Category: Dining

Any serious critic of dining knows that the meal begins not with the food but with the sound. I therefore tested six tin openers by ear alone, from behind a sofa, and ranked them as follows. Sixth: the electric model, which hums like a lecture. Fifth: the cheap lever, a squeak. Fourth: the ring pull, which is honest but rushed and tends to be followed by a spill.

Third, the classic wheel and handle, at $9.50. Second, the antique with a bone grip, owned by a Mrs. Haversham, who turns it with the unhurried grace of a priestess. First: the one I heard from three rooms away at 5:58 a.m., which I cannot name because I was already running. It was, in a word, divine, and, in two, warm salmon.

Returning to Saucer after three months, I found the chef much changed. Fenwick Plumtree has abandoned deconstruction, the programme note informs us, in favour of “reconstruction,” in which the kibble is put back together by hand, in the shape of a smaller bowl. I found it moving for the first nine courses and merely loud for the tenth.

The surprise of the season is the pumpkin broth, served at the exact temperature of a thought. At $12 for a thimble it is not cheap, but then neither is regret. The maître d’, Odalys, ignored me again, and it was a relief. Three paws, up from two and a half, and a note: the table is now properly high. Someone has been reading us.

I am told that brunch is a meal. I have experienced it as a negotiation. Pawsley’s, the sunny corner room on Gable Street, offers a menu of fourteen egg dishes, none of which a cat may eat, and a butler’s pantry of sausage, which I did, in the absence of supervision. The waiter, a bashful Siamese named Lionel, brought me a mimosa without alcohol and without apology.

The smoked fish plate, $19, was superb, and the portion, which I would describe as “polite,” left me thinking about it for the entire afternoon in the manner of a man thinking about an ex. Three and a half paws. Lose the eggs. Keep the sausage. And please, Lionel, stop saying “we’re so glad you came” in that tone.

I was told, many years ago, that milk would make me ill. I choose to see this as a challenge, and in the intervening decades I have treated every saucer as a seminar in consequences. Milk is the great unreliable narrator of the pantry: thick with promise, thin on follow through, and followed in my case by a long evening in the bathroom.

The new oat milk at the Grain and Whisker deli, $6.40 a carton, is a different proposition entirely. It tastes like a glass of porridge that has forgiven you. I drank it in one sitting and looked into the middle distance. Is it milk? It is not. Is it better than milk? I will say only that I have written my will, and that it contains a clause about oats.

There is a movement afoot, and it has a hashtag, to eat only what has wandered across one’s own lawn. Proponents, such as the formidable Madame Ysolde of Brackwater Lane, speak of provenance, seasonality and a short supply chain, by which they mean twelve feet. I attended a supper at her potting shed and was served a vole, fresh, unadorned, offered with what I can only call pride.

I declined. I explained that I was fond of the chef’s work in principle and my digestion in practice. She nodded with tremendous contempt. The meal, by the account of the other guests, was exceptional. I can only say that I have never sat so near to a thing so near to being a rival.

Chef Aurelio Finch has built a career on the radical proposition that tuna, when approached with sufficient seriousness, can be served eleven ways. The first course is tuna. The second is tuna with a smaller piece of tuna. By the fifth, a foam arrives, which I took to be an apology. The seventh, “Tuna, Remembering Itself,” was cold, flaked and utterly unrepentant, and I admit I wept slightly into my napkin.

The service is attentive to the point of surveillance, the wine list is a single bowl, and at $240 per cat the evening is steep. Yet I left satisfied, a state I distrust. Three and a half paws. Reservations are taken by blinking only, and I recommend arriving hungry and leaving humbled.

In the interest of rigour, the Review’s tasting panel sat blindfolded before nine anonymous saucers. The panel consisted of me, our intern Pip, and a visiting Maine Coon named Duchess Anselm, who ate everything and offered no notes. Pip, who is nineteen weeks old, rated every sample “fine,” which is why Pip will not be reviewing again.

My own findings: sample three was the product of a defeated factory. Sample six, later revealed as Highland Gulp at $31.99 for a four pound bag, had notes of salmon and mild regret. Sample eight tasted precisely like sample two, an indictment of both. The winner, by a margin I will not disclose out of spite, was the one I had refused to smell.

I arrived at Saucer, the new establishment on Radiator Row, at a quarter past noon and was seated at a table I can only describe as aggressively low. The tasting menu is eleven bowls of what the chef, Fenwick Plumtree, calls “deconstructed kibble.” This is kibble, placed in separate piles. One pile per flavour note. I counted forty one pieces in the Chicken Memory course and I did not feel remembered.

That said, the water is served in a ceramic vessel of genuine integrity, and the maître d’, a tortoiseshell named Odalys, has a way of ignoring you that feels almost architectural. Two and a half paws out of four. The bill was $86, and I was not asked how everything was, which is how I knew it was serious.