Lympstone Manor: outrageous views and bijou food — restaurant review

Lympstone Manor sits just north of Exmouth. Originally the seaside home of the Baring banking family, it was built in the 1700s and regularly updated. The last big change before the present owners looks to have been the addition of a fetching veranda in white wrought iron around the hips of this austere block of Georgian country house.

The view is outrageous. Clear blue sky, gently rolling Devon hills and the broad Exe estuary. Best of all, at least for my internal eight-year-old, train lines run along both sides of the river, giving it the sort of Hornby model train scale that makes me giggle delightedly.

This is the first solo venture of chef Michael Caines (MBE) after about 20 faultless years at nearby Gidleigh Park, and I’ve got to say I like what he’s done with the place. Plenty of muted tones, ­discreet art and, well, the sort of comfort I could become dangerously used to.

I’m not the pseud who complains about a single leaf in a dish, I’m really not, but bear with me here. The starter was three beautifully trimmed, poached spears of Wye Valley asparagus. Incredibly fresh and crunchy. They’d been laid side by side then topped with five or so morels, three poached quail eggs, shavings of black truffle and a pond of chive butter sauce. In my preliminary recce, I’d estimated it was four to five bites. A little masterpiece of interlocking parts, like some sort of Japanese puzzle box. Also, carefully interspersed in the dots and dabs of gorgeous components were individual leaves of “microgreens” — sorrel, ­chervil and borage. Imagine the maths here, how each forkful is composed, and the parts ­distributed. So, my final forkful has a single tiny borage leaf in it . . . and I don’t like borage.

Some people say it tastes like cucumber, some of us perceive it as a weirdly oysterish succulent. Do you see my problem here? My personal preferences regarding the herb are subjective and seem beyond trivial and yet, on a dish so precise that each individual leaf is selected and placed, it suddenly makes a difference, to get mathematical about it, to 20 per cent of your dish.

Why am I sharing this? Because Caines’s thought and precision really forced me to consider the incredible granularity of the interface between what they’re doing in the kitchen and what we do when we eat. With this kind of precision, if the chef is doing his job and I’m doing mine . . . well, ultimately, I am the tosser that has to have an opinion about a single leaf.

It was a superb starter that also highlighted a particular ­characteristic of Caines’s food. Many chefs do delicate, tweezery plate work but his seems to be, at a rough estimate, about 30 per cent more bijou. More tiny. It’s a remarkable stylistic preference that makes many of his dishes look more like baroque jewellery than food.

A single fat raviolo of roast veal sweetbreads was lifted, on a small plinth of fondant celeriac, over a puddle of rich sherry velouté. This was corralled into a pool with a circular dam of some green purée, then strewn with some of the smallest mushrooms I’ve ever seen. Field mushrooms, not some exotic type, just so spectacularly immature that they looked like they’d been whittled down from real ones using a scanning electron microscope. What do you even call a broad bean that’s not broad?

A narrow bean? A beanling? As vanishingly wee and as perfectly formed as a newborn’s toenail.

I’ll tell you what, though. For something that looked like the mechanism of a dress watch, it packed a punch like a hammer drill. Rich and meaty, but with the green vegetable flavours kept carefully in prominence.

Local line-caught hake jumped out of the menu at me like it wanted to start a fight, and I was more than up for it. They’d obviously cured the fish in salt for a while, which tightens the texture and enhances the flavour immeasurably, a great idea because wrapping the fish in wild garlic leaves before steaming could be a recklessly robust treatment. The balance, though, was right on the button. The garlic mellowed back from its occasional rankness; the fish endowed with strength and focus. It would be impossible to do the “bacon velouté” any justice with mere words. You’re just going to have to try to get your head around it at a conceptual level. Bacon. Velouté. I mean really. Are you feeling that?

Dessert was a small ingot of pistachio parfait, topped with dots and dollops of raspberry crémeux, pistachio meringue and raspberry sorbet. Don’t be fooled into inferring any kind of frivolity here. Once again, all the technique, all the wrangling and retexturing, is entirely in service of the balance of flavour. Just a stunning piece of work which, though I mention it only in passing, also looks fantastically frivolous.

When Caines took over Lympstone in 2017, his team planted a vineyard with chardonnay and pinot noir grapes. The first sparkling wines are appearing now but, according to the sommelier, they were surprised by a successful early harvest of some of the pinot. It says a lot about the changes in our climate and our expectations about wine that an English restaurant can now offer you a bottle of its own. I strongly approve of the development.

A tasteful building in an outstanding setting is centred on a dining room that’s a light-filled, marble-floored shrine. The room focuses you on the plate so the chef can focus you closer on each forkful that passes your lips. Lympstone is glorious and could only have been designed by a chef.

Follow Tim on Twitter @TimHayward, on Instagram @timhayward and email him at [email protected]

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