Eat Out London!RIGO' London
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Critic Grace Dent Laments Outmoded Fine Dining at RIGO' - Eater ...
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Critics, he claims in an opening spiel, enjoy novelty, which means novelty is good, which means Magpie is good, because it’s outré, intense flavour combinations are novel.
It’s pleasing to see somewhere new and ambitious celebrated for its ambition and novelty, but the weird, wholly artificial binaries that Deacon creates (novelty / pleasure; critic / non-critic; restaurant critic and “critics of books, music and the rest”) aren’t helpful — for reader or restaurateur.
The unhelpfulness of those binaries that Deacon crowbarred in is obvious: sometimes pleasure comes exactly from a place’s lack of novelty: people thrill to The India Club because it offers the same sepia-toned charms as the novels of EM Forster, as “side streets in unknown cities where old milliners and haberdashers miraculously survive”; in a city like London a place like this is “a curio, a living, breathing museum piece, a pearl.”
Caviar-declining man of the people Jay Rayner spends this week in the dunce’s corner for his review of Jean-Georges at The Connaught (it’s expensive, apparently), so it’s left to Giles Coren to close things out by loving pretty much everything about The Oystermen, which offers not novelty but the simple pleasures of “Coven Garden fish restaurants in the days of old.”
All — apart from the “unclassy” addition of a £3.50 surcharge for some bread — with a side of “charming” service and coming together in sum to represent “the best new fish restaurant to have opened in London in yonks.”
Rigo, Parson's Green: Restaurant Review | Foodism
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Gonzalo Luzarraga's Rigo is testament to the fact that contemporary haute cuisine can be found well outside of the centre of London.
The restaurant has divided critics since it opened, with textural plays, artful platings and ultra-modern versions of classic Piedmontese dishes meaning Rigo makes sure its presence is felt on an otherwise quiet West London high street.
Having worked under Alain Ducasse, among other Michelin-starred luminaries, Luzarraga is a chef whose food nails the fine-dining tag to the mast from the off, and dishes here oscillate between simple and effective (sourdough with anchovy butter, and Ligurian-style French olive oil on the site) and more cheffy (dehydrated tripe with salmon roe and that mortadella ice cream cone – which, for the record, we thought was delicious).
In classic Piedmont style, anchovies crop up a few times on the menu, from the butter to a dish of cultured milk and quail's egg with bagna cauda, and again in our favourite dish: which resembled cacio e pepe, but was in fact spaghetti made with a heritage wheat variety that dated back to Roman times, with processed anchovy and bread yeast – rich, saline and full of umami character.
Set lunch menu from £22; dinner menu from £43; wine from £5.50 by the glass.
Grace Dent reviews RIGO': There is no real reason to eat moss ...
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At Rigo, near Parsons Green Tube station, the danger phrase, ‘our chef will be taking you on a journey’, along with a portentous, ‘I’ll fetch someone to tell the stories behind the cocktails’, surfaced before we were seated.
Rigo’s ‘experience’ centres on chef Gonzalo Luzarraga’s life on the Italian/French border and his travels in South America, Russia and Asia.
Rigo’s opening ‘snacks’ involved a lump of dried moss and a story about the moss.
It arrived with a story about why the chef loves leftover tomatoes; sadly without a large side portion of STFU.
A souped-up crème brûlée with porcini mushroom ice cream came with a story about a bet the chef had with another chef about porcini mushroom ice cream, that I did not listen to as I was quietly replaying the episode of Friends ‘Where No One’s Ready’ in my mind to steady my breathing.