L’Hexagone, 22 Decrease Goat Lane, Norwich NR2 1EL (01603 926 886). Starters and small plates £7-£12, mains £14-£24, desserts £7, wines from £21
Early in my completely satisfied adventures as a gigging musician, placing my ragbag of borrowed licks and boundless, puppyish enthusiasm earlier than very form audiences, I had an epiphany. No matter my ambitions, I used to be not required to have mastered the piano fully earlier than taking part in for folks. The jazz world could also be strewn with mighty saxophonists who flip as much as gigs bellowing “any tune, any key, any tempo”. To me, they're God-like figures. However I didn't must be, certainly might by no means be, like them. As an alternative, I merely had to have the ability to play the tunes I used to be acting at that second. Again then the viewers didn't have to know that there was not a lot else past the 10-song set they’d simply heard. I'd nonetheless be, and certainly stay, the perfect jazz pianist of all of the British restaurant critics.
There’s so much to be stated for being good over a slim bandwidth; for doing a small variety of issues rather well, somewhat than attempting to show your exhausting high-trapeze virtuosity. I considered this whereas finding out the brown-paper menu at L’Hexagone in Norwich. It's the tiny French restaurant that actually can. It's the type of place we might all do with extra of, when cash is tight and we have to take our pleasures with care.
The decor of the small area, on a slim slab-stoned alley, is what I’ve simply outlined to myself as Refined Goth: the partitions are painted black. Downstairs is a bar with seating for not less than, ooh, six. Upstairs, previous the spray-painted phrases “liberté, égalité, fraternité”, is a eating room seating one other mighty 20. In line with the very smallness of all of it, that lunch menu runs to barely 50 French phrases. They're, nonetheless, nice French phrases: a distillation of southern French nation cooking all the way down to its necessities. The prepare dinner is Frenchman Thomas Aubrit, son of a prepare dinner, nephew of a butcher. His English spouse, Gemma, whom he met on the restaurant he was working in again in France, runs front-of-house.
Come early and so they’ll do you actually good espresso, pastries and a croque monsieur or madame. Come for lunch and it’s soup, salads and a bunch of cheery issues involving beef. That basically is the sum of it: to over-extend this jazz-food analogy till it submits a letter of resignation, it’s a decent nightclub set that hits all the suitable notes, and most undoubtedly in the suitable order. The £12 salade niçoise is a pleasingly dense, chopped affair, with a reasonably association of anchovies and tomatoes, topped by half a boiled egg, its yolk at an ideal state of jamminess. A tomato tartine is a crisply toasted piece of sourdough smeared thickly with garlic-boosted tapenade and laid with slices of beef tomato, carefully zigzagged with stripes of thick pungent pistou, the French reply to pesto solely with just a little Gallic swagger. Eat the tartine along with your fingers and also you’ll be smelling your lunch in your fingertips for hours after, in a cheerful approach.
There may be, after all, steak frites, or a bavette with a shallot sauce. Cheaper, gnarlier cuts get the one therapy they perceive: stewed till breaking down into threaded fragments, in a tomatoey stew with black olives, new potatoes and the lofty insistence of fennel seeds. The particular in the present day is a steak tartare, a correctly dressed affair, with a golden egg yolk at its centre and a giant heap of hand-cut chips, nonetheless tipped with the fat-wrinkled skins. It’s a beneficiant heap for £24.
We might now play “guess the desserts”, however the recreation received’t final very lengthy, will it? You realize it'll embody chocolate mousse; a gentle, barely grainy milk chocolate model topped with chocolate flakes, all of which melts away to nothing on the tongue. Sure, there’s a butter-yellow crème brûlée, the burnt sugared floor simply begging for the crack of the teaspoon. Have the vanilla panna cotta with the fruit purée should you like, however mine’s nonetheless that crème brûlée, eaten till I’ve run the sting of my spoon all the way in which around the terracotta bowl to take away all of the crusty, sugary bits.
Within the evenings, there’s a 14-course tasting menu, every dish evoking the profound panorama of Provence. Don’t be foolish. In fact there isn’t. That might be exhausting. It’s precisely the identical tight, attractive proposition, maybe with the addition of a fish dish. It’s only a bunch of easy issues executed very properly and with true, beguiling attraction. To go together with it, drink one thing sweetly acquainted from the brief wine listing that hasn’t heard of anyplace outdoors France. Virtually all of it's out there by the glass; virtually all of it's beneath £40. Don’t come to L’Hexagone anticipating life-changing drama. Come right here anticipating to be fed. By the way, the title is a French nickname for the form of their nation. I didn't know this and now I do. On daily basis is a faculty day.
Whereas I’m loitering in Norwich, I've to say chef Jimmy Preston’s XO Kitchen, which, in its personal approach, additionally sticks inside a slim body, on this case a cheeky, magpie-like romp throughout Asian flavours. They knew I used to be coming, certainly allowed me to order prematurely as a result of in any other case I'd have been too late for final orders. Due to this fact, this will’t fairly be thought-about a assessment, however I adored the face-slapping flavours a lot they must be talked about. Come for the char sui pork stomach, each charred and wobbly beneath a brain-blasting rust-coloured sauce, with a heap of pickled cucumber and a dollop of Norwich-appropriate Colman’s Mustard.
Sooth the mustard burn with the watermelon salad, in a giant soupy dressing heaped with mint, peanuts and contemporary chilli. Do order the meat massaman, a lush coconut curry, with a hacked-off chunk of bone, the properly stuffed with wobbly, sizzling, bone marrow. Particular reward is reserved for his or her BBQ hispi cabbage, with a black bean dressing and a golden, crispy rubble that Preston calls XO seasoning. So, what's that precisely, Jimmy? “Effectively,” he says slowly. “You want a pork factor for XO in order that’s crushed-up Frazzles. And then you definately want dried seafood in order that’s Scampi Fries.” He seems away. “Monster Munch may also have been concerned.” If you're appalled by that, what are you doing studying this column? It’s utter genius. The remainder of you, go to Norwich. Lunch at L’Hexagone. Dinner at XO Kitchen. Or the opposite approach spherical. I actually don’t care. Both approach, job executed.
Information bites
Fancy lunch at your native grocery store? You then’re in luck. Boparan Restaurant Group, which owns a bunch of excessive road manufacturers together with Gourmand Burger Kitchen, Slim Chickens and Caffè Carluccio, has opened its first ‘Restaurant Hub’ inside a department of Sainsbury’s in Sydenham, south London. One other is more likely to observe in Wolverhampton, as a part of plans to open 30 within the coming yr, every providing meals from a wide range of their manufacturers, each to eat in and take away.
The Hawksmoor steakhouse group, which is shortly to open an outpost in Liverpool to go alongside these in London, Manchester, Edinburgh and New York, has turn into one of many few restaurant firms within the UK to be licensed as a B Corp enterprise. The certification, by the non-profit B Lab community, means they've been assessed to carry profit not simply to their shareholders, but in addition to their workers, prospects and to the surroundings. They are going to be reassessed each three years. Go to thehawksmoor.com.
Employees shortages are endemic throughout the economic system, nevertheless it appears the hospitality sector actually is struggling greater than most. Based on evaluation of knowledge from the Workplace of Nationwide Statistics by Koozai, a digital advertising company, properly over a 3rd of meals and lodging companies are having issues recruiting the expert workers they want. The subsequent most affected sectors are development and transport.
E mail Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or observe him on Twitter @jayrayner1
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