The Providores and Tapa Room - Removed from website August 2021 (closed) - Marylebone, London

Marylebone High Street has become a nexus of culinary flair in London. In the past year, a number of inventive restaurants have sprung up. Corbin and King (The Wolseley, The Delaunay) chose the street as the site for their newest venture, Fischer's, and you would have reside underneath a rather sizeable rock to be unfamiliar with Chiltern Firehouse. However, the thriving foodie scene is not a brand new phenomenon in the neighbourhood, and one of the restaurants that has helped foster the growth is the excellent Providores and Tapa Room, nestled in the southern end of the High Street.

The restaurant was launched by New Zealand chef Peter Gordon, one of the chefs chiefly responsible for proving to the world that fusion cuisine was not just a hyped-up new-fangled concept with his West London eatery Sugar Club in the mid-nineties. The Providores and Tapa Room, as one might deduce from the title, is really two restaurants. The former being a tasting-led fine-dining restaurant on the ground floor whilst the latter is a more casual, relaxed proposition with whitewashed walls, communal seating, and the eponymous tapa cloth - a ceremonial bark cloth popular in the South Pacific island.
We took our seats in The Providores, a more formal affair with sleek black seating and leather banquettes, starched white tablecloths and modern art adorning the walls. We were immediately struck by the professionalism of the service. Within moments, our waitress had furnished us with water, a selection of delicious breads and taken our drinks orders - a beetroot spritz prepared from fresh beetroot juice pressed in house, NV Nautilus Estate Cuvee and soda, as well as a cucumber and basil sour which muddled cucumber-infused Element 29 vodka with cucumber and basil before shaking it with lemon juice and egg white. Both cocktails were light and brisk palate cleansers.

Guests are encouraged to choose between two and five dishes which are allegedly starter sized but were in fact quite generously apportioned. Because of the plenitude of appealing options, the menu could have been a challenge to navigate if it weren't for are almost obscenely competent server. We commenced with a superlative Singaporean-style crab and coconut laksa with soba noodles, a soft boiled quail's egg, crispy shallots, coriander and a bream and peppercorn dumpling. To be honest, it put to shame anything that we've tried in most of London's Malaysian joints. A tempura battered inari parcel was impregnated with spiced dahl, drizzled with a yellowbean ginger dressing, and served with aubergine, spinach and some intensely aromatic cherry tomatoes. On paper it might sound a bit humdrum, but this dish popped with flavour.

Moving on, the scallops were some of the best we've had in a while. They arrived pan-seared with a crisp brown crust and served alongside celeriac purée, fennel, apple and radish salad, crunchy shallots and a yuzu/manuka honey drizzle. The interplay between the succulent flesh of the shellfish and the glassine texture of the shallots was divine. Beef pesto is one of the most famous dishes on the menu, it's been a signature for nearly twenty years since the heady days of The Sugar Club. An immaculately tender, juicy beef fillet is bedded down with Swiss chard, a courgette and beetroot salad. What really nailed it home was the garlic dressing, pesto and kalamata olives. The saline blast of savouriness was the perfect foil to the beef.

As with everything else, the dessert course was of the highest quality. Golden Crunch ice cream and lemon and raspberry sorbet were nestled underneath a pistachio and grapefruit biscotti, then crowned with a blood orange and blueberry compote. Whilst the dish was certainly busy, its disparate elements melded together luxuriously. It was also quite light and buoyant compared to the depths of our second dish, a chocolate truffle fondant served with rhubarb, hazelnuts and whipped truffle cream. With 70% Virunga chocolate, it was richer than Croesus.

We left it in the hands of the experts and opted for wine pairings from the sommelier, which were some of the best we've recently sampled. We had a difficult time faulting anything about the meal or indeed the entire restaurant, and are excited to offer The Providores and Tapa Room as our newest Innerplace restaurant.

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