A great chef at his best: Lisboeta reviewed

In 2014, Nuno Mendes, a chef from Lisbon by way of Wolfgang Puck’s kitchens and his own Viajante in Bethnal Green, opened a restaurant at the Chiltern Firehouse hotel. This is a redbrick Edwardian castle in Marylebone, which used to be a fire station, but no longer is. This restaurant was skilful: both blessed and cursed. I thought it was Gatsby’s house, inhabited by people looking for something they would never find because it does not exist: self-acceptance through the incitement of jealousy, which is the emotional purpose of being rich.

People went for the empty pleasure of being seen at the Chiltern Firehouse because the prime minister David Cameron, among others, came for Caesar salad with chicken skin, which was presumed to be interesting like he was. Skin aside, the food was less important than the performative presence of what calls itself society inuring itself to its own hubris, and rot. This restaurant was gaudy, but it did not make sense. Mendes is a thoroughbred, and a donkey was required.

This was a shame, because Mendes, who looks like a benevolent wizard, is one of the great chefs of the age and we are lucky that he works in London. He is a maverick, and imaginative, but unlike others he does not forget the diner, who can take only so much maverick imagination. The only exceptional things about seafood-flavoured ice cream are its facetiousness, and the credulousness – and decadence – of those willing to eat it.

Now Mendes has done something for himself and his oppressed food. He has fled from Hello! magazine and opened a restaurant called Lisboeta on Charlotte Street, which is too close to other restaurants to be as fashionable as the Chiltern Firehouse, which, spiritually at least, requires its own country estate, and possibly its own decade.