Fantômas, a new restaurant in Chelsea, is named after one of France’s most famous fictional antiheroes: think the Scarlet Pimpernel meets Dexter with a large dose of James Bond baddie. Or at least that’s what I gather – to the British ear, the name just sounds archly gothic. And that’s quite in keeping with this capacious, glamorous and sparsely lit joint, where the music is loud (tribal house, or thereabouts, in case you’re wondering) and a statuesque beauty in a tailored leather gown walks you from the front curtain to your table, before handing you over to a server. Well, make that servers plural, because they are legion here.
This place is a collaboration between chef Chris Denney, formerly of Fiend and 108 Garage, and George Bukhov-Weinstein and Ilya Demichev, the pair who in 2014 caused chaos on the London dining scene when they opened Beast, a similarly Bram Stoker-ish spot in a crypt that served only gigantic king crab, steak and chunks of aged parmesan with rocket. Prices started at about £100 a head, which at the time felt like a lot for surf, turf and some cheese with the devil’s lettuce. Little did we know back then that £100 would be roughly the bill for a minor blowout at Pret nowadays.
Fantômas’ prices are wholly in keeping with fancy London norms right now, so factor for about £100-plus a head, before booze and service. I drank a glass of fancy lemonade with a cryptic name for £14 purely to show willing. One thing is for certain here, though: Denney is again reaping his trademark culinary whirlwind. He’s never boring and his menu is delicious but borderline chaotic on a global level. There are sweetbreads with sauerkraut, celeriac with lamb heart ragu, beetroot with buttermilk ranch sauce and Irish beef with a suet dumpling. This is King’s Road in Chelsea, and Denney’s menu screams: “Europe by private jet, stopping briefly in most capital cities, but avoiding anything as gauche as passport control.” Should Japan feel left out, there’s dashi soup and chutoro tuna with ponzu. You want Mexico? Here’s rare squab pigeon (how very home counties) on a Mexican red mole sauce.
Denney can undoubtedly cook incredibly well, and his kitchen team show flair for flavour in everything they touch, be it the rich, lightly whipped chicken liver parfait with a doorstop of warm sourdough focaccia or, one of my favourite dishes of the night, a simple slab of hispi cabbage elevated by being sweetly caramelised and served with tarama. That squab, incidentally, is served so rare, it could feasibly have been annoying the tourists at Nelson’s Column not 10 minutes earlier, but the mole sauce it comes with is wholly drinkable. I liked the barbecued aubergine with hibachi oil much less, because it had turned soggy during its titivation. That said, the hits at Fantômas far outweigh the misses, and the perilla-scented ponzu sauce with that chutoro is altogether outstanding.
Even so, Fantômas is a wholly unrelaxing dining experience. There’s an open kitchen on one side of the room and a cocktail bar on the other, the music is relentless and every course seems to be delivered by a different server, which leads to oversights. There are about 80 covers and – on the Saturday I visited, at least – almost as many servers, sommeliers, managers, deputy managers and even the owners, all milling about on the floor and barely two yards from your plate. I’ve seen calmer hokey cokeys. There’s no point trying to hide in the toilets for solace, either, because they are styled like caves, plus the ladies’ has stone walls, so feels a bit like being held at Carlisle Castle for sedition.
This is a restaurant that left me with many more questions than answers. By dessert, another fresh face appeared tableside and implored us to try the cucumber ice-cream, which turned out to be a painfully cold cucumber granita fuming with liquid nitrogen. Solace, however, was found in Denney’s trademark rum savarin, here served with chantilly cream and pineapple: think a small, delicate baba with a twist of piña colada. Our other dessert was a “chocolate bar”, a concoction of mousse, orange and hazelnut with a jerusalem artichoke ice-cream that was oddly warm. We are definitely in “jerusalem artichoke dessert season” now, people, a yearly event in the fancy food calendar – I will certainly not forget last year’s artichoke tarte tatin in a hurry.
Fantômas shook me up and threw me back out into the street, £200 poorer and having to push my way past that leather-gowned hostess and one of the owners, who were debating VIP tables, plus it took until Sloane Square tube for my tinnitus to start clearing up. All in all, it was an unforgettable evening.
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Fantômas 300 Kings Road, London SW3, 020-8191 2781. Open dinner only, Tues-Sat, 6-10pm (last orders; 10.30pm Fri & Sat). From about £70 a head à la carte, plus drinks and service
