Adam Simmonds at Danesfield House

Saturday, April 21, 2012 - The food mostly matches the monochrome decor, but from start to finish is full of vivid flavours. An amuse-bouche of rum jelly with granita whacks your tongue with cold mint and vanishes. Another, of goat's cheese with red pepper and black olive, is a tiny gazpacho with a hint of Milk of Magnesia. Crab salad is a girlishly pretty mosaic of tiny crab molecules, dots of avocado puree and transparent squares of kohlrabi - subtle and pungent but gone too soon...The food's delicious - but you can't help feeling you've strayed into some absentee monarch's very pale kingdom.