Up to London, back to France ... at least for art and food

With a new puppy to house train, a new garden to plant and bank accounts to replenish after holiday, staying close to home for the next few months seemed like a fine idea.  But it's spring, finally.  As the worst winter in recent memory fades away, the social diary fills up.  It's as if the whole country has had cabin fever, and wants to get out and about.

And so up to London, for a French chef and a French artist.

They were both surprises.  Chef Bruno Loubet, because someone I'd never heard of is producing Michelin-star quality food at bistro prices a 5-minute walk from my London office.  Painter Edouard Manet, because the much-lauded show left me bothered and unsatisfied.  Let's start with the art.

Manet:  Portraying Life, just concluded after a 4-month run at the Royal Academy, was London's museum blockbuster for the spring.  The focus was portraiture and, by extension, a look at the upper middle class life of Paris in the late 19th century.  Surprisingly, I found that place and time disturbing.

Normally, when I think of the City of Light in this time period I imagine sparkling cafe society, partying at the Moulin Rouge, darling children playing in formal gardens, the luscious Napoleon III rooms at the Louvre.  Monet's paintings show us something darker.

The fact that his colour palette is mostly blacks and greys doesn't help, but it's more than that.  In the most interesting paintings here, the sitters are lost in introspection.  You sense unhappiness.  A feeling of impending menace.  Take, for example, In The Garden, shown above.  At first glance it's a charming portrait of a young family.  But the longer you stand before it, the more you see the husband's downward gaze as a wish to be elsewhere, and the wife's slightly wistful look as a feeling of entrapment now that the fuzzy-faced baby has arrived.  There's the famous Music in the Tuileries Gardens, where the shoulder-to-shoulder crowd doesn't look like they're enjoying themselves, but doing a duty to see and be seen.

Madame Manet had a pensive look as she stared into space in multiple portraits, as if hoping for better things.  Her son Leon turns up a lot, his gaze into the middle distance redolent of teenage angst.  Frankly, while the descriptions on the paintings didn't explore this angle, I felt I was walking through room after room of unhappy, dissatisfied people.  Perhaps I was imagining it, but there seemed to be a back story the curators weren't bothering to explain.

The glowing exception here is Manet's compelling portrait of frequent sitter, fellow artist, sister-in-law and possibly lover Berthe Morrisot.  There's a reason the curators picked this as the main promotional image for the show.  It captures her energy, dynamism and charisma.  She seems alive, ready to climb out of the frame and saunter down Piccadilly in search of a cafe au lait.  Or probably an absinthe.

Whether brooding or charismatic, the best of Manet is compelling.  But there was a lot of average, unmemorable stuff in the exhibit as well.  Many people you drift by without any desire to learn more of them or the painting, and some ... especially the pastels ... that seem so insipid you wonder how a  great artist could have produced them.  This could have been a better show with half the art, and a lot more delving into the sitters and the darker emotions floating behind their disconnected gazes.

Earlier in the day, a colleague had treated me to lunch at Bruno Loubet's bistrot in The Zetter hotel.  Loubet was a very big deal in London in the '90s, then disappeared to Australia for a decade. I missed the news that he'd turned back up as chef of the bistro in this hotel near Smithfield. The place is surprisingly low key and little known considering the quality of the chef, and the food.

Everything we had, and everything I saw coming out of the kitchen, could have comfortably been served in a one Michelin star restaurant. My colleague's starter was particularly grand: a clear beef bouillon dotted with tiny, precisely cubed vegetables, crowned with cubes of fried foie gras and a morel mushroom stuffed with chicken liver pate. Mine was a bit lighter, but still felt terribly gourmet: two beautifully poached quenelles of salmon and scallop, floating on a thick soup that was essentially bouillabaisse base. These both testified to a gourmet hand in the kitchen and, sure enough, there was Bruno, visible in the open plan kitchen, clearly in charge.

I went on to grilled fish surrounded by tiny beetroot ravioli, then we shared out desserts. A vanilla cheesecake was average, the peanut butter mousse with citrus gel was a revelation. I never would have paired those things but the mousse was so light, and the peanut so subtle, that the pairing with the sharp citrus was perfect.

Add to this a nice wine list and great service, and you have a place worth going out of your way for.  It may have been French food, but I can't imagine Manet's subjects ate this well.  If they had ... they would have looked happier.