Grace and Flavour

Winter has arrived in London. The capital rattles with snot-clogged commuters and rowdy office parties. 'Go and review North Road,' I'm instructed. 'It's Michelin-starred Scandi-navian. Mmm... roast reindeer! It'll be Christmassy.' I book a table, ominously easily, envisioning myself eating a Donner or Blitzen burger while wearing a Sarah Lund jumper and bauble earrings.

North Road, it transpires, is not remotely festive. The ambience is muted, the décor all colours from beige through to taupe. It's big on rabbit cooked in burning hay, logs, soil and wild mushrooms, dried loin, pickled green juniper, smoked quail's eggs. It's very light on LOLz.

I witnessed many diners gazing, forlorn and perplexed, at their plates. North Road has drawn comparisons with foodie-haven Noma in Denmark - one of those places in the MasterChef finals that the fledgling cooks get wibbly talking about as it's not just a restaurant, it's a 'foraging degustation event' where chef prides himself on not using real-world shops but swimming the bay pre-dawn in hessian underpants for old nettles to make his stock. It's un-clear where North Road forages, but the teal and the monkfish come with 'Peter's mushrooms'. Peter, in my mind's eye, is a disgruntled allotment owner in Muswell Hill, sat with a blunderbuss waiting for those pesky North Road looters to return.

The menu is brief: just four starters, four mains and no sides on the night we visited. I chose an excellent but minuscule salad of warm roasted vegetables littered with crunchy pork crumbs. The cured smoked Dorset cod with kohlrabi and wild herbs was salty, delicate and delicious. The mains were less successful. Monkfish with swede was a barely filled plate of overdone monkfish with al dente veg in a clear gingery tea. The teal cooked in burned hay tastes exactly thus. The puddings made me audibly rankled. Øllebrød and milk is essentially a puddle of forced rhubarb with a squish of what could be canned cream. The treacle sponge is unbothered by treacle and sprinkled with what tasted like Trill.

It wasn't the most successful evening, but at least I've solved the mystery of why Sarah Lund always misses dinner.

NORTH ROAD
69-73 St John Street, EC1 (020 3217 0033)