We start with a story about a Swedish lawyer named Mikael Jonsson, who also wrote a food blog and threw astonishing dinner parties for his friends. I heard the story from one of those fortunates. Memories of the marvels eaten at Jonsson's table made his eyes shine.
Then Jonsson did the maddest thing. He ditched the law and opened up a restaurant in Chiswick, a posh west London suburb. He slept over the shop, putting every penny onto the plates and wowing a city notoriously allergic to being wowed. In 2013 Hedone received a Michelin star, spreading the story to a wider audience.
Hedone is on the high street, beside a pizza place. Its footprint is roughly the size of a Starbucks. I’m at a kitchen counter seat, close to the action. At the start of the night it’s eerily quiet; there’s no music. Later the room will fill with chat and noise, but now it’s the hum of the kitchen extractor, the clacking of Tupperware lids, murmured instructions and a newbie chef stifling a gasp when she slices open her finger instead of a vac-pac bag. Hours of work have gone into filling the drawers and bags with food. They will be warmed, aerated, squirted, placed, dotted and drizzled over plates for hours to come.
Jonsson is the tallest chef in the kitchen. Inscrutable, bearded, bespectacled: you can see him in a pinstripe suit in a courtroom. I want to ask him if he’s having fun, but he doesn’t look like he is.
Me, I’m having the best time. It starts with the dancing girls that are the canapés – a cherry meringue with a penny-sized disc of foie gras topped with two discs of button mushroom, princely and pauperish. Then comes the parlour trick: a salad nicoise, squeezed Willy Wonka style into a doll-sized cone. It’s “a bit brittle” Jonsson warns. (Some of your dishes are handed to you by the chefs. Others arrive the longer way round delivered by the wait staff.) So you down the feather-light cone in one bite. Pop. Instant salad nicoise.
Curls of avocado are pared into cups to hold crab meat with teeny apple cubes, topped with a pistachio cream and a fluffy white “curry” foam that is groaningly delightful. A warm eggy flan with cucumber three ways, pickled, granita-ed and pureed gives you ice and warmth, comfort and zing.
Then the £75 (€94) seven-course tasting menu proper begins. Poached and caramelised onions battle with mandolined pear slices to see who’s sweetest against a lemon zest and sage backdrop. The onions win, but you end up relishing the graininess of the pear.
A show-stopping Isle of Mull scallop comes still attached to its stony-ridged shell, cooked at 40 degrees so it has the texture of raw with the sweetness of cooked. A beaded dashi broth and black trompettes, like stray strands of seaweed, are its only adornment.
Then: liquid Parmesan ravioli. As with the cornetto, they have to be eaten whole to avoid embarrassing chin dribbles. Tiny cubes of guanciale are like jellies made of pig and horseradish and onion finish it off.
I’ve asked for the pigeon, but it’s woodcock tonight. Jonsson does a show-and-tell of the bird before it’s cooked, plucked but with a still-feathery head and an extraordinary curved length of beak. He can serve the head and I can eat the brains, he says. Right so. The legs also arrive on the plate, clenched Jurassic Park claws and all to “show respect for the bird. It’s a wild bird.”
It’s tooth and claw stuff, the tiny pink morsel of brains more a texture than a taste, a creamy faint echo of the meat. The legs are too chewy to manage more than a nibble. There are tiny cubes of smoked eel and jammy figs on a generous piece of duck foie gras to make it feel more like a treat than a treatise.
The first dessert looks low-key but is a tribute to Christmas that makes me smile. Splodges of almond cream get green tea meringue berets, and a clementine has been buried in a pillow of fluffy mousse. It’s the orange in the toe of a stocking and the marzipan on the cake.
The second dessert is a stunner. Watching it being made hasn’t prepared me for the experience of eating it. Your spoon cracks the glass crisp disk of raspberry-powdered chocolate (I presume it’s been frozen as there isn’t a smidgeon of melting going on). Then you plunge into warm foamy chocolate mousse that’s darker than a Scandinavian crime drama. At the bottom is a spiky passion fruit jelly and on top there’s a calm quenelle of vanilla ice cream. It’s a game of texture and temperature, sweet and bitter, making for the most brilliant dessert I’ve ever eaten.
It’s a schlep from central London and you’ll need a second mortgage to dally with the wine list, but Hedone is a hedonist heaven. There are a couple of parlour tricks, but the rest is a pantry trick. Mikael Jonsson is an ingredients wonk, fanatical about starting with the best produce and never travelling so far up his own ego that this starting point gets forgotten. He might not be smiling, but his diners certainly are.
Dinner for one with sparkling water and 12.5 per cent service came to £89.44 (€113).
The verdict: 9/10 One man's dream becomes delicious reality
Hedone, 301-303 Chiswick High Road, London W44HH tel: 0044-207-8747-0377
Facilities: Downstairs.
Food provenance: Not much on the menu, but ask and you shall be told
Wheelchair access: Yes
Vegetarian options: Inventive and extensive
