Lunch with Nice Guy Eddie is always a treat. I’ve lunched with Nice Guy more than most and it’s something I’ll never tire of. We’ve had the odd dud meal, the odd dud bottle, but the company is always about as far from dud as you can get.
Nice Guy knows what I like: simplicity, quality and a good list. Andrew Edmunds was the choice.
I was last in Andrew Edmunds on New Year’s Eve 1999. Quite an evening, not all of which can be recounted, but the date is significant: how many restaurants stick around for this long? And how many are as good, a decade and a half later, as they were first time round?
Food: a pretty good plate of charcuterie started off. More of it would have taken it to a solid 90 points. Some cornichons would have taken it to 92. Main course of lamb shoulder ragu with parpadelle was equally solid and needed nothing more: 93+. Perfect: quality and simplicity.
2011 Meursault from Mr Lafon did exactly what it said on the tin. Clean; edgy. I tasted its component parts from barrel in 2012 here.
The only negative on it is that it’s so young and, more to the point, I was relieved that all the white Burgs on the list shared its youth. Would we have risked a ten-year old bottle? The digital pictures that I’ve been sending various traders over the past week have included a lot of white Burgundy, and pictures are requested to look at the colour of the juice rather than any cosmetic flaws… Anyway, 91 points from me.
2007 Gevrey, Les Cherbaudes from JM Fourrier was the red, and again ticked all boxes. I’d recently read about the “Fourrier shake”: yer man Jean-Marie Fourrier, one of Burgundy’s most thoughtful winemakers, bottles his wines with a fair bit of dissolved CO2 in them, a product of not racking the wines before bottling them. This bottle had a noticeable petillance to it, and I felt pretty pleased with myself giving the bottle a good shake with my thumb over the top of the bottle. Not only does this do the trick, you get a satisfying “phut”, not unlike what you get when opening a bottle of Champagne, as you remove your thumb. Bill Nanson explains it well here. Shaking over, this was delicious, as most of the 2007s are. This is a brilliant vintage for drinking now, especially if you favour a soft and elegant style. Yum, and 93 points or so.
To sum it up: top resto, top wines and top company. Nice Guy Eddie, as long as he’s not hungry, and as long as you don’t need him to do something he doesn’t want to, is almost invariably 100 point company. The afternoon, now getting on, was made perfect by the sommelier who, whilst checking wine-searcher on his laptop on the next table, exclaimed: “who the *&^% are Renaissance Vintners?”
