Subtle nuances separate a Michelin star and a local treasure

REVIEW:
La Trompette, Chiswick, and Thompson, St. Albans

It's a rare and profligate treat when you sit down to two gourmet tasting menus in less than a week. With matching wine flights. I blame the American elections. I needed distraction.

One was La Trompette, a well-known Michelin-starred French restaurant in Chiswick with a long-established reputation amongst London foodies (past review here). The other was a popular local restaurant in St. Albans called Thompson with just two AA rosettes and little reputation beyond its immediate area. It's not even, quite remarkably, in Trip Advisor's top 10 restaurants for the town. And yet, there wasn't that much difference between the Hertfordshire unknown and the Chiswick giant.

With two fine dining extravaganzas so close together, this seems a fine opportunity to consider what makes a Michelin star, and to compare and contrast the fine dining aspirant to the established giant.

Both places delivered beautiful meals, each a procession of highly-styled plates with small portions carefully arranged on showy china in squares, dots, smears and crumbles. Both had attentive and knowledgeable service, with Trompette's being primarily French and Thompson's fielding a more global team. The sommeliers at both made confident pairing choices and could talk about them in depth.

The menus followed the same general progression from light to full-bodied, each preceded by showy amuse bouche at the start and delivering an exotic pre-desert towards the end to cleanse the palate before the final firework. At Thompson: smoked and lightly pickled sea trout; chicken liver parfait with roasted fig and red wine jelly (above, top photo); poached fillet of halibut with girolles; slow-roasted local beef; tropical sorbets with roasted coconut; Black Forest dacquoise (below, bottom photo). At La Trompette: raw bream with an Asian pickle; roast scallop with confit ginger; roast foie gras with gingerbread (above, bottom photo); wild turbot with spatzle; citrus mousse; bitter chocolate with peanut, caramel and lime (below, top photo). Both restaurants offered a choice between two main courses, at La Trompette you also got to choose between desserts.

Both dining rooms are tasteful, uncluttered and modern. La Trompette's is brighter and decorated with lighter colours, while Thompson is darker and cosy with rich reds, browns and blacks.

The prices, surprisingly, aren't as different as you'd think. The Chiswick-based Michelin experience will put you back £70 per person for the food, with an additional £55 for the wines. Up in Hertfordshire, you'll pay £59.50 for dinner and £35 for the wines.

Other than distance from central London and £30.50, what differentiates the Michelin starred restaurant? Though uncompromisingly French, La Trompette's menu had a few more elements of the exotic: bonito, shimeji, miyagawa. The flavours were a bit more distinct and powerful across the board, as if everything had been distilled down a bit further. The sauces were slightly glossier and richer. The sommelier was more playful, offering us the usual descriptions or a blind tasting with descriptions after the course (we guessed, of course) and his pairings were more unusual. That included wines from surprising countries ... we only drank one French and one of the best was an American from Oregon ... and one of those tasting menu dramas where the wine's not that palatable until the food comes, and then they transform each other. (Although Thompson scores bonus points for matching their dacquoise with a coffee martini rather than a standard pudding wine.)

But these are tiny nuances. Of the two restaurants, La Trompette delivered to expection. The newsworthy discovery is in St. Albans. I fantasise about a restaurant like this in our bit of the English provinces. The people of Hertfordshire are very lucky. If you every find yourself up that way, be sure to book in with Thompson.