The Rose, Deal: “A sweet parade of impressive cuisine” – restaurant review

The Rose, 91 High Street, Deal, Kent CT14 6ED (01304 389127). Snacks and starters £4-£12, mains £19-£25, desserts £6-£9, lunch menu, three courses £23, wines from £26

That's because it's a crab cake sprinkled with icing sugar, one of the star dishes from the menu of the Chiltern Firehouse in London Marylebone when it opened in 2013. It was created by Nuno Mendes, the Portuguese chef with good taste, often quirky, and a thin, shiny beard flecked with grey. His crab cake has come to represent the dizzying indulgence of what was, for a time, the hottest and most exciting A-list restaurant in town. Look at us, he bellowed. We are so decadent that we eat savory junk food versions of fried desserts. This was a place where tables were apparently so hard to find even the waiting list had a waiting list.

The punchline of this overheated joke is that none of the botoxed, primed, and sometimes anally bleached A-listers who went there gave a tuppenny toss on the food Mendes has a serious track record, from his early modernist experimentations at Bacchus, an East End pub, to the chef's table at Viajante in Lisboeta, his recent love letter to the country of his birth. But the people he fed at Chiltern Fire Station were only there to see and be lewd.

Of course that mob has eventually moved on. There was another new hot spot they needed to frequent to bolster their fragile sense of identity. Meanwhile, the dishes created for them remain i...