Fusion food. It’s a phrase that strikes fear into even the most open-minded of diners. Countless crimes have been committed in the name of joining this cuisine with that. And yet harmonies have also been found. Peruvian and Japanese may have sounded like odd bedfellows to your average UK diner a few decades ago, except – as we have subsequently learnt – Peru’s Japanese diaspora has meant that they really aren’t. Equally, there are often interesting fusion cuisines to be found at countries’ borders, either physical, like between Italy and Slovenia, or historical, such as between France and Vietnam.
Amethyst is less geopolitical in its synthesis of different cultures’ cookery. Rather, what is on display when visiting the latest restaurant from award-winning chef Carlo Scotto, is a menu suffused with all the forces that have themselves impacted Scotto.
It is, as Scotto says himself, inspired by his own global adventures. “I want to take diners on a culinary journey based on my own travels and my menu is very ambitious,” Scotto told BigHospitality. “With a real mix of flavours and cuisines in every dish.”
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This is evident from the very first dish of the 12-course tasting menu The Week tried recently. A muscular triptych of tastes which include a celeriac dish spiced with Korean flavours of gochujang and ssamjang. This comes alongside what Scotto describes as “French toast”, but this hardly manages to do justice to the unctuous croquet that arrives, oozing with truffle and vacche rosse cheese sauce. Next to this is a Briouat – a traditional Moroccan pastry painted delicately with almond and honey. Bang, three courses and three continents, just like that.
One of the joys of dining at Amethyst is that everything is served at a 21-seat chef’s table, which takes up the whole of the ground floor. Positioned next to Scotto’s kitchen, you can watch your food being prepared and often even served to you by the great chef himself. This makes a nice change from other restaurants in London where it isn’t even guaranteed that the person with their name on the sign will be in the kitchen. Everything at Amethyst, meanwhile, feels personal, though not overbearingly so – Scotto isn’t hovering by your shoulder waiting for your praise, but his presence is evident in each dish.
In fact, his touch is immediately apparent in the next stop on our global odyssey – a dish that can only be described as an amalgam, which brings together the diced scallops with cured duck, caviar and muscat grape. An unashamedly unexpected coupling, and one that also looks like something that you might find at the bottom of the ocean. But the result is entirely triumphant.
Another whimsical compound dish follows, which pitches a scoop of foie gras, spooned like ice cream, up against a beautiful wedge of bright scarlet salmon, topped with pieces of yuzu that have been shaped into delicate snowflakes. This is Amethyst’s signature dish, and it is clear that a lot of love and attention has been poured into it.
Amethyst’s signature dish foie gras and salmon
(Image credit: Lateef Photography)
Lick-the-plate-clean stuff
Bread wouldn’t usually rate a mention in a whistle-stop review aiming to pick out the highlights of an expansive tasting menu, but the next course definitely makes that list. Scotto serves up a delicious fresh Egyptian mahlab bread, and places it as an adjunct to a puddle of colours; ochre, mauve and jet black – a combination of squash, pickled walnuts and smoked fig leaf oil. It is lick-the-plate-clean stuff, and fortunately, that is what the bread is for – to swirl around the dish, which my dining partner and I do so fastidiously that I’m not sure the plate would have looked like it needed to be washed when it was returned to the kitchen.
For all his mastery of the world he discovered through his own travels, the next dish speaks unambiguously of Scotto’s origins: cavatelli (a rolled pasta shell) in sun-dried tomatoes and sweet paprika. It is one of those quintessential Italian dishes, composed of simple ingredients that have been respected utterly and prepared painstakingly so as to convey their essence. It is tomato pasta, really, but from another planet of excellence.
Other ingenious creations follow: black cod served in a bowl that is dark as its contents. A superlative pigeon breast with beetroot, plum and damson. And then to end, two fruit-centric desserts: pear paired with liquorice, and then one final heave to take us over the finish line, a ripe fig that liquefies into a pool of white chocolate.
Carlo Scotto
Collision of cuisines
It all adds up, quite frankly, to the redemption of fusion cuisine itself. And also helps to highlight what we already know: that there should be no hard and fast rules in cooking really. Rather with careful consideration, not to mention great precision, almost any collision of cuisines can work.
And perhaps what Scotto is telling us, without ever saying it out loud, is that none of us are as distinct as we might sometimes think. An admirable and timely sentiment at a moment when so many forces seem determined to push us all apart.
Arion McNicoll is a freelance writer at The Week Digital and was previously the UK website’s editor. He has also held senior editorial roles at CNN, The Times and The Sunday Times. Along with his writing work, he co-hosts “Today in History with The Retrospectors”, Rethink Audio’s flagship daily podcast, and is a regular panellist (and occasional stand-in host) on “The Week Unwrapped”. He is also a judge for The Publisher Podcast Awards.
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