“There’s beauty in everything really, everything you cook,” says chef Gabe Lea, who is pleased as punch with his new bistro menu at Maya.
“Look at that asparagus, how green it is. And with the Cafe De Paris butter. You cannot beat it. I rarely go to super fine-dining places. Usually, I’d go for stuff like this. With super seasonal ingredients.”
The asparagus is indeed very, very green, and cooked with just precisely the right amount of bite. And that Cafe De Paris butter has all of the good stuff in it – anchovies, mustard, spices, garlic, capers. When the side dishes are at this level, it says plenty about the main dishes.
“Obviously with the restaurant, Maya Dining Room, we’ve got off to a great start, and now we feel like we want to start serving stuff that’s a bit more familiar to people,” says Gabe. “But still a really high quality. So, still using dry-aged beef fillet for the tartare, and a great ribeye for the steak frites.”
Maya’s downstairs restaurant is certainly aiming for a star – it got listed in the Michelin Guide within weeks of opening. But now you can get that level of cooking in the upstairs bar too, which has just launched its new bistro menu, crammed with stone cold classics.
A truly great burger, steak frites (with duck fat frites), oysters, Caesar salad, a seasonal risotto. They sound simple. They’re not though.
“The risotto came from when I was with Raymond Blanc at Le Manoir,” Gabe says. “We make a tomato essence – like a fancy tomato stock. It’s made over 12 hours, boiling the tomatoes down, then we strain it through a muslin cloth overnight and it becomes this translucent tomato essence.
“Then we finish the risotto with mascarpone, parmesan and loads of butter.” Cue the drooling sounds.
“For the burger, we use the dry-aged trim from the rib eye and the fillet, and we blitz it with about 10% bone marrow, which adds that lovely savouriness,” he goes on. “It looks straight forward, but it’s not. And that’s a potato brioche bun.”
The best bit about the burger? You can eat it. Obviously, you can eat it, that’s the point, but you can eat it without it going absolutely everywhere, a blessed relief from those burgers that have to be skewered with a steak knife to hold them together, and the ones you have to dislocate your jaw like a snake to get in your mouth. Silly.
“Ever since I came into fine dining, the idea of having mess all over me, all over my hands, it’s just not my thing at all,” he laughs. “So that was important.”
Even the humble Caesar is exceptional, and it’s all in the detail.
“The Caesar is great,” Gabe says. “The bacon is imported from Alsace, and we blitz some of that through the dressing too, so you get the flavour of bacon everywhere. We make our own focaccia for the croutons too.”
The excellence upstairs extends to the drinks too (they’re aiming for a Top 50 Cocktail Bars ranking too, so they’re not messing about). Notably is the clarified espresso martini, a clear take on the legendary tipple. And there will be a frozen spritz ‘window’ opening for the summer too, should you be passing.
“We just use the best stuff we can,” says Gabe. “There’s an element of bravery behind ‘simple’. There’s nothing to hide behind.”
Maya’s bistro is taking bookings now…
£7 Cocktails for 7 hours 12-8 from 12pm Friday, Saturday and Sunday.
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