Voyage with Adam Simmonds, London NW1: ‘A bit like eating at a weight-loss camp’ – restaurant review | Grace Dent on restaurants

6 days ago 10

King’s Cross in London is a place where a million voyages begin and end, each and every week. Which may explain why so much cash has been thrown at the area around the station to turn it into “an aspirational lifestyle destination”, rather than somewhere to stomp through grumpily while dragging a suitcase.

By and large, however, this proposed glow-up has failed – the Euston Road will always be an unlovable, multi-laned traffic snarl-up – although now, if you creep into the Megaro hotel, you’ll find a minimalist Scandi restaurant, Voyage with Adam Simmonds. This plain, dark brown, oak-panelled room sits rather incongruously inside the recently restyled Megaro, which now has a Britpop, Austin Powers-esque, rock’n’roll theme and suites boasting names such as Groove Britannia and Pop Diva; Backstage Britannia comes complete with acid smiley face pillows.

Voyage’s veal sweetbread ‘perched on a delicate plinth of kohlrabi’.

If the Megaro is a celebration of the 1990s London party scene, however, Voyage is a post-party detox in Gällivare, Sweden. Dinner is a five- or seven-course tasting menu of painstakingly prepped gastronomical visions.

Take our first course, named simply “Oyster”. One word, no clues. Fancy, Scandi-influenced menus – and I have seen many – never reveal what you’re ordering, although the portion sizes are almost guaranteed to be minute, as if they’re designed to feed psychic hamsters. That “Oyster”, by the way, turned out to be something very delicious indeed: a bivalve mollusc from France with teeny-tiny flecks of compressed granny smith apple, white asparagus, wood sorrel and tapioca pearls, which a flurry of chefs in the open kitchen assembled meticulously with tweezers.

Similarly, when Voyage’s menu reads “Sweetbread”, you can expect a single veal sweetbread perched on a delicate plinth of kohlrabi served two ways – raw and salt-baked – with a dash of onion puree, a pied mouton mushroom and a whisper of chicken jus in its yellow mustard seed sauce. Voyage’s journey might, to some diners, feel like a trip to a weight-loss camp, although admittedly we were on several occasions offered some good rye bread with whipped butter. Even so, you should expect dinner here to be light and dainty, so on no account take a fine-dining refusenik who will pine for a side of buttered spuds with the “Venison”. That aged venison comes with a slice of salt-baked beetroot, another slice of raw beetroot and a puree of spinach, parsley and juniper.

Voyage’s aged venison with a slice of salt-baked beetroot, another slice of raw beetroot, and a puree of spinach, parsley and juniper.

Adam Simmonds spent his formative years at Le Manoir aux Quat’ Saisons, so his style was always heading towards the precise, refined, faultless and crisp. Voyage feels like a journey through all the various stoves behind which he has stood over a long career – at Le Gavroche, the Ritz and the Halkin, let alone the Lanesborough and L’Escargot. It takes thousands of hours in hot kitchens to cook like Simmonds does.

For me, the highlight of our meal was “Celeriac”, a bowl of cubed, salt-baked, roasted and fermented celeriac with truffle, plus some pieces of shiitake mushroom and walnut, all finished with celeriac broth. Celeriac cooked in five different ways in a single dish is as time-consuming as it sounds, but it’s worth it for this level of vegetarian joy. Also stridently finickety was “Lobster”, in which a forkful of lobster meat sat in a clear broth with some razor clam and squid.

Like all fancy hotel restaurants, Voyage’s clientele included several guests who had possibly ambled in hoping for a caesar salad and a side of fries and were now knee-deep in a Noma-style nosh-up. And if the celeriac and the lobster dishes had puzzled them, they hadn’t seen pudding yet. A bowl of pale smears and creams of varying textures eventually revealed itself to be compressed pear infused with tea and kombucha, some koji ice-cream and some chocolate ganache with a few chestnut drops and a hazelnut cream. Not over-sweet and, in fact, by some interpretations of the word, not really dessert at all.

Voyage is not for everyone, sure, but others will love it. The service is warm, knowledgable and determinedly proud of Simmonds’ hard work, and they sent us on our way with delightful rosebud tea bags that had the look and feel of something I might have made at Brownies. These were packed into a homemade envelope, complete with a letter from Simmonds himself, and sealed with wax at the table, as if they were issuing me with a medieval death warrant. None of this, as far as I remember it, felt remotely normal at the time, and the whole experience becomes even weirder in its retelling. Voyage is definitely a trip.

Voyage with Adam Simmonds 23 Euston Road, London NW1, 020-3146 0222. Open lunch Thurs-Sat, noon-2.30pm, dinner Weds-Sat, 6-9.30pm. From about £65 a head à la carte; five-course tasting menu £85; seven-course tasting menu £115, all plus drinks and service.