"Cook what the week gives you. The room will forgive almost anything except pretending."
Chef Marchetti
Our story
A room built around fire
The short version is on the front page. This is the longer one, for anyone who wants to know why the room is the way it is.
Ilse Marchetti, Chef and owner
I started cooking for people in an apartment with four gas rings and a borrowed table. Sunday nights, whoever turned up. There was no menu. I cooked whatever the market had left on Saturday afternoon, which is not a philosophy so much as a budget.
That constraint turned out to be the whole idea. When you buy what is good that week instead of what the menu demands, the cooking gets simpler and the room gets easier. Nobody is waiting on an ingredient flown in for a dish that should not exist in February.
Aldmere opened with the same rule and one addition: fire. The turbot, the hogget, the pears in autumn all pass over embers at some point. Fire is unforgiving and it rewards attention, which keeps the kitchen honest.
We write the list on Tuesday, after the boats. Sometimes it changes again on Thursday. If you ate here in spring and come back in November, you should not recognize much beyond the bread and the butter.
Three things we do not move on
Fire
Embers, not gas, for anything that will take it. It is slower and it goes wrong more often, which is the point.
The market
Tuesday, after the boats. If it is not good that week it does not go on, however much anyone liked it last month.
The room
A full room or a quiet one, the service is the same: unhurried, unfussy, and finished when you are.
Doors at six, Tuesday through Saturday.