Review: Alchemilla, Nottingham

Alchemilla has one of the most stunning dining rooms going. It’s an old coach house beneath the pavement in front of the splendid old town houses that the coaches once belonged to. Their maitre d’ showed us the photos of the place when they took it on: there were tree roots growing through the ceiling and standing water on the floor. But someone had a good eye for possibilities, because its now a beautiful stripped-back space with natural light coming from the original roof windows and most of the tables tucked into booths that were of course once the parking spaces for coaches. It’s basically magical. And they looked after us beautifully. So how magical is the menu?

The first bite, a tiny warm chicken and porcini tartlet, was dreamily good; a light almost liquid mousse with crispy little shards of chicken skin and bright lemon thyme. Neat. The seaweed-flavoured crackling with parmesan was okay, and my cracker had missed a few seconds in the fryer so was still chewy in parts.

My next course of duck liver and enoki was, I have to say, destroyed by soy sauce. So overpowering that it lurked on my palate and in my throat and messed with my next couple of courses. I should have sent it back in hindsight. Instead I left some. It’s a nice idea and I can actually see exactly how the salt/umami taste cuts nicely into the duck liver. Maureen did much better with a raw dice of scallop doused in a pleasant mix of buttermilk and dill oil.

A nice piece of BBQ celeriac was smothered by quinoa soaked in a hefty sweet/salt sauce of some kind. Felt unbalanced and odd. The final starter was better, a wild grain risotto with crispy wild grain on top and a healthy grating of aged parmesan. Or maybe the soy sauce was starting to wear out, washed down by some very good Jurancon.

On to the main, a jolly decent plate of duck; pink and toothy breast, slowly roasted leg and a couple of pieces of heart. You can always win me over with a bit of fowl heart. I liked the punchy little pieces of sweet pickled alexanders stem, and the kohlrabi was… kohlrabi. Meh.

And then the meal really took off, with three superb desserts! First a stickily delicious bit of diced loquat (look it up!) surrounded by loquat stone cream and sandwiched between two delicate amaranth biscuits. Sublime combo of textures and the floral perfume of the fruit. Second pud was a really inventive and scrumptious combination of curry, coconut, cardamom and chocolate. Smart to choose three flavours that really stand up to the chocolate, which provided our dinner theatre in the form of a chocolate foam mousse turned into feather-light “ice cream” by plopping it into dry ice. Final pud was a bright and cleansing frozen yogurt stacked with an architectural display of wood sorrel leaves on pine gel. Proper nordic forest on the tongue.

So what am I concluding about Alchemilla? Our 7 course menu was £50, and that’s a fair price for the level of ambition on show. And, yeah, for the awesome dining room. It’s all part of the experience! That said, there were definitely a few problematic dishes, a lack of balance and refinement mainly. I found them easy to forgive because it was an otherwise lovely lunch, and really exceptional desserts. I’ll go there again next time I’m in Nottingham – it’s a good discovery.