Salmontini Le Resto. I’m suspicious of it right from the start, for what I know to be very superficial reasons. But Salmontini. I can’t shake the image of a fish draped languorously, burlesque-style, in an oversized Martini glass. The name sounds like a Dali sculpture or a terrible, surrealist dare.
This is the first European outpost for the Salmontini brand, already a titan of the Middle Eastern seafood scene, so it’s possible the name has some exotic nuance in Beirut – home of their flagship restaurant – that’s lost on a non-Arabic speaker. With that in mind, I check how the name goes down with a Lebanese colleague. He scrunches his face up and says ‘Yes, like a Martini of salmon?’, so I abandon that as a theory and just arrive at the Pont Street location prepared for fish and misadventure.
I have harbored hopes that, in keeping with the name, this restaurant and the whole experience will be magnificently, eye-wateringly weird, but instead – and I realise this shouldn’t be a disappointment – it’s Rather Nice. The inside of the restaurant is a lot like the Belgravia setting: expensive without being brash, all muted colours and a sense of well-heeled order.
The waiter is very, very nice and the wine he brings us, a Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc, is also very nice. In fact, the only thing that does turn out to be slightly weirder than nice is that after we order, we’re asked very politely if we want some chopsticks.
This is confusing for several reasons. There are no chopsticks on the table. There are, though, knives and forks on the table. We haven’t ordered from the maki or sashimi menus, and our starters don’t sound like food that would lend itself to eating with chopsticks. If anything they sound like food that we could make a mess of using almost any cutlery. My date and I look at each other in what we will later discover he believes is mutual bafflement, and I believe is a high-stakes game of chicken.
But in the end we both turn down the chopsticks. And the arrival of the starters vindicates that. The spicy crispy tuna and salmon salads are each a small tower of Japanese tartare fish and tempura batter crumbs carefully piled on top. It’s a very elegant construction. With chopsticks, in the wrong hands, it would have been a massacre. The Asian influences carry over into the main courses, into the lemongrass the Chilean sea bass is spiked with and the miso marinade on the Alaskan black cod. Both are just as high-design as the salads, and come with understated slivers of mushrooms, or small whirls of potato foam and samphire.
That emphasis on plate architecture is probably down to the chef, Esteve Prats Grau – recently of Spanish culinary empire Semon, so himself no stranger to a dodgily-named place of work. The menu is, unsurprisingly, salmon-centric, but anybody who doesn’t love salmon – and my date is here as a test case for this – is fairly well-catered for via the inventive things being done with tuna and yellowtail on the maki menu, or the array of steaks on the josper grill.
I won’t lie to you, this is not a place you’d go to if you’re after a dramatic and unexpected evening. It’s a place you’d go with an exacting aunt or a corporate client, safe in the knowledge that nothing untoward would happen at all and everything will be entirely smooth and calm. Unless, of course, you take them up on the offer of chopsticks. In which case all bets are off.
Salmontini, 1 Pont Street, London SW1X 9EJ. Tel: 020 7118 1999. Website.
