Beaverbrook, Surrey: ‘Not cheap, but shockingly good’ – restaurant review

‘Deep of cushion and gilded in all the right places’: the dining room at Beaverbrook country house hotel. Photograph: Sophia Evans for the Observer

Jay Rayner
The Guardian

This one is going to make some people cross. It doesn’t matter whether the restaurant is a triumph or a disaster; whether trumpets call or raspberries are blown. (Spoiler alert: it’s mostly trumpets.) There are people who will be furious with me for even being here. I think about this as I work my way through the glorious vegetable tempura, a golden confection of crisp filigree and lace. I sigh and press on. I have crispy deep-fried things to eat. I am but a man with appetites. I’ll just have to suck it up.
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I am having lunch at Beaverbrook, a new country house hotel near Leatherhead in Surrey, in Cherkley Court, once the home of the great press baron Max Aitken, AKA Lord Beaverbrook. All the eager staff here are recognisable by the small silver Spitfire badge they wear, to acknowledge Beaverbrook’s role as Churchill’s minister for aircraft production during the Second World War. Beaverbrook loved a filthy, stinking row; it is fitting that opening a hotel named after him caused one.

In 2009, the Beaverbrook Foundation, which had attempted to open the house to the public, announced it would be sold to make way for the hotel. Cue the mother, father, aunt, uncle and cousin of all legal battles. Local environmental groups, including the Campaign to Protect Rural England, opposed the development, especially the proposed golf course. Obviously, they lost and last year the hotel opened.

‘We’re not sure whether to eat them or enter them for the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition’: tuna and salmon tacos. Photograph: Sophia Evans for the Observer

First impressions are brutal. There’s a gatehouse at the bottom of the drive, staffed by a man who is about as welcoming as cholera. “Dropping off or picking up?” he barks at our cab. He could have tried looking in the back. And then the long, looping drive through the golf course. I’m with Oscar Wilde on golf – a good walk ruined – but that hardly does justice to the calamity that golf courses wreak on the landscape. They’re a dreary, turfed desert, as visually appealing as a motorway service station lorry park, but with none of the usefulness. They are also designed to exclude everyone who isn’t rich enough to pay for the pleasure of hitting a tiny ball while dressed as a middle manager in the sanitary wear business.

[post_ads]The better news is that the house has been restored carefully. It is deep of cushion and gilded in all the right places. For the restaurant in the main building – there’s a utilitarian brasserie in an annexe – they have gone for a Japanese “grill”. It is more than a little incongruous: the precise minimalism of Japanese, served amid the upholstered, pelmeted flounce of what was once one of Beaverbrook’s drawing rooms. Photographs of cherry blossom are supposed to orientate you, but the food does a better job of it.

Let’s be realistic. Pricing here is pure Surrey golf course by way of Land Rover Discovery. There are outbreaks of luxury ingredients – wagyu, truffles – of a sort that make certain people feel better about themselves just for being able to afford them. Some of those ingredients make a case for themselves. Some do not.

‘I have to sip the hot dashi broth straight from the glass bowl’: vegetable tempura. Photograph: Sophia Evans for the Observer

We begin with what they call Japanese “tacos”: folds of toasted nori, filled with a tartare of tuna or salmon topped with a tiny bright green spherification of wasabi, to resemble fish roe. They come perched amid spindly twigs. We’re not sure whether to eat them or enter them for the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition. They set the standard. Extremely good ingredients have been treated here with extreme care. The raw fish is oily and rich. The wasabi pops. The nori crunches.

Then the glorious tempura, a rustling plateful for £10 including rings of sweet onion, asparagus, a single shiso leaf and fronds of enoki mushrooms looking like something wrenched from Nemo’s coral reef. This is some of the cleanest-tasting tempura I have had in the UK. At the end, I have to sip the hot dashi broth straight from the glass bowl. You can’t take me anywhere. Or you can, but I don’t promise to behave.

[post_ads]Two words never to get excited by are “cheap” and “sushi”. They’re like “amateur” and “brain surgeon”. Or “Michael” and “Gove”. All are terrible ideas. The Beaverbrook sushi is not cheap, but it is shockingly good. We share a selection of eight pieces for £30. We are in teeny, weeny, jewel box preciseness territory. You just know that everything has been tweezered and stroked and frowned over. The highlights are a sweet, raw blue prawn, subject to detailed, key-hole surgery knife work, turbot with crisp, citrussy ants – yes, really – salmon dolloped with black pungent garlic purée and yellow tail with crunchy toasted quinoa. Sadly, grilled eel comes with foie gras mousse. Really, just stop it. They also make their own brisk, pickled ginger. We are offered extra and we accept. At the end, we are charged £2 for it, which is a cheap trick, albeit an expensive cheap trick.

‘An even more impressive trick’: cabbage and truffles. Photograph: Sophia Evans for the Observer

The robata grill list is short on bargains – £35 for black cod, anyone? No, thought not. We go for the value range. The £22 chicken brings escalopes of thigh, lightly battered and dribbled with a teriyaki sauce then dressed with sliced truffles. I suspect truffle oil might be involved, but it’s extremely effective. This is chicken as luxury item. An even more impressive trick is worked on thick leaves of green cabbage, cooked down to soft in salty sake butter with more truffle. I never thought I’d think of cabbage as luscious. Florets of broccoli are charred, sprinkled with yuzu peel and presented with a spiced vinegar, and a kimchi mayonnaise, which I now want to put on everything, including my breakfast cereal.

We should have stopped at the pre-dessert, a startlingly beautiful green basil sorbet under a lemonade foam that fizzed and sparkled and made me want a bucketful for my sixth birthday. Pity that was 45 years ago. A dessert sharing plate was too many creamy, spongy things in a messy circle with gels and purées. They were all expertly made, but it was cacophonous. Skip that. Revel instead in the crisply pressed sense of place; in extraordinary country house glamour, and a moment of countryside peacefulness. Old Beaverbrook would doubtless have been appalled that one of his drawing rooms ended up hosting a filthy hack from a rival newspaper, hunting down copy. Some locals will hate you for even going. But you’ll eat seriously well.

Jay’s news bites

Elsewhere in Surrey, the small but rather beautifully formed ‘aperitivo’ bar Bacaró has opened in Woking. Alongside its great drinks list is a menu of arancini and crostini, and larger plates, such as thinly sliced porchetta on rosemary roast potatoes (bacarowoking.com).

My friend the chef Ravinder Bhogal of Jikoni in Marylebone has embarked on a three-month residency at London’s W Hotel, with a thrilling vegan menu. Stand-out dishes include cauliflower popcorn with red chilli and caramel-braised tofu with confit garlic rice (theperceptionbar.com).
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Last year, Pippa Kent had a double lung transplant. Afterwards she was told that, like thousands of people who have a suppressed immune system, there were lots of foods she couldn’t now eat. Struck by the lack of resources out there, she is now crowdfunding a cookbook, Now What Can I Eat? It includes recipes from Mark Hix, Tommy Banks, Leon and Honey & Co. Visit kickstarter.com and search nowwhatcanieat.

Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or follow him on Twitter @jayrayner1