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Whatley Manor is a very pretty, restored manor house in extensive grounds and gardens. Serious money would appear to have been lavished on the place, which features several attractive lounges as well as a generously spaced and smart dining room, whose walls and tablecloths are cream in colour; the only odd note for me was the muzak: folk music, here? The menu has classical roots, as befits a chef who trained with John Burton-Race, Raymond Blanc and Richard Neat, but who seems comfortable to make controlled ventures into modernity in his cooking. The a la carte menu was £68.50 for three courses (with assorted extras) or a tasting menu was £85. The dining room has a low ceiling and is quite long and narrow in shape.
The 31 page wine list had plenty of choice from France, and a smattering from elsewhere. Rolly Gassmann Pinot Blanc 2004 was £45 for a wine you can buy for around £12 in the shops, The lovely Antinori Tignanello 2006 was £92 compared to a shop price of about £51, while Louis Jadot Corton 2005 was £190 for a wine that will set you back around £56 to buy.
We had two meals here on successive evenings. I was impressed that the kitchen managed to bring us almost entirely different nibbles and extras on the second night, which was a nice touch. Bread is made from scratch and was a choice of spelt, white or brown rolls, or onion bread slices (the latter was the best of the bread) – around 7/10 overall (the onion bread a little higher).
On the first night I was offered nibbles of Jerusalem artichoke and celeriac with truffle, a quail egg that was poached and served with leek and a pumpkin puree, and a foie gras mousse with teriyaki jelly and sesame toast. I particularly liked the smooth foie gras mousse with its hint of Asian flavour to balance (between 7/10 and 8/10 overall). A further nibble was a glass of deeply flavoured mushroom foam with truffle essence, alongside a delicate ball of deep-fried Parmesan (8/10).
Pan fried langoustine tails were served with cauliflower purée and topped with Thai foam. This dish worked really well, the langoustines of high quality and perfectly cooked, the cauliflower puree having good texture and the gentle hint of Thai spices complementing the delicate flavour of the langoustine (8/10).
Also excellent were plump, sweet hand-dived scallops that were roasted and topped with diced apple, leek and toasted almonds, served with truffle essence (8/10).
For my main course, beef fillet was pan-fried, served with braised oxtail, caramelised veal kidney and bacon, topped with red wine sauce infused with cumin. The beef was served quite rare but was of good quality, while the assorted garnishes made sense together (7/10).
Morel and Pedro Ximines cassonade was served with iced mushroom cream, deep fried quail eggs and excellent English asparagus (7/10).
A refreshing pre dessert was vanilla panna cotta with sherry jelly, coconut granita and tropical fruit sorbet, the respective textures excellent, the flavours coming through well and working harmoniously (8/10). This was preceded by a rhubarb with ginger foam that worked less well; I like both rhubarb and ginger, but here the ginger taste was overwhelming, so that the rhubarb (hardly a retiring taste) barely came through (4/10).
For dessert, chicory mousse was prettily presented, layered with bitter coffee and marscapone cream. The flavours were distinct and textures good, though the chicory flavour was a little subdued (7/10).
Carpaccio of poached apple was served with a light maple syrup cheesecake. The apples used were Granny Smiths and had quite good flavour, while the cheesecake was fine (7/10).
To finish, petit fours consisted of: strawberry and lime marshmallow, Brazil nut toffee, a cannoli and a raspberry jelly, as well as a selection of chocolates served from an elegant wooden box (8/10). Coffee had good, strong flavour (8/10).
On the second evening of our stay the nibbles varied, with the quail egg this time having an interesting eel and kipper foam, Jerusalem artichoke mousse with a goat cheese panna cotta and Madeira jelly, and soy-glazed tiger prawn (just about 8/10 on average). The soup in a glass tonight was celeriac foam with excellent, intense flavour, again with the lovely deep fried Parmesan (8/10).
A pretty salad was dressed with radish and walnut flavour and had smoked eel, warm duck and cured foie gras. This was a very successful combination; for me there could have been a little more eel in relation to the duck and foie gras, but a nice touch was an unannounced orange sorbet giving some welcome acidity (8/10).
Roasted red mullet was timed carefully and was of high quality, garnished with pan-fried scallop, confit sardines and white balsamic. My only quibble is whether the sardine garnish really added anything, but this was a fine dish (8/10).
Stella had a fine fillet of turbot, pan-fried carefully and served with celeriac a la grecque (between 7/10 and 8/10).
Rhubarb and sauternes foam was an improvement on the rhubarb and ginger foam of the previous night (7/10).
Treacle tart was dressed with poached pineapple and coconut gel with custard ice cream; the pieces of pineapple were a little hard but a worse issue was the pastry base for the treacle tart, which was very hard indeed (5/10).
Praline and chocolate soufflé was very well made, served with lemon grass ice cream (also with a chocolate sorbet at my request as I personally am not wild about the idea of mixing lemon grass flavour with chocolate, well-made though it was). The texture of the soufflé was lovely (8/10).
Service over the two meals was generally very good, if not quite as slick in places as it could have been. The main slip was trying to get a top-up of wine on the second meal while eating my main course, when after two failed attempts to catch the eye of the staff I resorted to getting up, bringing the carafe over from its resting place and pouring it myself (personally I am very happy just pouring my own wine at the table, but if restaurants do insist on taking the wine away and pouring for you then they need to get it right). The dining room was by no means full on this second evening, so this seemed a little careless. However in every other way the service was fine.
Overall I think the savoury dishes are comfortably 8/10 level, while the only flaws came through at the dessert stage, which was a much patchier experience than the savoury courses.
Below are notes from a meal in July 2009.
The wine list is substantial and features top growers from around the world. Mark-ups seem erratic. Examples are Chateau Musar 2000 at £63 for a wine that costs around £17 in the shops, yet the superb Torres Mas La Plana 1985 is an almost absurdly fair £63 for a wine that these days is hard to find but would cost you about the same retail if you could get it. Leoville Las Cases 1997 is listed at £160 for a wine that would set you back around £70 to buy retail, while Dr Loosen Kabinett 2007 is a modest £23.50 for a wine that will cost around £13 to buy. Bread is made from scratch here and was a mix of onion bread with nice texture, spelt flour bread and more conventional white and brown rolls, served warm; butter was from Brittany (7/10).
As we looked at the menu we nibbled on smoothly textured foie gras mousse and red pepper mousse, a well-balanced poached quail egg with leek, smoked eel and pepper foam, and beetroot jelly with crème fraiche (8/10). A further set of nibbles then appeared: very pure green tomato essence, delicate deep-fried goat cheese and powerful tapenade, the elements tasting very distinctly of what they were supposed to (8/10).
I began with a pretty presentation of quail breast, boned leg of quail, with terrific baby artichoke, quail egg, and baby spinach leaves as garnish, with a pea sorbet. The meat was excellent and the artichokes in particular had unusually good flavour; I would have been happier with pea puree rather than sorbet as the cold contrast rather numbed the taste of the peas, but this is a quibble about a very skilled dish (8/10). A pair of scallops had lovely sweet taste, were cooked to perfection and served with excellent asparagus, porcini puree, black truffle sauce and broad beans, with an onion-flavoured circular tuile as garnish. Again the vegetables had unusually good flavour, while the onion tuile was technically superb (comfortably 8/10).
Stella had excellent fillet of turbot, pan-fried and then glazed with teriyaki sauce, served with flakes of crab meat, rice vinegar and Edamame beans, the fish resting on a bed of spinach; alongside was a lovely green salad with radishes and a ginger-flavoured dressing. I thought this was a very successful dish, the Asian flavours nicely controlled and working fine with the fine turbot, while the spinach in particular was of remarkably high quality (8/10). I had roast poussin with asparagus, girolles and cooking juices laced with Madeira, with Parmesan bonbons on the side. The poussin had lovely flavour and was cooked carefully, the meat moist, while vegetables were again exemplary. The Parmesan bonbons with their liquid centre gave a richness that worked well with the fowl. Again, this was a very skilled dish, using superb ingredients (easily 8/10).
Cheeses are supplied from Premier Cheese twice weekly, and the mix of British and French cheeses were in generally good condition (the Epoisses was just a little over-ripe, but this is a difficult cheese to serve at its peak, and outside France I have pretty much never seen it served exactly in optimum condition). Cheeses were 7/10 for me.
A pre-dessert of blackcurrant and clove foam was technically good, though for me the cloves did not enhance the dish (7/10). Lemon jelly with thyme foam was not my kind of thing; I like thyme, but as a combination with lemon I found it strange.
My dessert of mango cannelloni was very well-made, with mint ice cream, coconut foam and pieces of grapefruit. The elements were well-made but this just seemed to me to have too many elements (7/10). Egg custard tart with cherries and pistachio ice cream and a little lemon sorbet had a more harmonious set of ingredients, but I found the custard tart not quite sweet enough, and the pastry harder than ideal (6/10). Coffee and generous petit fours, including an array of chocolates, were very good indeed.
Service was slick, our waiter having previously worked at Meurice, and the whole front-of-house team seemed very well trained. Martin Burge is producing some very high-grade food indeed, using superb ingredients (many brought over from France) of a quality rarely seen in the UK. The savoury dishes seemed to me well-conceived, interesting and technically superb. I found the desserts less assured; partly (but not entirely) that is my aversion to certain food combinations in my desserts, but even allowing for this I found the savoury dishes of a generally higher level. Overall the kitchen is producing some of the better cooking to be found in Britain at the moment.
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