Fishmarket
Great Eastern Hotel, London

The Conrad Group, which manages both the Great Eastern Hotel and its five restaurants, including Fishmarket, is known more for its design acumen than for its cooking. Certainly, the beautiful marble room which Fishmarket is lucky enough to enjoy is magnificent - neither garish or overdone, but simply elegant. What surprised me, however, was that Fishmarket's food was less objectionable than I would have expected. No, it's not quite Le Bernardin - but few places are.

My starter of dill encrusted gravlax (spelled gravadlax in the UK) was well cured (gravlax, of course, is salmon cured in salt and herbs, of Scandinavian provenance), and the sweet mustard sauce that came with it gave the dish a sophisticated tinge. I was surprised to see that no special bread was brought out for the fish, since I think some kind of hearty cracker or oatcake would have been perfect. Nonetheless, -the dish was actually quite good, and well priced for a restaurant that sits so high in the spectrum of London pricing.

For my main dish, I ordered a red mullet tagine. Now, normally, when you order a tagine of any sort the whole idea is for the restaurant to be able to present the dish in its dramatic clay pot - for that's what a tagine is, more than a style of cooking. The tagine, like a dutch oven, is supposed to create a certain kind of cooking environment for the dish - one that often provides a distinctive taste or texture. Here, you can see my description of a beef tagine, for example, that I had at the New York restaurant Django.

At Fishmarket, however, the dish arrived arranged simply on a plate, a perfectly aligned, thin square of couscous sitting underneath two obviously sauteed pieces of fragrant fish. This puzzled me for a moment, I have to say. The fish hadn't been cooked in a tagine - and it seems kind of odd to just do the couscous in a tagine and then not take advantage of the inherent presentation it affords. Still, the couscous was delicate and flavorful - both mildly spicy, and sweet with plump, well cooked sultanas dotted throughout. And it was small - finally, thankfully, I had run into a restaurant with a sense of proportion. Eating in New York for more than a month had fooled me into thinking that all restaurants served too much food - here, the portions were well thought out, and just adequate.

Dessert was fun, for a simple reason. My lemon tart arrived, adorned with clever sugar garnishes made in the shape of orange slices. I looked at it, and it looked back up at me, cringing. For, of course, it had obviously been ordered in from a bakery, and not cooked in house, and then sneakily disguised with its sugry finery. There's just a certain sheen, I think, to the ordered in tarte au citron - and even though I could be wrong about its capitalistic provenance, I don't think I am.

Anyway, I actually don't mind when restaurants order in desserts. I'd much rather they did that, and present me with a proper tart, made exactly with a slightly sweet shell of half french butter and half flour, than try to gin up some sort of graham cracker crusted lemon curd monstrosity slathered with whipped cream in their own kitchen. It's a real sign of the chef's humility, I think, to order food in when they know they can't do better, and as I crunched through the quite decent dessert, sipping gingerly at my hot coffee, I was glad for the master's virtue. In all, Fishmarket had impressed, even though I had expected little.