Majoring in cheese at L'Art du Fromage
Many's the long night I've dreamed of cheese - toasted, mostly," says Ben Gunn in Treasure Island. Me too, me too, even without the benefit of being marooned. What would life be without cheese? as the opera aria so nearly put it.
L'Art du Fromage, a new French joint in Chelsea majoring on the stuff, is the creation of two 24-year-olds from Strasbourg, Julien Ledogar and Jean-Charles Madenspacher. The décor is a bit stark, with graceless wooden chairs and embossed ads for those awful complicated beers they cherish in Belgium.
Indeed, the whole experience is very much northern French, a bit like stepping into the film Bienvenue Chez les Ch'tis, the farce that the French believe to be the funniest thing ever, in which a southern French postman is relocated, not just against his will but to his absolute horror, to a small town near Dunkirk.
From the non-cheese starters, Pâté en croûte au Riesling avec crudités was a huge portion for just £5.50 but disappointing nonetheless, with heavy, doughy pastry, rock-hard jelly with little taste, framing a dense and over-processed terrine that needed lots of mustard to give it a lift.
Munster pane (£7.10) was better: fishfinger lookalike slices of soft cheese, crisply fried in breadcrumbs, served with curls of good Bayonne ham, and a sharpish green salad, although one that contained large crystals of unground salt.
Not having just returned from a day-long wintry hike, we passed on the fondues ("eat as much as you like").
From the choice of five Tartes Flambées, an Alsacien version of a pizza, we had La Forestière at £8.40 - a good, thin and crisp bready base, covered with softened onions and cream, plus tasty bacon lardons and wild mushrooms, albeit oddly salty. As a meal in itself, this would be satisfying and a bargain.
A Tartiflette Franc Comtoise (£11.80) was a blockbuster: a bowl full of potatoes, cream, onions and ham, with mushrooms again, and Reblochon cheese melted in, accompanied by a helpless salad. Despite being so rich, this one just wasn't irresistible enough to justify the damage it would do to the waistline and the carotids.
At La Fromagerie, they serve cheese in a healthy, indeed somewhat Californian, manner. The cooking style here at L'Art du Fromage would suit outdoor workers in Siberia very well; the gentry of Chelsea, I suspect, not so much.
L'Art du Fromage
1A Langton Street, SW10
