When someone like Grace Dent calls a venue ‘one of the UK’s best restaurants’, your ears prick up.
It’s the accolade she gave to fine-dining restaurant Amethyst, a dramatic and bold-looking place found behind a grand set of heavy doors on Sackville Street in Mayfair.
The restaurant is a new (ish) venture by chef Carlo Scotto, who worked in kitchens in Italy, Japan, France and Sweden before joining the Gordon Ramsay fold and cheffing at Angela Harnett at Murano and Galvin La Chapelle.
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The Italian chef went on to helm the kitchen at Xier in Marylebone, which has since closed, before opening Amethyst in May this year.
Amethyst is a restaurant full of bold decisions and decisive statements. The dining room is a Bruce Wayne cave-like space, spartan yet suave with bare mottled walls and atmospheric downlighting. It’s deliberately unbusy, so not to upstage the food.
Diners sit at the crooks of a large table that zig zags through the centre of the room. It’s made from quartz with a jaggedy streak of Amethyst (Carlo’s birth stone) coursing down the middle.
To the back of the room counter seating divides the dining room from the kitchen, where the chefs almost silently do their thing.
With a full house being just 36 covers, there’s enough room to swing a cat on a busy day, I, however, turned up on a quiet night, when the minimalist interior held more space than the diners did.
It gave Amethyst the air of a new restaurant waiting for things to take off, but forgive this, because dining here was sublime.
Amethyst was my introduction to Carlo’s cooking and what a greeting it was. His 12-course tasting menu was a creative gastronomic journey of immaculate dishes that pulled together his love of travel and exceptional food.
Like a round-the-world air ticket with multiple stopovers, the autumnal dishes took you to various pockets of the globe, to Morocco, Italy, the Nordics, France and Japan, in 12 perfectly formed dishes.
I cannot bang on enough about how exquisite the dishes looked. My chubby chunk of cured salmon arrived decorated with meticulously placed rose petals, hazelnuts and other edible embellishments, and my wedge of beef came with a thick crust of Ras El Hanout which didn’t have a granule out of place.
It was almost a shame to eat them – almost, as the joy of eating them outweighed the joy of looking at them, for sure.
Demonstrating knives and forks aren’t always needed, I ate the first three dishes with my hands – one, a standout a North African-style parcel of pastry stuffed with almond and sweetened with honey, and another a moreish cube of French toast with a plop of cheese sauce and shaved truffle on top.
I was also invited to slurp back the leftover umami broth straight from the bowl after the delicate goyza once floating in it disappeared, and to tear up my Mahlab bread roll and mop up the tri-colour smear of kabocha squash puree, pickled walnuts and smoked fig leaf oil that came with it.
The wine pairing that came with the tasting menu worked a treat at every dish, glass and step of the meal. Wines are available by the bottle, but at a place like Amethyst where every detail is considered, I take pleasure in being a little lazy and trusting everyone involved in the operation knows their stuff far more than I know mine.
Amethyst is the sum of strong decisions and exacting standards and demands you pay attention to what’s on your plate.
In short, did Amethyst live up to my high expectations? Yes. It did, and more.
Address: 6 Sackville Street, Mayfair W1S 3DD
Website: amethystdining.com
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