Less art more craft

Hywel Jones made a name for himself at Foliage restaurant in the Mandarin Oriental Hyde Park Hotel and went on to gather praise at what turned out to be a mysteriously brief stint at Lola's in Islington.

As of last week, Jones became head chef of PHARMACY, a restaurant hitherto most famous for being designed and decorated by the artist Damien Hirst.

Hirst is a renegade, a chap who likes to sabotage the discreet charm of the bourgeoisie. Jones is a craftsman of a more conventional kind. The two aims and abilities sit oddly together, neither doing the other one a favour.

Almost as if to defy the display of used needles and latex gloves in the men's lav, the colourful DNA sculpture and the pill-popping wallpaper, Jones has tweaked and titillated and tidied his creations, sweetening them with flavours such as vanilla in a sauce for raviolo of confit rabbit served with roasted langoustine crouching on top, or Gew¸rztraminer in a cream around chicken, or fondant onions inside a pithivier pastry to accompany roasted partridge, perhaps on the basis that a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down.

A first course described as millefeuille of globe artichokes and green beans, gribiche dressing, autumn truffles, arrived as precise as a watch mechanism but overpowered by the flavours of gherkins and capers. Complete with amuse-bouches and petits fours, the meal seemed like hotel food, sitting out of place and costing too much in the Notting Hill location. An unfixable wobbly table provided an unfortunate metaphor for the experience, which my young companion struggled to summarise as enjoyable.

The Pharmacy Restaurant and Bar
150 Notting Hill Gate, W11 3QG