The Sunday Times
Giles Coren was invited as a guest “to quite the most extraordinary (and extraordinarily huge) meal currently available in London”.
“It’s a famous and famously crazy restaurant — top of some lists of the best restaurants in Britain, entirely absent from others — presided over by a wonderful crazy man called Otto Albert Tepasse.”
“But, listen, you can’t afford La Grande Bouffe at Otto’s. And nor can I.”
Giles Coren - 2024-02-22Evening Standard
Jimi’s ES magazine colleagues David Ellis and Joanna Taylor doubled up as David initiated Joanna into the charms of La Grande Bouffe at a French restaurant that is by no means new, but which has suddenly caught the attention of reviewers.
Boasting that this was his 19th visit – some of which he can barely recall through the alcoholic haze – David reports that “astonishingly”, the experience is different every time. “It is a menu of duck and lobsters, every part of them squeezed and crushed into extraordinary dishes, of sweetbreads, of livers, of scallops, of blood sauce, of caviar, of crêpes Suzette… each course more improbable than the last.”
Often described as “mad” – including by the Standard’s headline writers, and the Times’s a few weeks back – David prefers to call Otto’s “spellbinding”. “You come for last meal-on-earth territory. I’m just getting an awful lot of practice in.”
Joanna was quite happy to call it “mad” – “That’s because it is.” But she certainly enjoyed the “sheer, incomparable indulgence” of the squeezed duck and lobster juices, while the “crisp, featherweight potato clouds named pommes soufflé are nothing short of a miracle”.
David Ellis - 2024-04-29
Drinks
Extras
