00:00You're looking at Otto's. It's a restaurant unlike any other, where ducks and lobsters get pressed,
00:05pans full of great shooting flames are the norm. It's not unusual to see champagne go
00:09out by the caseload. It's London's most magical dining room, and quite possibly its maddest.
00:14This is what it's like to eat there.
00:17So we're sat down in Otto's. I'm joined by Joe Taylor, the ES Food magazine editor,
00:21and I'm also joined by Ellen Hansen, who is one of the owners here along with Otto Tabass.
00:26So I think basically you're going to watch us have far too much to drink at lunch and
00:29see what we think about it. Good to go? Absolutely. Right.
00:33Otto's is not about a quick bite to eat. This is somewhere where meals are made to
00:37luxuriate over, where lunch can easily stretch into the evening and tables are never turned.
00:43We, well, we only do one sitting, so we don't weave up tables. So people have the whole evening
00:48to enjoy themselves for the whole lunch. There's no pressure on leaving. We follow a rhythm of
00:54customers, you know, if they want to have four courses, stagger it. Our thinking was always,
00:58how would we like to go out and dine ourselves? Yeah.
01:01So that's always been, you know, my forefront while thinking how, you know, what's enjoyable.
01:05I mean, I don't like to go to restaurants where you get told that you have an hour and a half
01:09or two hours for the meal, because that defeats the purpose of going out to eat, I think.
01:13Yeah, absolutely. Go out to enjoy it, not to be rushed.
01:16The restaurant is most famous for its pressed duck, a recipe invented in the 1800s, but until
01:21Otto's opened was all but extinct in the UK. Opening in 2011 in a tricky financial climate,
01:27Otto's might not be here today if I hadn't gambled on the dish.
01:32When did the idea for like a duck press come up?
01:35So Otto's talked about that forever, even before, you know, before we opened the restaurant,
01:40because he worked at La Tour d'Argent in 1976 in Paris. So he always talked about the duck press,
01:47and I didn't quite, I didn't quite know what it was initially, but he kept saying, well,
01:51we should do one table for service and, you know, knead this duck press. And I thought, okay.
01:56Uh, but obviously they're very expensive. So in the first sort of year and a half of opening,
02:02he didn't have the money to buy one. But, uh, eventually we got a duck press. We had it for
02:09about six months. I remember we put it on the menu and it wasn't making any takers,
02:13and we weren't quite sure, quite sure what to do. Business wasn't really going very well.
02:17It was the duck that caught the attention of the Standard's legendary critic, Faye Mashler.
02:22The restaurant delighted the famously demanding Mashler and her review meant a struggling
02:26business was soon flourishing. Sometimes, you know, when somebody's pressing the duck,
02:30we have this Viking helmet, which we get out and it's like the whole restaurant gets engaged in
02:36the pressing. You might have two staff holding press and Otto's there for the banter. And so
02:41it sort of becomes a whole thing for the restaurant. Because actually it's very serious
02:44foods, but the whole idea is you're meant to be celebrating or having fun or. Well,
02:49it's not meant to be stiff or for people to feel uncomfortable or it's, it's meant to be,
02:56you know, eating food together with friends and whatever. It's supposed to be a joyful experience,
03:00not an experience where you feel like, oh, you've got to sit in a certain way or do whatever.
03:04That's, that's not enjoyment. It's not, not what we at least, how we see it.
03:10Today we're in for the full works, an eight course menu dubbed Le Grand Bouffe or the
03:15Big Feast and named for a cult seventies movie of the same name.
03:19So it's an Italian movie about three men that plan on eating themselves to death. So I have,
03:28you know, this is Otto's thing, you know, imagination. He's obviously,
03:34you're not going to eat yourself to death here. So, or please don't, please don't.
03:38Right. Cheers. Cheers. Cheers. So this is the, to go with the first course of the duck. So what
03:52we have on the table at the moment is, um, on one of the croutons is the liver. Then we have veal
03:59sweetbreads, croutons with more mushrooms and a lot of a truffle sauce around the plate. Heaven.
04:04So I think what you've got is you have the richness of the duck liver,
04:08which is perfectly matched by that sort of truffle flavor, which is quite subtle. It's
04:12not like when you go to truffle now in restaurants, it's just used to like whack you in the face. It's
04:17earthy, which I suppose is a bit of a cliche for something with truffles in.
04:22I absolutely agree. Yeah. It's the salt sands really does it very, very well. Normally I'd
04:27find truffles quite overpowering, but this is really, really well balanced. So you can
04:31So can you tell us a little bit about the history of the duck craft?
04:35It was, the dish was invented in the late 1800s by a chef called Machenet. So what really made
04:41it famous was that they numbered all the ducks. So all famous people, Roosevelt, Charlie Chaplin
04:48had a duck and they all numbered and they kept track of it. We use the same ducks that they used
04:53at La Tour d'Horlon from Mason Bregault, which is in Chanal, which is north of Bordeaux. And they
04:59breed those particular ducks for the purpose of canarola press because of their high blood
05:04contents. They feed themselves off the marshes, they clip their wings so they can't fly away. So
05:08when they slaughter them and they don't feed them. So when they come in, they have a lot of blood
05:12inside. So which is what you need to be able to press the carcass and get the blood and the marrow
05:17out. The duck press does exactly what it says on the tin. The duck's carcass is put into a silver
05:22machine and squeezed of every last drop of blood, which is then mixed with plenty of booze to make
05:27a very rich sauce. I just like that it's faintly Tudor to be having a blood sauce. It's great,
05:35you know, you read those old cookbooks or even just seeing Queen Victoria ate this and all that
05:41stuff. It's kind of things like this. You have no idea why they made them or how they made them.
05:46But here you actually kind of, I suppose, travel back in time for that, which I think is great.
05:50Because you've got that sort of richness of the blood sauce, which is a very sort of direct
05:54flavour. The caviar just adds a little salt lift to it that just really, really cuts through.
06:02And you were saying about the pea puree, just kind of being like fresh and light.
06:07When I first saw the pea puree on the plate with the blood sauce, with the caviar, I thought, well,
06:13surely that's all, that's going to be a bit of a mishmash. But it actually really adds a lot
06:17of freshness to it. And I was kind of thinking that the blood sauce would overwhelm the pea,
06:22but it doesn't at all. It just kind of sings through it. It's really nice.
06:26It's not only duck that gets this treatment, lobsters are under the cosh too.
06:31So you have the claw of the lobster, you have a little croute on there and then egg, shea truffle,
06:38beurre blanc and imperial caviar. Caviar, truffle, lobster. It's like the big three, isn't it?
06:45While pressed duck is unusual, pressed lobster is beyond rare and there are only a handful of
06:50lobster presses in the entire world. And the sauce is the lobster that we press,
06:56that's been sitting there throughout the whole meal, reducing, and Otto's just strained it out
07:01and serving on top of the lobster tail. After the first lobster course of the claw,
07:06the tail is presented in a bisque-like sauce and a mound of beluga caviar.
07:10Hope you've enjoyed it. I've got to say it smells solid five. Big one.
07:16Not everything Otto's does needs a press or a pan full of flaming brandy.
07:20The fiendish pommes souffle, a type of french fried potato, are marvelling themselves.
07:25They're notoriously tricky to pull off, so very few places offer them.
07:28I feel like I could blow them and they'd fly away. They look so nice.
07:31Yes, give it a go.
07:39Can I try one?
07:40Of course, of course.
07:41So they're little hollow potatoes.
07:49You never see these and if you do, it's a really, really good sign that that
07:52restaurant really knows what it's doing. Yeah, first time here. What do you make of it?
07:57I mean, I eat out five, six, seven times a week and I've never seen anything like this before.
08:05Pommes souffle, I mean, how is this the first time I've ever come across them? I don't know.
08:10And obviously the duck presses and the lobster press and I think the care and detail that goes
08:16into the pairings and the wine and the service, it's just, it's just fabulous so far. I'm obsessed.
08:23It seems Otto's has made a convert of Joe, but there's still one main left,
08:27a pie made with what remains of the duck. You get the idea. Come with an empty stomach.
08:33It sounds blasphemous to say it, but it is almost the best part of the meal because it's
08:38everything we've had before kind of reduced down. It's all that richness and that fat.
08:45I don't know how I'm going to get through it because frankly, I've eaten my body weight
08:49twice already, but there's something there that's just so rich and delicious. It's,
08:55you've been for a long walk in the cold, you come in and you had this, it'd be your perfect meal.
09:00For Pert, it's a crepe Suzette, flamed table side and litres of triple sec. A dish from the 1890s,
09:06elsewhere it would be a cliche, but at Otto's it makes perfect sense.
09:10Eating here does not feel entirely like being in the real world.
09:13I think there's that delightful thing where it's partly like, even with the raspberry
09:19goulash, it just reminded me of like the restaurants that you heard about as a kid.
09:24For me, it's like you went to as a child and then you grew up and you thought restaurants
09:28were all going to be like that. In fact, they weren't, they were quite disappointing. They
09:31were very parsimonious. They were small plates and you didn't have anything, nothing was indulgent
09:36and then you're like, okay, restaurants are different now, but you heard about these grand
09:40suppers and everyone's staying there all night and doing stuff. I think this is what this is.
09:45And I think this menu as well, it's 5pm, but it could be 5am, it could be 11pm,
09:53like there's a sense of time system. And I think that's actually really hard to achieve.
09:59Cheers.
10:00Cheers.
10:02To Otto's.
10:03Thank you.
10:06It's probably the most memorable restaurant experience I've had in London for many,
10:11many reasons. To Otto, to the presses, to the wine, to the company. I mean, the interiors,
10:19it's just, it's so eccentric and esoteric and delicious and unique and I will definitely do
10:26back. I'll have to, you know, I don't, I don't have a house, but sell a handbag or something
10:32and I'll, I'll be here. I don't think I could put it any better than Jodie's. I think this
10:41affirms my opinion that actually Otto's is completely unlike anywhere else. And that alone
10:46for me is worth paying for. It's an extraordinary start to finish. And I think that you either fall
10:52into two camps and people who get it or you don't. But I think increasingly it will be so
10:58hard not to get it. And I think today really proved that. So three cheers for Otto's.
11:03Also, can someone call me a car because I physically can't walk.
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