A meal at Plates: an experience to remember
Due to a family bereavement I had been feeling that I needed something to help me overcome a stressful period and had treated myself to a meal at Plates. For the first time ever, I had a seat at Chef’s Table. I had ensured myself plenty of time for anticipating the meal by walking to the restaurant in Old Street, all the way from my Bloomsbury hotel.
The experience was memorable. It came as a bit of a delightful shock that I was actually sitting there at a bar and seeing Kirk Haworth there, working in his kitchen just like I used to view him on Great British Menu. I felt like a teenager who spots her favourite popstar.
The restaurant is small, and nicely decorated, with good lighting and was full when I was there. There was a nice atmosphere, nobody was loud, people were all just having this great meal. The team are extremely welcoming, and are all very well informed about the food that is being served. Moreover, they are also very enthusiastic about the offering, generous with details about how this amazing food is created. When the chef brought me a course himself I was too perplexed to say more than thank you… missing my one chance to have something of a conversation. Throughout the meal the delightfully friendly and welcoming hostess brought the various dishes and explained what they were, again oozing with enthusiasm but also knowledgeable. At the end of the meal Plates felt like ‘home’ already.
The 7 course menu starts with a refreshing granita, accompanied with poached peach and soy custard and an amazing beetroot and buckwheat truffle that explodes with a flavour burst and is warming after the cooling granita. This appetizer refreshes the palate but it also anticipates the next course in that in both the flavours develop distinctly from freshness to depth as you eat them.
Then English tomatoes come served with a rich ricotta and freshness from raspberries and strawberries. Here again you have a multi layered dish: the first intense and sharp fruity flavours are vaguely reminiscent of the sweetness of childhood confectionary, but then you find more intensity and warmth softening and warming and reaching maturity. Eating this course is ‘growing up’: from crisp childhood freshness to rich adult flavours.
Nothing prepares you though for the next course, a vegan version of a savoury croissant: a cloud of laminated sourdough bread whose crunchy texture is as light as a feather and which melts in the mouth with a savoury taste. The bread brings texture in a lush golden cloud of goodness which is set off by the creamily rich whipped spirulina butter: each airy spicy mouthful of the pillow of whipped butter brings an unfamiliar but exciting taste experience, combined with the crisp layers of bread one is simply in a luxurious culinary heaven.
The savoury flavour of the croissant is echoed in the deeply savoury mushroom dish in which maitake mushroom is combined with a dark and intensely flavoured mole and lightened up with a hint of kimchi and puffed rice to give texture.
The taste of the next course, the lasagne, picks up again the rich mellow tastes of the mushroom and makes them more intense. A refreshing and crunchy Tokyo turnip on the side breaks up the deep flavours and brings more texture to the dish.
The texture and flavours of the herbaceous ice cream as the pre dessert again is reminiscent of the whipped butter, again offset by crisper textures of chewy beets and mulberries. This course is like the mirror image of the second course: under rich flavours of icecream we find lighter textured beets and fruits.
The meal ends with a chocolatey heaven of cacao gateau, coconut ice cream and caramel: intensely chocolatey tastes, rich and sweet and intense, refreshing ice cream and crunchy nuts complementing both texture and flavours.
The closing expresso rounds off the experience of this meal where you go from crispy fruity lightness, through the golden cloud of bread and guided by greens and browns of the mushrooms and the lasagne to end in a dark and intense world of strong nutty and chocolatey flavours that enhance each other.
Visually too, the meal progresses from light shades of pink, over shades of green and gold to end up in the dark heaven of cocoa.
I walked back on a cloud of elation: a wonderful meal experience that progresses from flavour to flavour and where all the course echo or anticipate each other.
I hope to be able to return and perhaps next time I will be slightly less awestruck and be able to have that little conversation!