High price for poor fish at Villandry, Bicester Village (From Herald Series)

High price for poor fish at Villandry, Bicester Village

4:02pm Wednesday 10th December 2008

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Villandry sounds uncomfortably close to villainy – which is what many might consider this new restaurant’s unjustifiably high prices to be.

Instance: my main course was a four-inch long, three-quarters-of-an-inch thick piece of chargrilled swordfish, which cost £13.50. That was £13.50 for the fish all by itself save for a few sprigs of dressed salad leaves. A mighty feast for a supermodel, maybe, but the rest of us would expect a little more to make a main course worth the name. So portions of creamed spinach and new potatoes were ordered. The result was another £6 on the bill.

Nearly £20 for one modest plate of food, consumed in what amounts to a fast-food nosebag for shoppers, would hardly have been acceptable if everything about it was perfect. This was not perfect. The fish was not properly cooked. Swordfish, as all who eat it will know, has a soft and delicate texture; the white flesh parts easily beneath the fork. The flesh of my piece of fish was shiny and rubbery. It resembled the meat of a skinned chicken leg awaiting its turn on the barbecue. Dark brown searmarks on the outside showed that it had done its time on the grill, but – as with most villains sentenced by the courts these days – the time had been insufficient.

A word to the waitress, a delightful and helpful young Frenchwoman, brought speedy action. “Of course, you want it to be cooked,” she said, as she whisked the plate back towards the kitchen. It was returned to me five minutes later in an edible state (if with a slight taste of burning about it).

News of my disatisfaction had spread among the staff while I sat fishless; two other members of the waiting team asked about the problem and made the appropriate noises when I explained. Rosemarie and I judged the front of house to be very well-run, not least in the handling of the queueing arrangements necessary in a place where you can’t book and at this very busy time of the year.

We had not been to Bicester Village for some years and were surprised to find, though the parking area has significantly expanded, that it was still an effort to find a space. (Later one of the restaurant staff told me it takes him up to an hour when he arrives for weekend shifts.) The huge numbers flocking to buy from the centre’s many designer outlets are what, of course, provides Villandry with its ‘captive audience’. This is an audience shared with the somewhat similar (though Italian) restaurant and food shop Carluccio’s at the opposite end of the complex.

Villandry is French, its name taken from one of the most lovely chateaux in the Loire Valley. It is a sister restaurant to the Villandry which was opened by owner Jamie Barber in Marylebone High Street 20 years ago, and which moved in 1997 into larger premises in Great Portland Street. This has become a bit of an institution among the ladies who lunch. The intention, presumably, is that the Bicester operation – which opened last month with a party (pictured right) attended by X Factor finalist Brenda Edwards – will develop the same éclat.

To do so, I would say, it needs to pay rather greater attention to the food it is serving. I mention, for example, what was placed before the four ladies lunching immediately to our left, designer label bags strewn around their feet. Their first bottle of house white went back as being undrinkable but I was surprised to see them eating what followed without demur. This was four examples of the chicken, avocado and pinenut salad, which varied so wildly in size that they would have been ideal for Goldilocks’s ursine associates. Daddy Bear could have gobbled two.

He could certainly have demolished in three bites the starter placed before Rosemarie. One piece of toasted ‘ancienne’ bread (for which read white sliced) topped with a slice of smoked salmon came with a dessert-spoon sliced cake of sliced avodado beside it. Definitely not for the hungry.

By contrast, my big bowl of rich-flavoured roasted plum tomato and basil soup would have pleased any trencherperson, and certainly pleased me.

The swordfish main course I have described. Rosemarie’s confit duck, too, was barely satisfactory. “It’s supposed to be crispy,” she said, “and this isn’t. I also expect confit meat to be so well cooked it falls from the bone. This is really quite tough.”

“Maybe it’s a different approach to the dish,” I offered in a conciliatory tone. To counter this argument, she turned over the menu and read from “Le Dictionnaire”, for those “whose French is a little rusty”. It explained that confit was “slowly cooked in its own fat to give it a crispy outside but a moist and succulent interior”.

Not this one, I’m afraid.

To finish this less-than-satisfactory meal, my companion had a slice of glazed lemon tart (so-so), while I drank a coffee.

Next time (if there is one) I think we’ll try the rotisserie chicken or the croque monsieur which I could see (and smell) were clearly rather good.

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