If I’m entirely honest, I didn’t have the purest of motives for booking in at Piquet. I heard the name, and heard an opportunity for endless ‘it Piquet-ed my interest’ puns and ‘A Piquet Behind the Scenes’ type taglines.
Then I heard that the chef is Allan Pickett – ex-Galvin, ex-Orrery, but extremely British and cites Rab C Nesbitt as his hero on his Twitter profile. The restaurant isn’t, as Google Translate might lead you to believe, named after the French trick-taking card game. It’s a Frenchified Pickett. It’s the Hyacinth Bucket of the restaurant world. That blows all of my, let’s be frank, very dexterous puns out of the water. Now I’m consumed with the need to go sit in this high-end, highly-praised Anglo-French restaurant and order all the least French things with my best French inflection. It doesn’t matter if I don’t much want a Diet Coke or to eat from the Carving Trolley menu; that’s far outstripped by how much I do want to order the Dee-yate Cokay, and demand the Cahveeng Trollay be wheeled over to us tout de suite. Apparently being even fake French makes me genuinely high maintenance.
So what’s really drawing me to Piquet is a fairly specialist set of desires, but I’ve gone to restaurants on thinner grounds than this before. And it’s not as though there aren’t other, more grown-up reasons to visit. Pickett has a great reputation. The wine list will be impressive. The food will be dense. The cheeseboard will be a golden abundance that’ll make you feel like Scrooge McDuck diving into his vault of money at the start of Duck Tales. And if I wedge an elegant pun or semi-offensive attempt at a French accent in here or there, the waiting staff will be far too polite not to pretend to find it charming.
In the event, my dreams come to naught. I have a weird and sad week, and arrive at Piquet with a heavy heart that not even the prospect of Scrooge McDuck-ing through a mountain of French cheese can lighten. My guest arrives downcast, with official documentation from the surveyor diagnosing ‘naughty damp’ in her new flat.
She is preoccupied with homeowning woes. I have no appetite, not even for racy innuendo about Caroline’s naughty dampness. Tuck us into one of your black-curtained corners in the ground-floor dining room, Piquet, with a view of the brutalist multi-storey construction site opposite, and we shall tell sad stories of the death of kings. We shall feast upon dry breadsticks. That’s all we have the heart for.
Unfortunately Piquet are having none of it. The ground floor seems barely in use, probably because of all the brutalism and scaffolds going on across the road. We’re steered down to the bright lighting and cream banquettes of the lower dining-room instead. It has a vague feel of corporate event space about it, possibly because it’s packed to the art deco rafters with suits and briefcases, but there’s a less vague feel of Grande Brasserie outweighing that. We sit among wooden-panelled walls and brass and are besieged with wine lists and amuse-bouches. I take an amuse-bouche, but only because I want to say ‘misery loves canapé’, dramatically yet sorrowfully, while I eat it. Also there’s anchovy in it. You can’t argue with anchovy.
It turns out you can’t argue with the starters either, a beetroot and fig salad with goat’s cheese mousse, and something beautiful and deep-fried involving pigs’ head with gribiche sauce. Neither of them are obvious choices for the appetite-less and downcast, since they’re both richer than a three-course meal would be at a lot of nearby Soho high-concept, low-food restaurants. That we then go on to manage an actual three-course meal – which here I’d equate to roughly six courses anywhere that uses cheese and duck fat with a less liberal hand – speaks to Piquet’s powers of persuasion. The main course menu makes such great use of baby squid and venison loin that I forget to impose a French accent on either when we order. The cod casserole is a beautiful Christmas-coloured mash-up of red, green and haricot beans.
The cheeseboard is everything I dreamed it would be, and boundless like the ocean.
Piquet, even at my least ravenous, your Gallic charm and sprawling menu made me dine hard with a vengeance. I like to think if I came back on top form, I’d ruin you.
Piquet, 92 Newman Street, London W1T 3EZ. Tel: 0203 8264500. Website.
