The passing in September 2023 of Nico Ladenis, one of the prime movers of the revolution in British gastronomy that took place in the 1980s and 1990s, was the occasion for much gustatory nostalgia.
As the final ebbing of nouvelle cuisine took place in London and the provinces, Ladenis’ cooking seemed to point the way forward. It owed a demonstrably large debt to the principles of classical French cuisine—an arch-enemy of food and wine snobbery, Ladenis nonetheless wrote his menus for many years entirely in French—but what he jettisoned was the delicacy, the subtle white sauces that tasted of presque rien, the toning down of vegetable pungency, and the cautious integration of seasonings. Ladenis dealt in fortissimo flavours, astonishingly concentrated essences of each ingredient, so that everything, from the truffled green leek that dressed the duck liver terrine to the tiny globe of livid red raspberry sorbet that accompanied a slice of lemon tart that was singing with citric intensity, had the impact of a Force 10 gale.
It was not just the approach to food that Ladenis revolutionized. Although he and his wife Dinah-Jane, who managed his restaurants with unflappable aplomb, hardly drank at all, he had very defined views about how wine should be treated in the restaurant context. He had an unerring nose for British hauteur, which manifested itself never so clearly as in the business of wine appreciation. In his first book, My Gastronomy (1987), one of the classic texts of its era, he
This Article was originally published on World of Fine Wine
