A couple of Fridays ago I was sitting outside a very pleasant café called Butter Beans, a minute away from Richmond’s beautifully refurbished Art Deco train station, experiencing what could safely be described as mixed emotions. I was happy, because I was about to have French food for lunch. But I was also sad, because I was not in France doing it.
I was supposed to be. It was the week of my annual big holiday and our plans, made right at the start of the year, were to return to Montpellier, arguably my favourite city in the world. We had booked the bed and breakfast we always stayed in, and the room we always stayed in, for that matter, and I had been daydreaming about a glass of wine or a cold beer out on the roof terrace before dinner. The city had decided – jolly decent of them, if you ask me – to organise a week-long craft beer festival to coincide exactly with my time there.
In a parallel universe you wouldn’t be reading this review, and I’d be sitting on a terrace somewhere (an hour ahead, you see) with a bottle of Languedoc white and a menu in front of me, no doubt being insufferable – well, even more so – on social media. But many of my holidays have come a cropper in the last twelve months, and this one was no exception: Zoë needed an operation on her back, and it was scheduled for the day after we’d come back from France. But in the run-up to the procedure she was in too much pain to catch a train to the airport, sit on a flight for three hours, sleep in an unfamiliar bed, the list goes on.
As the date of the holiday inexorably approached I knew that we would have to have The Conversation, so I mentally prepared myself. I stopped thinking about what restaurants to book, unfollowed various places on Instagram so I wouldn’t have to look at all the dishes I wouldn’t eat and all the fetching dining rooms I wouldn’t eat them in. I unfollowed the beer festival too, said nah nah nah I’m not listening to all the tap takeovers and events.
It was fine, I told myself. After all, when I broke my arm we cancelled a couple of trips away and Zoë, who is of course a far finer human being than I am, never made me feel guilty. There will be other times she said, and I know she meant it. She had given me the script nine months ago, and when we had The Conversation I faithfully followed it. And I meant every word, because that’s what marriage is about, but I have a feeling Zoë would have done a better job of hiding her devastation. Or perhaps she wouldn’t have been devastated, because she’s not unworthy like me.
I kept the week off though, convincing myself that a staycation might be nice. And I decided to treat myself on the Friday with a little solo excursion, lunch with a paperback, a day out on the train. Maybe it was the new series of Ted Lasso, perhaps it was something else, but I found myself eyeing up Richmond as an option. It was a leisurely direct train, taking almost exactly an hour, and there was a very appealing French restaurant a short walk away from the station: technically in Kew not Richmond, I suppose, but not worth splitting hairs over.
Mignonette has just celebrated its second birthday, and it’s safe to say that it’s had a decent couple of years. It won a Bib Gourmand from Michelin after it had been open barely six months, and although it hasn’t so far come to the attention of the broadsheet critics, it did receive a very positive writeup from restaurant guru Andy Hayler – who has featured on the blog before – when he paid it two visits in the first couple of months. “Already shaping up very nicely indeed” was his verdict.
It is owned by chef John McClements, who previously held a Michelin star at a restaurant in nearby Twickenham, and most of the coverage it garnered in the first few months focused on its value for money. Mignonette, you see, offers an extremely affordable prix fixe at lunchtime (“even less than Noble Rot’s” was one comment) and McClements, speaking to the Standard, made much of his attempts to keep costs down, running a lean ship in the kitchen and cutting out the middle man when sourcing ingredients.
“Reasonably priced” felt like a difficult concept to square with “just around the corner from Richmond station”, so I decided it merited a visit for that reason alone, if no other. Fortified by excellent caffeination, I made the short stroll in the sunshine. You couldn’t miss the place, with its tasteful sage frontage, racing green awning and micro-terrace with a couple of tables outside. It reminded me somehow of Chelsea’s Medlar, as if a distant relation, and that shared language made me strangely confident that a promising lunch was in the offing.
The one review I’ve found online of Mignonette was sniffy about the interior (“no expense has been incurred”, it sneered) but I thought it was absolutely fine. It’s a compact room with about thirty covers, although I think they have more space on another floor, and while it’s pretty plain and unadorned, I think I’d pick that over ersatz.
I do think a couple of the smaller tables are ones you wouldn’t want, especially the table for two crowbarred into the bay window, but I had no complaints. I had a great table with my back to the wall, plenty of space and an unimpeded view of the comings and goings of both the diners and the small, friendly and extremely efficient brigade of serving staff.
I don’t know what this says about the demographic of the area, but I was one of the youngest people in that dining room and I think we all know by now that I’m no spring chicken. Bloody boomers, eh? They were there taking advantage of the prix fixe when, generationally speaking, they’re the bastards most capable of paying for the à la carte. I guess being retired comes in really handy when you’re having your main meal at lunchtime.
Just how much of a bargain Mignonette’s set menu is came as a surprise to me, even though everything I’d read said as much. Initially I was disappointed that it was the only menu available: the à la carte comes out to play in the evening. But then I read it and any disappointment evaporated. It is – you may need to read this a couple of times and I promise it’s not a typo – £23 for 2 courses or £25 for 3. Normally that is done by using cheaper ingredients, or by just giving you two choices per course – one meat and one vegetarian, say, with an additional fish option if the restaurant is in a giving mood.
None of that was the case here. Five starters, five mains and five desserts to choose from, with foie gras, smoked salmon, jamon iberico, guinea fowl and lamb all making an appearance. And there were flashes of interest almost everywhere you looked: fermented fennel with one starter, seaweed salad with another, treacle-cured bacon or Merguez sausage cropping up with the mains, heather honey ice cream, pollen and kumquat paired with one of the desserts. I would have only found a prix fixe as attractive as this in a couple of my Montpellier haunts, and they would both have been more expensive.
Whichever permutation of dishes you eventually choose your meal begins, as mine did, with bread and butter. Two types of bread – one a lightly seeded loaf and the other a slice of baguette with an impeccable airy springiness. They came with Mignonette’s Marmite butter, which was the colour of a fudgy caramel and had a relatively subtle but unmistakeable umami depth. It might even convert people who think they hate Marmite, not that I’m among that tribe. A review I read was dubious about this being the default rather than a bog standard salted butter: some folk are just ingrates, if you ask me.
Both bread and butter were replenished when I tore through them, which I found extremely winning. By this point I had a respectable £28 half bottle of Fleurie in front of me, along with my paperback (An Absence Of Cousins by Lore Segal: don’t bother, I feel like I’ve been reading it all year) and the sunny afternoon stretching out ahead. Everything was going very swimmingly indeed.
That trajectory was not remotely altered by a very fine starter. What was billed as a boudin of foie gras – ethical foie gras, the menu takes care to point out – was two glossy discs of the stuff, with a little sprinkle of salt, served with thick ribbons of duck. The latter was allegedly roasted, but I’m not sure exactly how roasted anything can be when its centre is quite so ruddy: that didn’t matter though, as it proved a marvellous counterpoint.
Hidden underneath were two little nuggets of sunshine which at first I took to be sundried tomatoes, but had a note of citrus that made me think they were possibly something like kumquat. And frisée, which is a leaf I generally cross the road to avoid. And a gorgeous dressing with a flourish of Pedro Ximenez that made me think that everybody who had tried to serve me frisée in the past had just been doing it wrong. This is the genius of French cuisine at its best, to me, if it can make frisée a treat.
If the starter was strong, the main was better. Knockout, in fact. Three thick slabs of Herdwick lamb, cooked impeccably, with an embarrassment of riches in support. A soft golden clove of garlic on top. To the side, a quenelle of dreamy pommes purée and two batons of delicious, just-firm-enough courgette. A semicircle of what could have been squash, or pumpkin, again cooked bang on, so soft it could have been confited.
Under the lamb, a phenomenal samphire pesto – a new one on me, but a superb advert for not just eating samphire with fish. And then one final treat: a nubbly little Merguez sausage, from the other side of the tracks to that blushing loin but providing exactly the heat, poke and contrast that catapulted this from a very polished plate of food to one of my dishes of the year.
A couple of months ago, in Cheltenham, I had an exceptional lamb dish as part of Le Champignon Sauvage’s à la carte menu. That menu was £92 for 3 courses. This dish was its equal in accomplishment and quality, on a menu where 3 courses sets you back £25. It is simply unbelievable that Mignonette can offer this range and quality at this price – I’m not sure how they can do that, or how sustainable it is, but I can tell you how wonderful it feels to be a beneficiary of that.
What I would also say about Mignonette’s lamb, before we move on, is that I can’t remember ever eating a dish quite so mindfully. Not just in the glass half empty sense of being aware of it coming to an end – although yes, that too – but in the sense that every forkful was considered, every permutation of components was tried and tasted. Just as you can order from a menu countless ways, it felt like you could eat this dish countless ways too. I loved it. I tore a little crust off my bread to mop up the final whispers of rosemary jus, before loading every last molecule of Marmite butter on to the remaining piece.
I felt a responsibility, as a table for one, to try and spend enough that the restaurant didn’t lose too much money by accommodating a lone diner. That’s my excuse for the alcohol on my final bill setting me back more than the food did. It’s my excuse for laying waste to a half bottle of red, and it’s the reason I ordered a glass of Pineau des Charantes to go with my dessert. It was a glorious pour of potent nectar, and I adored it. You need to at £18 a glass, and I know that on paper that’s ridiculous: in my defence, when the food is reasonably priced to the point of irrationality, it makes you do crazy things.
My dessert with that was a caramelised pear tarte tatin, and if it was the weakest thing I ate it was still miles from an ordeal. It was an individual tarte rather than a section of a larger whole, and something about it didn’t entirely work. The apples were scorching hot, the pastry not quite so: it felt as if they’d met late in proceedings, even though I knew that couldn’t be the case.
But these are not serious problems, not against the backdrop of such a brilliant meal. The sticky caramel sauce encircling the tarte was a thing of beauty, and the crème Chantilly, shot through with Calvados, was arrestingly good. I perhaps might have enjoyed the Earl Grey and honey crème brûlée better, or the Basque cheesecake with rhubarb, but there may be other times to weigh those up. I didn’t see any of them waft past to other tables, which gave me less to envy. Besides, technically this dessert cost £2.
The whole affair was brisk, which I might object to in other circumstances, but for a prix fixe – and a ludicrously priced one at that – I had no problem with it. I was asking for my bill just over an hour after I took my table, and the whole thing came to £78, including an optional 10% service charge. I occasionally say “but you could spend less”, sometimes less convincingly than others, but it’s definitely true here.
So yes, Mignonette is quite extraordinary. To put that set lunch in context, at home and away, it is considerably cheaper than London Street Brasserie, and miles better. Or if you want to compare apples with apples and talk about French restaurants, it’s also less expensive than Oxford’s Pierre Victoire – and much as I love that place it doesn’t come close to Mignonette in terms of quality.
A placid hour on the train, a ten minute walk and food so good that it’s verging on a giveaway, including dishes that hold their own against far pricier ones at acclaimed Michelin starred restaurants. Can you tell I quite liked the place? It is a destination restaurant in a neighbourhood restaurant’s clothing, and I really want to go back to try their à la carte one evening. This is my first review from Richmond, and much as I loved ambling round it I wouldn’t hold out for a sequel any time soon: if I’m in that part of the world, I’ll probably be eating at Mignonette.
The rest of my afternoon was quite lovely, since you asked. With the happy afterglow that a brilliant lunch and a little booze can give, I headed to Kiss The Hippo and had a fantastic latte before buying some beans to take home. I mooched around town window-shopping and remembering times, a lifetime ago, when I was a far more frequent visitor to Richmond.
I sat on a bench by the green and watched all the happy tourists pass by in their Richmond FC shirts, and I was far too replete with the milk of human kindness to judge them at all. And I stopped in a hugely likeable fragrance shop called Parfum Le Dance, because that’s the kind of thing I do, and sprayed countless bottles on strips of paper before taking my three favourites for a little walk, drying down on my wrists and hands. And then I went back to buy a bottle of something indulgent to remember the day by. Why not? I was on holiday after all.
It was, I reflected on the train home, a day out for the ages. Good French food, excellent coffee, people watching and fragrance shopping: I hadn’t missed Montpellier in the slightest.
Mignonette – 9.1
109 Kew Road, London, TW9 2PN
020 82401215
https://www.mignonettebistro.com
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