**What's the story? **
La Dame de Pic London is a restaurant with quite a pedigree. It’s the first UK opening from Anne-Sophie Pic, who is practically royalty back in her native France. Her family restaurant, Maison Pic in Drôme, has achieved three Michelin stars while under the stewardship of her grandfather, then her father, and now her. In 2011, the World’s 50 Best Restaurants organisation crowned Pic the World’s Best Female Chef and, a year later, she opened La Dame de Pic in Paris. This London venture is its sibling, situated inside the majestic Four Seasons hotel at Ten Trinity Square. Eight months after launch, the restaurant was awarded a Michelin star. Naturally.
What’s the vibe?
Brimming with occasion. The building sits alongside the Tower Of London, and the restaurant is accessed via the hotel’s vast Beaux-Arts rotunda. The 80-cover dining room is also lavishly oversized, with thick mirror-clad pillars that shoot up to a high plasterwork ceiling. That might sound a formidable space in which to dine, but it’s carved up by rows of banquettes, affording guests an unexpected sense of intimacy. Glass-topped tables and low-key lighting cause the whole effect to skew modernist rather than traditional.
What’s on the menu?
The Pic experience is all about unusual flavours combinations, rarefied presentation and adroit grace notes. That tone is set at the outset by a series of amuses bouches: plankton crackers on a bed of pebbles and seashells, for instance, and a light cep mushroom consommé that warmly coats the mouth.
As you would expect for such an auteur, the menu has a biographical dimension. GQ enjoyed a starter of “berlingots”: little pasta parcels stuffed with gently smoked Brillat-Savarin cheese and infused with a citric zing that contends wonderfully with their richness. It’s a Pic classic that was inspired by the traditional Drôme mini ravioli that she enjoyed as a child.
Even where the dishes draw on British ingredients, this is grande cuisine through and through. For main course we had Hereford beef – beef that had been roasted with coffee, and came with celeriac in brown butter, gin and sobacha. The meat was so tender, it was almost soft enough to cut with a fork.
That addition of sobacha – a Korean tea – is all of a piece with Pic’s style. Exotic ingredients run throughout the menu. Take our dessert, the much-Instagrammed white mille-feuille, a sheer white cube on a plate that is an exercise in architecture as much as in cooking. Filled with Tahitian vanilla cream and jasmine jelly, it was a suitably imaginative denouement.
And to drink?
The wine cellar has been built around bottles from the Rhône Valley, the region that the original Maison Pic calls home. But at 45 pages long, the wine list has plenty to offer besides. Unsure what to order? Go for the tasting menu and opt for the wine pairing option.
Conversational ammo:
Ten Trinity Square is located in the old Port of London Authority headquarters, an imposing symbol of Britain's former trading might. In imperial days, anyone bringing cargo up the river had to enter this building to pay dues. The structure was badly damaged in the Blitz, but retains the sense of grandeur that it was originally designed to project.
Check out our list of the best restaurants in London for more great places to eat.
La Dame de Pic, Ten Trinity Square, London, EC3N 4AJ. Fourseasons.com/tentrinity
