The main event of the anniversary weekend in my eyes. Forget the theatre! Forget the nice hotel (the Malmaison, for reference)! This is it. My criteria for picking a restaurant for tonight was a) a Michelin star, and b) explicitly mentioning on the website that the menu was veganisable. Portland nailed that. As they did, to be honest, absolutely everything else tonight. From the moment we walked in, I couldn’t have been happier. A snack before the snacks of an onion tart sets us off, before a trio of actual welcome snacks: a mushroom and parmesan macaron, melting into a fizz the moment it touches your tongue; a smoked eel and caper tartlet, incredibly crisp pastry casing an umami hit; and a truffled beef tartare on a healthy slab of sourdough. I double down on the truffle with a truffled Old Fashioned as an aperitif, a bold move before a wine pairing. Maybe, actually, the best wine pairing I’ve had. I want a bottle of everything. We start the courses proper with a baked Jerusalem artichoke, with a polonaise sauce and confit egg yolk, a triumph. Smoked shellfish chowder, with mussels, oyster, scallops, and more, thickened with an aioli and peppered with crisps for a textural contrast is maybe my favourite dish of the night. Chalk stream trout, flakey and tender, on a bed of braised leeks and topped with crisped leeks, aswim in warm tartar sauce. The main course is a fillet of beef, the requisite extra cut of a bit of braised cheek, topped off with a potato rosti and cavolo nero - an excellent dish, but I have to admit the one disappointment of the night here. I had asked, in a pang of envy of the a la carte menu offering duck fat mashed potato, if I could order a side of that at the outset, but sadly it did not arrive and I felt too awkward to chase it up. But I can’t really hold that against the dish. For dessert, a burnt cheesecake, creamy as all heck but not so much that it’s not elevated by creme fraiche and a rhubarb compote, a pane of tuille setting it all off nicely. We are sent home with a madeleine and a chocolate as petits fours and a honking great slab of a loaf of sourdough to take home with us. If this doesn’t end up in my top 5 in December, I’ll have had one hell of a year.