Chef Sally Abé will reopen her award-winning restaurant, The Pem at Conrad London St. James, on 26th October with brand-new, showstopping menus to create what has to be one of London’s most spectacular dining experiences.
The Pem closed for a three-month period to undergo an extensive kitchen refurbishment, installing state-of-the-art appliances so that Sally and her team can elevate their menus even further with new equipment, advanced techniques, and fresh ideas.
Having built a reputation for exceptional dishes inspired by nostalgic flavours and historic British cuisine, Sally’s upgraded menus build on this ethos yet are more refined and more considered, using new techniques to create stunning plates of food of unrivalled quality. She has hand-selected the UK’s finest producers, including meat from Lake District Farmers, hand-foraged mushrooms and fruits from The Wild Room, and seafood from Flying Fish, marrying the absolute best of British produce to create extraordinary plates.
New starters include ‘Dressed Dorset Crab, Violino pumpkin, vadouvan, buttermilk’ and ‘Montgomery cheddar soufflé, pickled and toasted walnuts, bitter leaves’.
The new main courses are, in Sally’s words, “some of the best I’ve ever created”, including ‘Hand dived Orkney XL scallops, Jerusalem artichoke, black garlic, sea herbs’, whilst the ‘Wild mushroom and truffle suet pudding, buttered Savoy cabbage, braised hazelnuts, Madeira’, stays true to Sally’s mission to put historic British dishes back on the culinary map.
Naturally, as the Queen of Game, Sally has featured the finest picks of the season on the menu, including the likes of ‘Stuffed crown of quail, crisp parsnip, molasses, spiced sherry jus’ and ‘Tarte fine of Wood Pigeon’ (for two). Sally will also be launching a stunning tasting menu that encapsulates the very best of The Pem experience, available from 14th November.
Sally’s ethos is also carried through the Set Lunch Menu which, with the calibre of stunning dishes on offer, has to be one of London’s best-value tasting menus at 2 courses for £35. Lunch guests can choose between the likes of ‘Venison tartare, preserved elderberries, truffled egg yolk, beech mushrooms’, ‘Braised pork jowl, crab apples, pink fir potatoes, calvados’, and ‘Roasted ceps, Jerusalem artichoke, cavolo nero, Old Winchester’.
Says Sally Abé: “The last two years at The Pem have been a great building block, but the new kitchen has enabled me to really push the boundaries of what we’re able to create. This has always been my vision, I’ve elevated the food and put a lot more detail into it than I’ve been able to before. After two years here, I’ve got a better understanding of what diners in the Westminster village want, so there’s real variation on the menus and there’s something for everyone. I can’t wait to reopen – if you loved The Pem before, you’re going to be blown away now.”
The restaurant, which opened in July 2021 at the Conrad London St. James with Sally at the helm, has built a strong reputation for its exceptional dishes and has become one of the premier dining destinations in Westminster. Within its first year of opening, The Pem was identified as ‘One to Watch’ and the restaurant was included in this year’s National Restaurant Awards Top 100.
