for the rest of us who adore the bivalve.

As with the oysters, not every dish was a universal hit: the mackerel was (for the same people who didn’t like the oyster) a bit too fishy and the flowers that came with the fresh cheese amuse bouche failed to pass muster with one of our number. Oh, and that same person wasn’t so hot on the cep mushroom chocolate truffle, although that is maybe a challenge too far for most.

Given that there is no choice of menu, and you don’t actually know what any course is going to be until it arrives and is announced to you, there doesn’t seem much point in a wine list, or indeed choosing a single wine to accompany dinner, so we opted for the tasting selection. All perfectly matched the dishes to which they were accompanying, again being presented to the table with a little description, much as each dish is so announced. (The menu is actually emailed to you after dinner: how cool is that? I bet they send it from an iPad2. Not to be outdone, the wine list is stuck into an old book. In our case Long Way Round, that self-indulgent twaddle from Ewan McGregor and the other one. Maybe Nuno got his inspiration for the website from it).

Service was excellent; friendly, helpful and relaxed; letting us talk when it was clear that we wanted too and introducing us to the wines and the food when it was time.

So the East is the new West then? Well no; much like brown/orange/purple/whatever-colour-the-fashionistas-tell-you is most certainly not the new black, one top foodie joint with an E-something postcode does not a new foodie capital make. For certain this is a top foodie joint, but it is so easy going, so unpretentious, I wondered if I’d got the website mixed up with another restaurant.

My absolute favourite set lunch is the fabulous Viajante. Weekend lunches are a more accessible way to sample Nuno Mendes' culinary skills – instead of the 9 or 12 course tasting menus which are offered in the evening (with the 12 course menu taking a whopping 4.5 hours to munch through!), weekends are a more relaxed affair with tasting menus of just 3 or 6 courses. We chose 3 courses, which was perfect for lunch, but is pretty hefty in itself as it also includes a couple of amuses, a pre-dessert and petit fours. At £25, this has to be the bargain of the century, especially as you can add well-chosen matching wines for each course for a paltry £15.

Everything, from bread and spicy whipped butter, to the brilliantly attentive service, and the theatre of watching sharply skilled chefs preparing your lunch about 2 feet away, makes for a dazzling experience. Our first course of sous vide-cooked lobster with milk skin and leek ash was challenging at first, but once we got used to the crazy ingredients, it really came together. The main course was duck two ways, one a confit, the other cooked sous vide (notice a theme?), which was earthy but elegant. Pudding showed off Mendes' skills honed at El Bulli with light as air chocolate mousse encased in a chocolate cube, with a salty chocolate ‘soil’ scattered around. It was beautiful to look at and the textures were intriguing, but I would have preferred an extra ingedient or flavour, as it was all a bit too chocolately. The highlight for me was a beauiful pre-dessert of sea-buckthorn granita. Sea buckthorn is a new one to me, but the flavour was instantly addictive, incredibly delicate but very memorable.

I can't rate the experience highly enough and am planning to return again and again. Shame about the dodgy Bethnal Green location but it only serves to make the restaurant sparkle even more. A true gem.

Top tips: start with crazy cocktails in the bar, and ask for tables 1, 2 or 3, closest to the kitchen action.

Quite simply magnificent. We had the six course taster menu with accompanying wine picked by the sommelier for each course. Every dish was assembled with, precision care and passion. Nuno Mendes is the antithesis of the likes of Gordon Ramsey in the sense he is quietly spoken and humble in his approach. He himself served some of the dishes at our table and talked us through the ingredient and cooking process which is a really nice touch. The man is an artist and I have to say I cant wait to go back for a repeat visit sometime soon. Special mentions go to the Thai Explosion II chicken “sandwich”, Charred leeks, lobster, hazelnut and milkskin; Duck, mushroom caramel, blackberries and girolles. Heck, it was all good. Just get a reservation, sit back and enjoy!

If you are the kind of person that eats out a lot and struggles to be impressed and/or are a slave to your tastebuds and are looking for the next interesting flavour then this is the place for you! I love how you are constantly surprised because there is no menu, you can only choose how many courses you would like to have with the added bonus of 4 separate amuse bouches and a pre-dessert refresher thrown in. Each dish was so interesting and if you have any understanding about the complexity of composing such dishes, you will be even more impressed. They give you a copy of the menu you had to take home so you dont forget the dishes which was a nice touch. The cocktails too were unconventional so an all-round gastronomic experience. Go to try a completely different food experience with lovely, friendly service.

My wife and I went on a Friday evening – to get there we took the bus!

Ok Bethnal Green is not typically where we go for dinner but the first thing to say is the outside of the building is a terrific and pleasant surprise! The entrance hall to the restaurant is also rather impressive.

The restaurant itself is quite small (I guess 20 tables in total). We were seated close to the kitchen and had a wonderful view of all the preparation work over 4 hours! The atmosphere is quiet and rather serene – no histrionics from the kitchen staff at all!

As commented on by others, the principal chef, Nuno, is very much in evidence and brought a number of the courses to our table himself – very nice touch!

OK -so what did we have?!

Well we had planned to order the 9 course tasting menu but, once there decided to go the whole hog and have 12 courses, despite the warning of ‘it will take about 4 hours!’ We are very glad we did. We also went for their wine choices by course offering – more on that later.

The food itself was quite frankly rather magical and stunningly tasty! Beautifully and carefully presented for a start, some were a work of art to look at and the combinations of flavours thoughout were a real treat – we have not had this variety of challenges to our tast buds and eyes since we went to a 3* michelin restaurant in France. What did we have? There was, amongst others, squid, octopus, olive soup, scallops, pork, beef, garden vegetables (as a course on its own), aubergine and two desserts. Only one course, the pork kneck, was slightly less delicious than all the rest. Nuno told us that the menu will be change durng the year.

Taking the wine they selected for each course was, in retrospect, probably a mistake because firstly we thought the wines chosen for some courses could have been better selected, secondly, with 12 courses, we ended up drinking rather too much (Hic!) and it did add quite a bit to the cost given we would not have drunk as much otherwise(£60 per head I think) . Next time we will choose a bottle and a half and make it last because this is really all about the food!

Service was good and aside from Nonu, the young man who served us the wine was diligent in giving us a commentary on each.

I must point out that this is absolutely not a cheap evening out and nor should it be for this quality and imagination. All up, with service, this cost us £330 for 2. Was it worth it for us? Absolutely! It is a real experience!

Next time we will come with friends because that would be even more fun as we compare thoughts on each delightful course (they will not book tables for more than 6 so as not to overload the service challenge and thus reduce quality) and will probably go for the 9 course tasting menu (but that is what we thought this time).

If you can face the cost then please try it – it is a wonderful experience!

My first but hopefully not my last visit to Viajante was superb. A friendly bar with expert cocktails started the evening well. Our party of 4 all loved the exquisite and elegant food that tasted as good as it looked. A thai taste explosion in an amuse bouche, the flavours of a meadow in the ‘garden’ dish, celery 3 ways (surprising and delicious) and the best course, carrot mousse dessert with frozen carrot tops (i think) which tasted and looked incredible. It's an aesthetically quite spare but attractive room and the staff are smiley and solicitious and almost as good looking as the food. This is inventive cuisine at its best -surprising and innovative but without unnecessary gimmickry (take note, Heston) or yawning predtictability. For the 9 courses we had, the meal was perfectly paced, so that I never felt full. Monsieur Michelin will surely come and take a look soon?

Nuno Mendes is a man of the world (as the name of his new restaurant suggests), but you would hardly know it from his unassuming and charming manner. He leaves his cooking to do the talking and the result is an eloquent paean to his travels and tastes. The result is some of the the best and most innovative cooking to have appeared in London in the last ten years.

First (and it would be churlish not to get them out of the way first), the gripes. Perhaps in keeping with the municipal orgins of the location, the furniture has more in keeping with the utilitarian necessities of a Registrar's waiting room, than a restaurant with Michelin star potential. One understands the very high cost of opening a restaurant, but was it really necessary to skimp to this degree and consequently impinge to some degree on the atmosphere?

Secondly, and at the opposite end of the material spectrum, the lack of reasonably priced wine. Whilst accepting that this is a grown-up restaurant, is it really necessary to have only 2 bottles of wine priced below £30? High-end restaurants (Philip Howard's The Square springs to mind) manages a wine list that achieves this without disappointing its clientele's expectations.

Both of these aspects are remediable. What this restaurant could not do without, is the cleverness and precision of the food's invention and execution. Doubtless, this is the sort of cooking that broadly could be put in the Blumenthal/ Adria “molecular gastronomy” bracket (indeed Mendes spent some time at el Bulli) . However, both those chefs are inevitably now a bit “dyed in the wool” (that's possibly the price of leading the advance guard). Viajante is able to build upon that style of cooking, whilst calling upon the pan-pacific influences of its author. The results are gastronomic gold dust.

The kitchen (the full theatre of which is on- view to the diner) offers 3 tasting menus for dinner (6, 9 or 12 courses) as well as the half- hearted suggestion of an a la carte menu. In keeping with Mendes' central ethos, it's much more fun to be propelled, Charlie- like, into his Wonka-ish vision. I won't spoil the surprise (although keep an eye out for the oompa loompas).

The restaurant was only half- full (not half- empty) on our visit (a wet Friday evening of the bank holiday weekend). I very much doubt that this will remain the case for long. Get there before the fire- proofed upholstery is removed…

Viajante – Pics at The London Foodie

Having had the most fantastic meal at The Loft supper club which I reviewed in 2009 (here), I was eagerly awaiting the opening of Nuno Mendes’ new restaurant “Viajante” in Bethnal Green’s imposing Town Hall building.

I was pleased to find that they offer a £25 lunch set menu which I tweeted about. It didn’t take more than a few minutes until a tweet up was organised with Uyen & Simon of Fernandez and Leluu, Jones (Unwholey), Euwen (A rather unusual chinaman), and Joshua of Cooking the Books.

Set in the grand Town Hall building, the bar and restaurant areas are airy and light, boasting huge windows, parquet flooring, and some very elegant furnishings. I liked the clean, semi-minimalist feel of these rooms, with their light colours and the Scandinavian-styled furniture. It was also good to find a relatively intimate restaurant (a maximum of 40 covers at any one time) which overlooks an open plan kitchen so diners can watch the chefs in action.

We had a few cocktails at the bar before heading to the dining area (diners are only seated when the entire party is at the restaurant). We opted for the 3-couse set menu priced at £25. There are no descriptions of the dishes on the menu. Viajante also offers 6 courses @ £60, 9 courses @ £75 and 12 courses @ £85. Wine “flights” can also be purchased to match each course and these are priced @ £30, £45 and £60 respectively.

We kicked off proceedings with a dainty amuse bouche of paper thin toast topped with romesco sauce, tapenade, greens and gherkin slices in a beautiful checker-board pattern.

Our first starter was a glass of soya milk (similar to a panna cotta in texture), and tasted like good quality, creamy tofu I have eaten in Japan. This was topped with a delicious layer of jellied dashi flavoured with aubergines and a small sandwich of pureed aubergine in layers of filo pastry. I loved the combination of flavours of this dish, although some of my fellow diners disagreed, so I was lucky enough to finish off Uyen’s.

The second starter “Thai Explosion” was served next – shredded chicken in a lightly spiced, creamy sauce reminiscent of Thai green curry and sandwiched between two thin wafers. From Japan to Thailand, the flavours were again complex and tantalising – I love the Asian influences in Nuno’s cooking and am still to find a chef who can incorporate these in their repertoire as well as he does.

A platter of bread and butter was also served. The bread was obviously freshly baked on the premises and tasted good. I would struggle however to describe the “butter” – it was very light, similar to churned butter milk and flavoured with some unidentifiable ingredient. The purple coloured seasoning was also intriguing, and the overall taste of the butter was outstanding.

Three courses on, I feared that this was the end of our lunch. Luckily it wasn’t and we were soon served a fish course of sashimi squid, with squid ink granita, thin slivers of radish, samphire and other greens. In my opinion, this was the best dish of the day – the flavour combination of squid ink granita, squid, olive oil and samphire was heavenly, and everyone at the table loved it. The presentation was again fantastic and I savoured every little bit of that dish.

Our next main dish was a meat course of tender pork and prawns with deep fried capers and green cabbage juice. The meat was deliciously yielding and combined well with the prawns. I was pleasantly surprised with the salty flavour and texture of the deep fried capers which really lifted the dish.

As a palate cleanser, we had a lemon and holy basil sorbet. The flavour of basil was intense and magnificently refreshing. I am not a huge fan of sorbets but I loved this and cannot wait to try and replicate it at home some time soon.

For dessert, we had a chocolate fondant with pureed raspberries, hazelnut ice cream and ginger crumble. The raspberry juice was nicely tart and contrasted well with the rich chocolate. The ice cream had an intense nutty flavour and was the perfect accompaniment to the fondant. The spicy ginger crumble added another layer of complexity to this delightful and very satisfying dessert.

As petit fours, we had chocolate truffles with a citric aspic. The truffles were filled with white chocolate with intriguingly earthy overtones. Nuno explained that the white chocolate mixture had mushroom as one of the ingredients.

The wine list is carefully thought out but also overpriced in my opinion. There are only two choices below £30 (a white Pinot Grigio for £22, and a red Syrah priced at £24). We ordered a bottle of Syrah @ £24 which had slight peppery tones and nice, soft tannins. It was a great choice by Simon, and one I will make sure to order on my next visit.

It was nice to see Nuno Mendes again as he cooked and oversaw his team at Viajante. He came to our table and chatted with us for a while, and was as charming and unassuming as I remembered him to be when I first met him at his supper club, The Loft.

Cost: £251.44 in total or £42 per person including drinks and service (£25 for the 3-course tasting menu, a cocktail per person and a shared bottle of wine).

Likes: creative cooking, sophisticated and complex flavours to titillate and intrigue the most jaded palate, elegant setting and decor, good value £25 tasting menu, excellent martinis. Filtered water readily available and free of charge.

Dislikes: having our booking changed 2 hours prior to our allocated slot was a little worrying, few affordable wine choices, a menu devoid of description of the dishes.

Verdict: The much awaited Viajante has finally opened and Nuno Mendes is showcasing what he does best – excellent, creative cooking, combining intriguing and complex flavours to utter perfection. A great value tasting menu to be had in elegant surroundings. I cannot wait to return for the blow-out 12 course menu. Very highly recommended.

It is early days yet, but Nuno Mendes' ‘Viajante’ venture shows promising signs of becoming THE new culinary destination for foodies in London. The quirky bar's decor is a cross between a 60's boarding school interior, with odd retro wooden armchairs and wooden bench-couches with grey upholstery and an airport lounge. It all makes for a very amusing bar experience, the drinks menu is dotted with signature cocktails as well as classic Portuguese ‘Super Bock’ beer and some excellent wines to boot.

Viajante's dining room is quite ‘pretty’, with class-room like wood panels, blue ‘lace-effect’ walls, twee little bowls of spring flowers adorning every table and cherry blossom arrangements dotted around the place. We are literally sat at the best table in the house in front of the ‘open kitchen’. There are 3 menus to choose from… 6, 9 & 12-Course menus. We are told we can see the menu, although they would prefer for us to be surprised. Interesting. We take their advice and place our trust in them and see what comes out.

Amuse Bouches are served in quick succession starting with toasted crostini topped with black olive and romesco sauce, freshly baked mini baguettes with a sublime ‘brown butter’ chicken skin and lardons, ‘Thai Explosion’ of mini sandwiches of toasted bread with chicken skin, filled with shredded confit'd chicken, coconut milk, chillies and coriander – which were absolutely incredible…and lastly ‘Smokey aubergine’ paste, served almost like Baklava between sheets of crisp filo pastry topped with pistachio nuts, accompanying a mini glass filled with a gelee of consomme layered on top of a soya milk gelee.

Our first course is a signature dish of Chef Mendes'… ‘Squid tartare with pickled radishes, samphire & frozen squid ink jus’. The squid ink jus resembles a black granita and is packed with flavour. The raw squid is milky and chewy but in the most unique and moreish way, paired with radishes for crunch, the dish is a triumph as a first course. The next course of ‘Spring garden’ – is literally as you would think it, a melange of spring vegetables, some raw, some given cooked sous-vide style making a very pretty plate of food indeed. Although at this stage, I do wonder if ‘pretty food’ is really going to be the theme for this evening's meal.

A razor clam shell with smoked yoghurt and rosemary dashi is brought over to us by Nuno Mendes himself with the recommendation that “You should really eat this carefully and quickly as the liquid is quite messy” – Who am I to disgree with him? Slighty in awe that Nuno is serving us personally, perhaps it is just a one-off, but no, he then proceeds to serve the next 4 courses to us also.

Roasted celeriac with onion tapioca pearls with Sao Jorge cheese, Skate wing with brioche, yeast and cauliflower followed by pigs neck and prawn served with Savoy cabbage, langoustines, fried capers and grated egg, all expertly served and explained to us by Nuno himself. I'm a very happy bunny indeed at this stage. It is at this point we look at the table next to us and realise Chef Marcus Wareing has arrived with friends to try ‘Viajante’ for himself and of course this ups the ante for Mendes, no doubt.

A lemon powder and Thai basil ice cream is served, followed by dessert… a carrot mousse with both sweet and pickled carrot, buttermilk and a dill granite. This was definitely one of the most special dishes I have ever had. I'm not a big fan of desserts, but I could have eaten that semi-frozen carrot mousse at least 4 times over. The last course is served…'Dark chocolate fondant with hazlenut ice cream, praline powder and a blackcurrant gel, this is the course that although delicious, suddenly sinks to the bottom of my stomach signalling my absolute incapacity to eat any more. I swigged the final mouthful of my delicious ‘Torcolato’ dessert wine, only to be presented with yet another course of ‘Crema Catalana’ – a sherry infused vanilla custard and a plate of petit fours, which included a dark chocolate truffle filled with white chocolate ganache infused with Cepe mushrooms. Hands down one of the most bizarrely delicious chocolates I have ever eaten in my life.

So, after all that, what else is there to say that hasn't already been said? ‘Viajante’ is not your every day type of restaurant. If you had to put it in a category, I would safely say it would be best ranked up there with Heston Blumenthal's Fat Duck, as it is a unique and innovative experience, that you may choose to visit again one day, but only for a special occasion. It is more of an ‘experience’ than a run-of-the-mill restaurant and I think that makes Viajante very special indeed. DEFINITELY somewhere that the consummate and most devoted foodies among us should experience before it becomes too trendy, too popular and too impossible to get a reservation at.

6 courses – £60.00
9 courses – £75.00
12 courses – £90.00