Restaurant:Hedone, London W4 – review by John Lanchester

I'm struggling to think of a single other person who has done what the Swede Mikael Jonsson has: moved from running a blog about food to running a restaurant. His lively website, Gastroville, concentrates on restaurant recommendations and chat about ingredients – and, now, some illuminating and funny posts about how hard it is to set up a restaurant of your own. He also had a consultancy advising restaurants on where to buy – sorry, "source" – ingredients. But Jonsson trained as a chef before going to work as a lawyer, and the itch to climb into an apron and get behind the stove has overmastered him: hence the admirable move from commenting and advising to having a go himself.

Hedone
310 Chiswick High Road, London
W4 4HH
02-8747 0377


Open Lunch, Fri & Sat only, 12.30-2.15pm; dinner, Tues-Sat, 6.30-10pm. Meal with drinks and service, from £70 a head.

The restaurant is in Chiswick, west London, and is called Hedone after the Greek word that more or less translates as "pleasure" – though the ideas summed up in that single term were complicated and much-debated in Greek philosophy. There's something sweetly serious about naming a restaurant after a difficult-to-pronounce idea in classical Greek ethics. The look of the restaurant is sweetly serious, too: bare brick, and with an open-plan kitchen that's more open-plan than usual, maybe because the counter is so low. I've no idea how chefs get used to that, since I get crotchety if people look on while I boil an egg.

Hedone is a passionately earnest enterprise whose focus and mission derive from the fact that Jonsson is an ingredient obsessive. His cooking is all about getting the very best possible ingredients – in which this country is rich, much richer than it realises – and then emphasising rather than denaturing their flavours. At its best, Hedone does this brilliantly. A starter of mackerel with little gem lettuce had subtle Japanese inflections in the super-fresh fish that were set off by an amazing dressing of sesame oil and white Banyuls vinegar. The next course was even better, an egg slow-cooked and served with pickled girolles that contained a dollop of apricot jam so subtly used that you'd never have guessed what the complex note of just-sweetness was. Grouse came with a sauce of its own offal, and a non-traditional but very interesting bramley apple accompaniment; 55-day aged beef had great flavour but was on the chewy side – that made me like it, because it showed the beef had been cooked in a pan, rather than by the boringly predictable technique of sous-vide – or, as it used to be called, "boil in a bag".

The restaurant's ingredients-first approach leaves things to speak for themselves, which is good, but there are moments when they speak a little quietly. Scallop sashimi with radish and a dollop of squid ink was exquisitely fresh – Hedone really is a masterclass in sourcing – but could have done with a kick of sharpness or acidity. Top-quality lobster and cep coexisted politely on the plate without creating any synergy, much like Lampard and Gerrard in the England midfield. Quetsch, a posh plum, made a delicious tart and came with an ice-cream made out of its pit – a lovely, witty idea, but the ice-cream's faintly almond-like flavour was so subtle, you had to concentrate hard to detect it.

These are high-level criticisms, and Hedone is only going to get better. Part of the honesty of the place is in admitting that it's a work in progress, a fact that the knowledgable and charming staff are happy to discuss. (A work in progress that at dinner charges £50 for four courses or £70 for six.) Jonsson, unlike most ambitious new restaurateurs, has not employed a PR agency and is trying for a slow start in terms of the attention he attracts; he's even restricting the number of covers while he gets Hedone the way he wants it.

At the table next to us, a young man – a chef, I'm guessing – had a quibble about something, and Jonsson came out of the kitchen to talk to him, with visibly stiff body language that suggested he was having to work at keeping his temper. I hope I'm wrong when I say that success may bring some problems of its own, as expectations of Hedone rise and it becomes as well known and perma-busy as it richly deserves to be.
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