 The transformation is in full-swing;
we say good-bye Ronald and hello Rowley Leigh...
 Farewell Ronald McDonald, hail Rowley Leigh. There could hardly be a more symbolic (or surreal) exchange of "chef-proprietors" in the stunning second-floor site at Whiteleys that is now Le Café Anglais - or one that better sums up the spirit behind the transformation currently under way within the landmark building.
Where once burgers thudded aimlessly down fast-food chutes, we now have Rowley Leigh - one of the most influential chefs of his generation - providing a theatre of pleasure, playing with his grand rotisserie in full view of his customers, offering a panoply of hors d'ouevres and a menu and wine list of full-scale deliciousness, delivered with style, efficiency and informal conviviality in a gorgeous setting.
I just think you try and do the best menu you can, try and create one or two slightly unusual things.
 Rowley was attracted by the "knock-out, absolutely wonderful space - a diamond shining in the rough" that was the old McDonalds site. How different will Le Café Anglais be from his previous stage, Kensington Place, also a large-scale room with feature windows? "Very different in style. In a sense much more old-fashioned," muses Rowley.
"It will be much more comfortable. It'll be quieter. Instead of being in a 1980s idiom, it will be somewhere between the 1930s and the 21st century. Architecturally it's a sort of pastiche of ocean liner and Art Deco grand salon - almost inevitable when you look at the space and the architecture of the Whiteleys building, which is amazing. So, just as a space to be in, it will be very, very different.
"It will also be slightly different in food. Whereas at KP we tried to spoon-feed the customer a little bit with everything already chosen for him or her, this is going back to the days when the customer is king. There is a much wider range of choice. You're not spoon-fed your vegetables, you choose them separately. The menu is back to basics, very long, and more English I think, with a special emphasis on roasting. That's partly to give that sense of Englishness and partly because the rotisserie spits add a hugely theatrical element to the room."
The rotisserie element of the Le Café Anglais was inspired by the typical spit-roasts seen on market-day trailers and in tiny restaurants in the small hamlets of the Cherbourg Peninsula in Normandy.
I went to one small place, which is only open in the season...where an old boy basically just cooks meat over a wood fire. However, I noticed everyone was absolutely captivated by the spit. I could see there was something magical about watching your dinner cooked that way.
For reasons of ecology (wood supply), housekeeping (smoke) and Health & Safety (floating burnt-ember particles), the idea of a wood-fire had to be abandoned, but the appeal of a sophisticated rotisserie that provides that sense of communality remained very much alive - as we see today, a few years down the line, in Le Café Anglais.
The sense of a shared feast comes on the menu, too, in the form of a glorious long list of hors d'oeuvres. "We have a lot of large tables - tens, twelves, eights, and a big private room. As part of the atmosphere of conviviality, we're doing a huge pre-menu of hors d'oeuvres dishes. The idea is that a party of 12 might order two sets of four dishes or eight separate pieces, and then put them in the middle of the table for everyone to dip into," Rowley explains.
 Heaven help anyone who moots the notion of a "signature dish" to Rowley - "the idea is utterly fatuous. It so annoys me. I did about three dishes at KP which were so popular I never took them off the menu. Now, when a chef opens up a restaurant, he says, oh and my signature dishes are... It's nonsense. At the Gavroche, there used to be a little line underneath the menu which said: "Although several of our dishes are our speciality, all the dishes bear the hallmark of our interpreration [sic]. I just think you try and do the best menu you can, try and create one or two slightly unusual things."
On the unusual front at Le Café Anglais is the ‘parmesan custard with anchovy toast' - a very warm wobbly little custard with slices of anchovy toast to dip in. The Starter menu is fairly classic with three soups, one pasta dish and quite a lot of sea food including Arbroath Smokies, grilled langoustines and a ‘pike sausage with herbs and beurre blanc'.
Rowley explains: "It's a pike mousse, moulded into a sausage, with bits of sea food in it, like scallops and shrimp, then baked in the oven so it expands into a fantastic form. Getting people to eat pike isn't the easiest in the world. If that became a signature dish I'd be very happy! I'm always happiest when I get people to eat things they think they don't like."
Main courses are mostly simple. Fish, clean and simple, either steamed or grilled and served with either sauce vierge or béarnaise sauce, which corresponds to the chef-proprietor's personal taste. ("I don't like the chef doing a signature dish with a lovely Dover sole. I just like a beautiful Dover sole cooked as well as possible without being mucked about.") And then a huge range of roasts.
Since we've opened in November, we'll probably have at least six different game birds, and lamb, mutton and beef. We intend to have an evening roast of the day, which will always be there. For example, roast ham on Friday, roast Sirloin on Sunday, so that people are going to say, oooh the ham's on tonight...
Set lunch will be great value with a few selected hors d'oeuvres and two dishes of the day (one fish, one meat) designed to be quick and cheap. "Speed is one of the most attractive things about a restaurant," maintains Rowley. "Speed and lighting. No one likes to be kept waiting and no one likes to look ghoulish in bad light."
 It is two decades since Kensington Place opened. What has changed in the public's attitude that time? "People are much more service orientated. I don't think necessarily the food culture has changed as much as people think it has, unfortunately, but people do expect something of restaurants in a way that was only beginning to be articulated 20 years ago.
Restaurants have replaced churches or pubs as meeting places. A social life for some people exists only in their eating out and I think, here at Whiteleys, we're going to have this great big lovely glamorous place for people to interact and to enjoy dining in. We've got an absolutely huge catchment, just with the local residents in Bayswater, and we're equidistant from Maida Vale, Knightsbridge, Marylebone, Notting Hill and Kensington.
Partnered by the indefatigable Charlie McVeigh - of Woody's nightclub, Bush Bar & Grill and the Grand Union Club (now the Westbridge) - the tremendous challenge of bringing the project from imagination has now reached fruition with the opening of the doors. Has it been energising? "I'm not entirely sure," smiles Rowley. "Sometimes I think I started up this juggernaut and brought it into life and I'm not sure if I'm running ahead or running behind trying to catch up. Luckily I've got a very good team, and partner in Charlie. It's long gone past being a one-man band. That's what's so exciting about it, that something you create takes on its own life."
He has his whites back on. The kitchen brigade are ready. The bar staff primed. Rowley admits he has been itching to get back into a operational kitchen, particularly in his new role. "Half the kitchen is on view, so I'll be on view most of the time with the rotisserie. It's part of the theatre and I'm dying to play with it. Although I was perceived to be the chef proprietor at KP, I wasn't. I didn't tell them how to run the room, I didn't write the cheques. Here I really am the chef proprietor."
For reservations, please call 020 7221 1415
|
