Please note that since writing this blog post, Beddington's has closed down
I can’t count the number of times someone has told me I’ll make a great wife because I can cook. I rarely feel the need to express my feminist principles, but let’s face it: if a man can cook, he would make a good chef. If a woman can cook, she’d make a good mother.
Jean Beddington is a female, British chef in Amsterdam, and as such I feel a certain solidarity with her. So it’s unsurprising that her eponymous restaurant, Beddington’s, has been on my ‘To Eat’ list for a while. But it was never going to be cheap, so I was biding my time. As the daughter of a retired restaurateur, I can pretty much guarantee that if I can convince my dad to come and visit, it won’t take a giant effort in my persuasive powers to land a table booking at one of Amsterdam’s top restaurants – without my having to foot the bill.
But a while ago I read a book by Jay Rayner: The Man Who Ate The World. The style niggled me – possibly because it’s the kind of book I imagine myself writing, and so I was all the more critical. But several points he made stuck with me. Mr Rayner is in the enviable position that people actually want to pay him to write about restaurants (how? someone tell me how?!), but he noted a pertinent point: when judging high-end restaurants, when reviewing seriously expensive dining experiences, it’s no use to have the bill paid for you. Some authenticity, some raw understanding, some honesty – comes from having a financial investment in what you’re eating.
So when my rich lawyer friend and his banking boyfriend spontaneously asked me to accompany them to Beddinton’s at 7 pm on Saturday night (they had a reservation for three – they must’ve known I couldn’t resist), I had a Jay Rayner moment. I decided that if I was really to review this Amsterdam institution with any degree of integrity, I had to pay for it myself.
Pre starter, came an amuse bouche of homemade corned beef, a raw sausage with mustard cream and a bacalau (salt cod) bitterbal. My first starter was a salad of prawns, palm heart, beetroot leaf and beetroot crisps. Both were delicate, original and left us wanting more.
My second starter (which really was just that, and not the traditional fish course) consisted of a curried cream of parsnip soup with a chicken korma skewer and mango chutney. While the flavours were well-balanced and joined-up, my overriding feeling was that I could’ve made them myself. And that was a bit of a disappointment. My main, however, was up there on the leader board of envelope-pushing dishes. My single-sidedly seared tuna steak was served with a horseradish and wasabi sauce, sweet potato mash and some surprisingly zingy soy concoction. I should’ve kept the menu for this one because the flavours were a smorgasbord of sweet, sour, salt and bitter that defied definition after the event.
Me being me, I willingly capitulated to the sight of the Vacherin Mont d’Or on the cheese board and didn’t look twice at the dessert menu. To be honest, I’d have preferred to choose my cheese myself (so that I could’ve maxed out on the Mont d’Or and forgone some of the others!) but as it was I was served a pre-plated selection. Educational, possibly, but there’s something I find rather gratifying about the agonising selection process from a laden cheese board…
This review is already far too long and I haven’t told you about my dining companions’ beef and oysters with beef tea, or deer with foie gras, or sweetbreads, or toffee apple ice cream with poached pear… or even the fabulous petit fours and the wine we drank. But I think you get the idea. The food was special-occasion food (but special occasions can come unexpectedly, in many shapes and sizes, and I would advise you never to pass up the opportunity to treat yourself – just because you can) and it was made more special by the fact that Jean Beddington is actually working in the kitchen that has her name on it. Which is more than can be said for the Gary Rhodeses and Gordon Ramseys of this world, who are too busy swearing on TV and performing in dance shows to do an awful lot of cooking these days. Not only that, but she was gracious enough to sign a copy of her book, ‘Absolutely Jean Beddington’, that my friends bought me from the restaurant as a present. A personal touch that was beyond the call of duty.
But was the meal worth the almost €100 each we paid for it? In a way, yes. But then again, I’m not sure if I can give it the elusive five stars (my lord, who do I think I am here?! Michelin’s baby sister?!). What I wonder, though, is whether I would be more generous if it wasn’t me who paid?
