Plateau Restaurant

Plateau's new six course tasting menu has been created for the D&D group's Blossom City promotion for spring. D&D, in case you don't know, are the mega-group who own Quaglino's, Kensington Place, and 30 or so other restaurants.

As it's the floral season, flowers keep popping up as garnish. There's a choice of vegetarian or meat options, and for the vegetarian ones in particular, a lot of the same ingredients appear in each course.

This is not a bad thing. At the beginning of the meal there is a citrusy gin fizz, and a creamy tomato veloute soup which they pour onto a bowl of fresh ricotta, pesto, and a lightly sundried tomato.

A dish of seared scallops, lovage and almond purée, and a fried breaded oyster is very nice. Although the garden vegetable salad is essentially a bunch of crudités artfully arranged on the plate (nice crunchy asparagus, mangetout, carrot, pickled beetroot, black olive tapenade and little dollops of ricotta mousse, all dotted with espelette pepper), there's a winning risotto made with potato instead of rice. It's a supremely creamy melange of small cubed potatoes, a soft-yolked poached egg and shelled broad beans, punctuated with more espelette. It's more creative than the meat dish - duck terrine with foie gras wrapped in Parma ham, with rhubard in pickled ginger, although this is very good too.

Rose veal rump ordered pink is perfectly cooked. A vegetable tart is very tasty, with puff pastry filled with lots of rich quinoa, flecked with goat's curd, and yet more espelette and veg. It's very filling, perhaps a bit too much for a six course menu.

The pre-dessert is a glass filled with lemon mousse topped with gin jelly, although you have to make sure you get the ratio right on each spoonful as too much jelly is bitter.

The edible 'basket of blossom surprises' is very cloying, filled with a biscuit drenched with strawberry purée, caramel and chocolate sauce. That alone would be enough sugar, but they are also sweet edible bees, marshmallows and crumbled chocolate. The dessert comes with a gift - a ring by Cadenzza, a nearby jewellers who are part of the Swarovski group. However the ring isn't quite as elegant as the rest of the menu.

The Blossom City Menu Gourmand is available till 30th June. Menus are priced at £60 per person or £85 with paired wines.

Plateau is an incredibly polite restaurant. Staff are punctilious, tables are impeccably neat and the colour scheme of the restaurant is a bit too clean and neutral – I’m almost relieved to find breadcrumbs in the crease of my seat, only to realise I’ve spilt them myself.

Like a lot of the restaurants around Canary Wharf, it’s housed in a glass atrium that would look great in the sunlight, but combined with the muted décor it feels gloomy on a grey day like today.

But Plateau is tailor-made for this area; there is a cigar humidor near the entrance, and the wine list has plenty of wines by the glass, with bottles starting from £19 and rising to hundreds of pounds.

We’re in the more casual, less expensive Bar & Grill rather than the restaurant, where the menu is divided into starters, sandwiches, Plateau classics and Josper oven dishes. There are snacks too - four plump red peppers are stuffed with ricotta and drizzled with olive oil, a simple, tasty aperitif, although they could have been left at room temperature a little longer. But it’s a very small point in a pleasant meal.

A salad of Belgian endives, chunks of blue Fourme D’ambert cheese and crunchy toasted walnuts is a winner and “extremely French”, I’m assured by my lunching partner in crime, who grew up in France. A dish of cured beef and celeriac remoulade is a grower, each bite reveals more of the mustardy celeriac which is a great match for the salty meat.

A mild curried potage of juicy mussels in their shells is the accompaniment to a nice piece of grilled bream; the Josper-cooked marinated poussin is good, if not earth-shattering, with sautéed potatoes and fresh spinach.

Puddings are gloriously retro, like lemon posset, profiteroles and the knickerbocker glory made with ultra-saccharine bubblegum ice cream, revealing a surprising playfulness to this businesslike eatery.

A three course meal for two with wine at Plateau Bar & Grill is around £100.