A VERY BIG HOUSE IN THE COUNTRY
GIANCARLO CALDESE OPENS IN BRAY. WE SIT DOWN WITH HIM TO CHEW THE FAT (duck)
Into the bullring of restaurants that fill the tiny town of Bray has come Caldesi. The Fat Duck is around the corner, as is the Hindshead, The Riverside Brasserie (prop. H.Blumentahl) and the Waterside Inn. Lucky locals eh?
Caldesi, known for his Marylebone eatery, has taken over the old Slice restaurant in Mill lane and created a cosy multi-roomed place with the smell of wood burning fires to tempt you in, plus a wood burning oven in the back garden for those summer afternoons hopefully yet to come. Although the décor is traditionally high-end restaurant, the menu is, as you might expect, straight from Italy and no-nonsense about it. Around the corner they may be wearing white coats and cooking in test tubes, but here there are hairy men cooking classic dishes with no help from science, only tradition, and chef Gregorio Piazza, helped out by Giancarlo himself for these opening weeks, is at the helm after ten years previously in Marylebone.
Giancarlo has taken time out of what must be a busy schedule to have lunch with Al and I and at the same time talk about life, food and that place up the road. He’s a cheerful chap Giancarlo, but you can sense steel inside that affable exterior and his team out here in the country don’t just jump when he says jump, their eyes clearly say ‘how high?’
Nibbles
He knows what he wants us to try “I want you to go out the door understanding our concept of food” he states and in a flurry of Italian orders lunch for us. While we wait I ask him what he’s doing out here in Bray. He seems a little distracted at first, not listening and taking a long time to answer, or tailing off semi-permanently mid sentence. I have that effect on people of course, but even so he does it so much that Al and I exchange worried glances thinking he might have died. Gradually though he rallies.
“I came down to this restaurant, to the previous owners, to help out, in a consultant sort of way,” he sighs wearily. “After a few weeks I felt I couldn’t really help so I said I’ll buy it, here’s a cheque. Why? Well one of the reasons was my wife and kids wanted to live outside of London so we’re moving to Gerrards `Cross and we can reach this restaurant and Marylebone easily.”
It sounds plausible but one has to wonder whether there isn’t some degree of bravado here. After all there are plenty of restaurants outside of London to choose from, why pick one in such a restaurant-saturated small town. Perhaps Giancarlo is keen to take on the competition and also prove that honest, traditional cooking can triumph against the guys in lab coats around the corner.
Is he a fan of the Fat Duck? He avoids the question. “Well the Fat Duck is always busy the five days a week they are open,” he says, ‘and here in Bray we are not that established yet, although weekends are fully booked. In fact we are turning people away and that’s in just our eighth week I don’t know many restaurants that could achieve that coming out cold as we did. Especially,” he laughs, “as the power and gas weren’t working almost up to opening day.”
Primi Patti
Our starters have arrived, a bowl of thick bean soup for Giancarlo, scallops wrapped in bacon with white wine, leek mousse and coral ragu for me. I venture the opinion that while most people pass by soup on a restaurant menu, for me it’s one of the true tests of the cooking, as a soup is honest with no decoration or presentation to hide behind. This observation cheers Giancarlo up enormously. “ Ah yes, “ he says,” we are talking the same language, soup is not easy! It is slow, laborious work if done properly.” His soup is perfect Autumnal food, comforting, rich and chunky and clearly passed through a Mouli and not blitzed in a blender. With it comes home made bread from the young pastry chef they have brought down, he clearly glows under Giancarlo’s praise when summoned from the kitchen and it’s well deserved. The lad has a real knack for the kneading.
I prefer the soup it to my scallops, which don’t really seem to be a perfect example of what Giancarlo is saying about simple, honest dishes. It’s an anomaly though as the Porchetta casereccia; thin sliced pork that’s been stuffed with herbs and served with a salad and green ‘”Italian!” lentils, is brilliant. This to me seems the real deal and I steal as much as I can off Al’s plate before he returns from his photo expedition in the kitchen.
“A menu should have variety, without being massive,” Giancarlo opines as he finishes his soup, “ and seasonal, of course.” He points to the salad of pear, apple, celery pine nut and pecorino cheese with honey and lemon, “that’s a lovely salad for this time of year, the honey and the apples make it right for the season we’re in. I don’t think salads should stop at the end of the summer. I think that this salad can be rather warming actually.”
Pasta
Second course and now we’re cooking, homemade ravioli stuffed with sea bass and in a lemon butter sauce is superb. The pasta glows yellow off the plate, “we use only the best eggs” and the lemon butter sauce is just the thing to accompany it. You don’t often see butter sauces in our health-conscious times but it’s worth throwing calorie caution to the wind sometimes. Proper cooking this is.
We’re also poking down taglioni with porcini and black truffle. You couldn’t get much simpler and the aroma of the sliced truffle hits the table before the dish does. A dish that you have to get down with, napkin stuffed into your collar
“We offer something for everyone with the pasta too,” says Giancarlo sucking thoughtfully on a strand of pasta. “Meat, fish and for vegetarians there is also the tortelloni stuffed with mozzarella and aubergine. Variety is important.”
Carne e pesce
Time for the meat of the matter and a little fish. Giancarlo insists we try the Scottiglia.
“It’s very nice,” he muses, “the way we do it is pieces of pigeon, duck, chicken, guinea fowl all cooked with onion and herbs and a bit of tomato. This dish epitomises a style of ancient cooking – left over pieces of meat gathered together and cooked this way to make good use of it with no waste and when done well it’s seriously very good and substantial.” It’s not just good it’s brilliant. With no particular artistry of layout on the plate it’s all about the flavours, which are packed in, tighter than commuters on a Northern Line tube at rush hour. The olive mash it sits on is equally fine, the two halves of the dish so complimentary.
Pan-fried monkfish with shrimps, pumpkin and olive oil mash is surprising. You might think the pumpkin an odd addition but it actually chums up to the prawns and monkfish like they’ve always been best mates. The prawn and the monkfish share a similar texture but the pumpkin adds a velvety smoothness to each mouthful, Ingredients are clearly king but are they hard to source out here?
“It’s difficult to find a good supplier, to be honest, although we do okay." he says."The other restaurants here say they have the same problem, but maybe they don’t want to tell us their suppliers eh?” he laughs uproariously forking a piece of meat from my plate and asking me to sample some of his wild boar stew, another powerfully flavoured dish aloft a sea of truffled polenta.
Throughout the plates have been brought out under the supervision of Manager Simon who asked Giancarlo if he could come out to the country and make the new restaurant work. “There are three people working here to make the restaurant what it is, the manager the chef and me in that order even though I am the boss. The cooking is the character of the restaurant and that character is all of us, we have been together a long time.”
Just desserts
Finally as we loosen belts, the bombolini. These tubular doughnuts look so heavy they might need a crane to lift them off the plate and yet when picked up they are as light as a feather. It’s another example of the pastry chef’s genius. “We have a local musician, a well-known star actually, who always orders some of these to takeaway with him,” Giancarlo laughs. “They really are fantastic, just perfect.”
We go to the bar for coffee where manager, chef and Giancarlo all crowd behind the bar at jiggling the Gaggia's levers, laughing and joking. Then Giancarlo is gone, back to London. The other two visibly relax. The boss has left the building.
The new Caldesi is looking to be everything Giancarlo wants it to be, with honest Italian cooking done to a very high standard. The team in place is professional, relaxed and very very passionate about what they do and determined to do it well. It's another reason to envy those who brag that they live in Bray.
Words: Nick Harman
Pictures: Al Stuart
