Mad good champagne

Krug Grande Cuvée Brut NV Champagne, France

(from £95, independent merchants or use Wine Searcher)

Entering via a gents outfitters called Flannels to an establishment with Primrose yellow toilet paper and a chef in silver boots, you’d be forgiven for thinking that things can’t get any more weird. And then the food arrives.

I really wish I’d known nothing about The Man Behind the Curtain before my first visit because it’s a restaurant that ought to take you by surprise. That said, you couldn’t fail to be impressed whether you know what to expect or not. I was there recently as the guest of Krug for a lunch focusing on Krug Grande Cuvée and the humble egg. Krug has recently taken to choosing a single ingredient each year and asking a selection of the world’s top chefs to create a dish based on it. One of the key aims of the exercise is to show the versatility of Krug Grande Cuvée as a food match.

Following a nine course lunch cooked by Michael O’Hare (The Man Behind the Curtain, Leeds) and Torsten Vildgaard (Studio, Copenhagen), I can confirm that it is indeed a delicious match for many and varied dishes. However, it is also a sensational wine in its own right. The current Krug Grande Cuvée is made from a base of the 2007 vintage with 12 reserve wines dating back to 1990, and is a blend of 37% Pinot Noir, 32% Chardonnay and 31% Pinot Meunier, fermented in small oak barrels and aged for around six years on lees. The result is a wine with a deep golden colour and a richly satisfying taste. Lively yet self-assured and full of savoury complexity, it is fragrant, silky, long and energetic, in a word quite brilliant, and utterly irresistible. (Susie, 9.5/10, July 2016)