No surprise that 3-star Core leaps to the top of my best meals ever list

I understand that the guards on death row do their best to honour inmates’ desires for their last meals. I wonder how they’d react if I were in that unfortunate situation and requested the 7-course tasting menu from Clare Smyth’s 3-Michelin Star restaurant Core? A ridiculous scenario, I know, but there’s a grain of essential truth here. At the end of that spectacular meal I was in a place somewhere between awe over the culinary magic and humility brought on by my good fortune, sitting across the table from the love of my life, content with the world and thinking that life really couldn’t get much better.

I’ve written about Clare Smyth here before. Back in 2013 I had an opulent lunch at Restaurant Gordon Ramsay, where she was head chef, and was invited to meet her back in the kitchen. I wondered why her name wasn’t above the door, and swore I’d seek her out when she got her own place. (Particularly since I felt guilty that my husband hadn’t been with me that first time.) Smyth opened Core in August 2017. Five years was not a quick delivery on that pledge. There was the pandemic, of course, and that busy time Clare was catering Harry and Meghan’s wedding before it, and the fact that getting a table here is a bit like getting concert tickets to a hot gig. Every day at midnight booking opens for the day three months from that point, and immediately sells out. By 12:15 the morning my husband stayed up to call, there were only two lunch slots left on the whole day’s docket. 

He’d booked to celebrate our wedding anniversary and my birthday, both on the 15th of September but celebrated at Core two days later. So exceptional was both the food and the price tag it provided another validation for having both events on the same day. 

Celebration began with the restaurant design itself which, in tones of white. grey, copper and natural woods, bathed in light and enlivened by seasonal flowers, is sophisticated yet relaxing. There were perhaps 20 diners besides us in the main dining room and a party of 10 at a long party table stretched out next to the pass, and that’s a sell out. So it’s an intimate place. Thankfully, despite being in such high demand Smyth hasn’t packed the house. There’s enough margin around each table to create a bubble of privacy.

Celebration begins with the same quartet of amuse bouche for everyone: a tomato gougere, a bite sized pinwheel of smoked chicken flavoured with beer, honey and thyme, foie gras pate on a crisp tart shell and a bit of jellied eel with some sort of mousse redolent of the ocean, served on a seaweed shell. I wasn’t crazy about the idea of the last but in taste it was a lot closer to the Japanese eel of which I’m an enormous fan than my imaginings of East End pie shops. The presentation was as good as the flavours, with the foie gras coming out on mounds of moss and the eel on beach pebbles, as if the natural forces were converging on your table. 

Next came a langoustine and wasabi pea work of art; the steadiness of hand required to place the circles of tiny dots on the plate would be far beyond me.

This was quickly knocked into a supporting place by the Scottish cep tartlet. A mushroom-lover’s dream, the tart case featured mushroom mouse topped by a pile of wafer-thin mushroom slices sitting in a mushroom sauce. It was the very essence of that flavour.

Back to fish for the Cornish turbot before crispy sweetbreads with kohlrabi. Everyone adores turbot, but sweetbreads tend to be for the more adventurous. I had them on a tasting menu once in the Loire valley and they weren’t bad, but these were truly excellent. (Photo up top.) In the “I’d actually order them again” Category. Piers, an avowed hater of kohlrabi, swore that if I could make it like that … completely infused with meaty, umami richness … he’d actually eat it. I don’t think I’ll be mastering that trick any time soon.

The climax of my savoury dishes was called Beef and Oyster. Like the eel and the tart course, Smyth is playing with common menus items and giving them the three-star treatment. Beef and oyster pie was a staple of the Victorian working classes. I doubt they’d recognise this incarnation. The beef, Highland wagyu, was rich and tender. I could have done without the whole oyster up top but it absolutely complemented the fillet with its saline hit. The best part of the dish, however, was off to one side, where an oyster shell was packed with the steak and oyster filling you might find in one of those Victorian pies, topped with something that resembled a prawn cracker in density and bite but I think combined the flavours of the oyster and sea weed. This little shell full of goodness was actually better than the fillet, proving you can work wonders with stews.

We started our transition to sweet with something called “the other carrot” another eye-pleasing combo of a carrot cocktail with a frothy top and two quenelles which, though two slightly different flavour profiles, would both have registered “carrot cake” in your brain if you’d been given them in a blind taste test. Yet bite-sized morsels were as gorgeous as any pastry chef’s proudest creation.

The dessert that followed was pretty much my idea of meal-ending perfection: chocolate, malt and hazelnut. A fine-dining tour de force inspired by the simple Malteaser. And like that addictive treat, this dessert was light as a feather. If you didn’t get that message through your taste buds, your eyes would help you. Tiny chocolate feathers drifted across the ball of malty chocolate before you, while the whole thing was served up on a thick glass plate stuffed with real white feathers. The only thing that could have made it better was rolling immediately onto a daybed with real down pillows for a bit of a nap.

But you’re not quite finished yet. Out come the petit fours. To be honest, even I of the too-big appetite and the too-ardent love of chocolate was flagging in the face of a small but perfect warm chocolate tart. Easier to slide in were a different take on wine gums: sweet treats made from the actual dessert wines Sauternes and Banyuls.  

Then comes the worst part. The bill. It’s exactly what you’d expect for what is probably the finest restaurant in Britain right now, using the finest local ingredients and with such a high staff count there’s probably one of them for every two guests. No wonder the service is both impeccable and informative. And of course you’ve had the matching wine flight, which increases your total by about 60% and brings out additional flavours with each sip. If ever there was a textbook illustration of “you get what you pay for”, this is it. Exraordinary doesn’t come cheap. I could run a long string of superlatives here and still not capture how distinct the whole experience was.

And thus, while I hope that my last meal is many years ahead, if an asteroid had struck London as we emerged, replete and temporarily impoverished, into the Notting Hill sunshine after that gastronomic ecstasy, I would have said “it’s been a fair game, and oh, have I lived.”