by Jay Rayner
Far better to bring it all inside a room with blaring Now That’s What I Call music, windows that appear to have UPVC double-glazing, and bogs that are a country mile’s walk away through the Minotaur’s labyrinth of a tourist hotel. Hence the menu is divided up between Brick Lane for Indian food, Kingsland Road for Vietnamese, Edgware Road for the Middle East and Portobello Road for burgers and fried chicken because that’s all they eat there, poor souls.
There’s also a list of haute pub meat dishes, another of fish and a lazy attempt to fob off vegetarians.
As exercises in missing the point go, they don’t come much better. The Marriotts haven’t just missed the point. They’ve studied the point, taken a few notes, turned away from it, gone on a long country walk, ended up in a pub, got drunk and woken up in their clothes the next morning with scribbles on scraps of paper from which they have cobbled together a menu.
It’s not that all the cooking is truly awful (though some of it redefines the word). It is more that it presents the opportunity to create a meal that makes no sense whatsoever. It’s discord fashioned from calories; it’s dinner as curated by Stockhausen. Still, at least I now know that Vietnam’s pho does not go with an Indian butter chicken. And none of it goes with a limp fattoush salad. No single kitchen can be fluent in all these traditions.
Vietnamese food is not something you can just turn your hand to, like crochet or housebreaking, as their pho proves. It should be a deep bowl of nourishing broth and noodles and beef. Here it comes in small bowls with two tiny, limp pieces of beef sliced as thinly as tissue paper. The beef stock should have a deep, rich flavour. This just makes us mutter about Bovril and think about how good pho on Hackney’s Kingsland Road really is.
We then have a long wait. Silly street-food vans with their almost instantaneous service. They don’t have leather banquettes for you to sit on so you can study the wine list with its opening price of £28 a bottle while you wait. Eventually our fattoush salad arrives, with not enough deep-fried pitta bread in it and no hit of zesty sumac. Eating this literally three minutes’ walk from the Edgware Road while mouthing the word ‘Why?’ with my mouthful, is an experience that will stay with me.
To be fair the butter chicken from the Brick Lane list is bang on. It’s as appallingly over-sweetened and claggy as any version you could find on Brick Lane, where the curries are uniformly dire. Think chicken in tomato soup. The rice is curiously wet, the breads far better. Deep-fried onion rings taste of last week’s oil. And whoever wants to dip one in a Marie Rose sauce? I mean it. Who?
There are bizarre inconsistencies. From the ‘meat’ list, devilled kidneys brings deftly prepared offal, still viscera-pink inside, seared outside. I can’t find fault with their cooking. The sauce, however, is bizarre. It tastes of sticky demi-glace and red wine. There’s no punch from cayenne pepper at all. They are called devilled for a reason; the cayenne isn’t optional.
The Portobello Road section offers the greatest high and the lowest low. The latter is a piece of fried chicken, coated in a bright orange breadcrumb case that flakes off like scabs to reveal pallid-skinned hen underneath. It looks like a boulder that has been badly coloured in by a child. It may be half a very small bird. It’s hard to tell. Either way the £12 price tag is outrageous. The honey and sesame dressing next to it tastes of sugar, vinegar and low self-esteem.
But then come their sliders, which are glorious and make me hum happily to myself. They are made from braised brisket, reformed and seared and dressed with a little veal jus, and perched inside tiny brioche buns. Alongside is a pot of pokey horseradish cream plus two hunks of roasted bone, the slippery beads of marrow within topped with breadcrumbs. For £7.90 it’s also good value. It’s when we eat these that it becomes obvious there are people in this kitchen who can cook, as long as it’s from their natural repertoire. Instead they have been smothered by a bloody concept. Did I mention how much I hate concepts?
The kitchen’s skills become even more obvious at dessert. Poor Knights of Windsor sounds like a rowdy bunch of mercenaries from Game of Thrones. It brings crisp-fried eggy bread with honey-glazed apples, a Calvados ice cream and a jug of custard. Jammy dodgers served in their own cutesy tin are shamelessly crumbly shortbread biscuits sandwiching strawberry mousse with, on the side, a glass of chilled strawberry liquor. These desserts almost banish the memory of the strangeness that has gone before. But not quite.
It’s pleasing to imagine the Marriotts might eventually come to their senses. The problem is they’ve embossed the name of the restaurant into the front step in brass. They came up with a concept. And now they’re stuck with it.
What happened next: Given the name really is embossed on the front step it’s no surprise there is still a restaurant called Lanes of London inside the Marriott on Park Lane, but it no longer works the street food schtick. Instead, the menu reads like that of a classic urban brasserie. Think steak tartare, club sandwiches, steaks, grills and duck confit. The current dessert menu includes something listed as ‘brioche, apple, calvados’ which sounds very much like the Poor Knights of Windsor that I so enjoyed.
Pret a Manger
The Strand, London, 23 August 2015
*
There’s a story that in the decades following the Second World War, Reading in Berkshire was regularly judged the most typical town in Britain. As a result, whenever there was a new traffic system that needed trialling – triple anti-clockwise mini-roundabouts, reactive traffic lights, annoying roadside signs with happy or sad faces triggered by your speed – it was introduced first in Reading. Hence, Reading became the most atypical town in Britain. Well, this evening I am sitting in the Reading of the Pret a Manger sandwich shop chain, a branch on London’s Strand that has been given every possible bell and whistle for the trial of an evening waiter-service menu and is hence now entirely atypical.
The Pret star outside is black and silver, and there’s tiling to match at the far back of the shop. Behind the till a graphic-embossed screen has been pulled down welcoming you to the evening service, and a ‘host’ stands by the door handing out menus clipped to boards. There are paper place mats, knives and forks – in a Pret! Oh my! – and even guttering candles. It’s all rather sweet, like the Year 6s have decided to be really grown up and run a restaurant in Mrs Wilson’s art room to raise money for charity. Look! They’ve printed out menus and everything, bless them.
My companion, flummoxed by the multiple branches nearby, loses her way and is a few minutes late. Orders are taken at the counter and then brought to you. I choose a £25 bottle of prosecco and sit drinking it alone staring out at the office workers hurrying home. These may be among the most depressing ten minutes of my life. It strikes me that going to a branch of Pret a Manger for a classy night out of prosecco drinking is a bit like going to a brothel in search of true love. It could happen but, frankly, we all know it’s a victory of hope over expectation.
Don’t get me wrong. I like Pret, I really do. It’s easy to be down on this sort of high-street brand, but even easier to forget the impact Julian Metcalfe and Sinclair Beecham’s chain had on our eating habits from the late eighties onwards. They made good, fresh sandwiches readily available to the masses in a way they weren’t before. The mark of a country’s food culture doesn’t lie in the opening of a restaurant serving Pierre Koffmann’s delicate braised pig’s trotter, however wonderful it may be. It lies in the national availability of, say, a really good crayfish and mayo sarnie or a quality brownie at a fair price. Some people will regard this as sacrilege; I imagine the comments section below this review online are now like the first fifteen minutes of Saving Private Ryan. But that doesn’t change the fact: Pret was a game changer in the casual high street lunch market.
Sandwiches, salads and brownies are what they’re good at. On the wall is a sign which explains they decided to trial this evening service because their stores are ‘often quite busy at lunch but unusually quiet at dinner’. Unusually? There’s nothing unusual about th
at. Nobody wants a sandwich for dinner, unless the evening’s gone really badly. And I’m not sure they want this either. Within 100 metres of this Pret there’s a Zizzi, a Byron, a Leon and an Itsu, all of which make a better argument for separating you from your cash at this time of day.
Because the food is deeply underwhelming. Much of it has already been on offer up to six o’clock. Now they can charge you more for putting it on Pret-branded crockery and sprinkling it with chopped parsley. The menu divides between small plates, toasties, salads and ‘hot bowls’ with a disastrous sideways move into macaroni cheese. Pret’s spicy meatballs, at £4.25 for a bunch of tightly packed spheres of indeterminate animal, set the tone by coming in a tooth-achingly sweet sauce. Too much of what we eat comes in a slop like this which has sacrificed grace or interest on the altar of sugar.
A plate of dips tastes like somebody hit the Tesco deli aisle and opened some pots, then went large on the pomegranate seeds. The ‘Lebanese’ dip is an insult to a whole country. It is red and salty and dull. The ‘raita’ could come from any number of culinary traditions, being simply yogurt with cucumber. The hummus is nasty, bland, tile grouting.
The hot dishes all come on the same ‘quinoa rice’, a charmless edible gravel clearly added to everything here to bulk it up. It’s there in a completely undressed salad of beetroot, butternut squash and feta. It’s there with a horrendously sweet cauliflower and sweet potato curry. Worst of all these is the ‘Korean BBQ pulled pork’. Shredded pig wallows miserably in a puddle of gloopy sugary redness, wondering what it did to deserve this. Through the window I can see Kimchee, a Korean restaurant, directly opposite. I dream about being in there. But I’m not. I’m here, at Pret a Manger, trying to have a good night out over an utterly inappropriate bottle of prosecco. As to the kale and cauliflower macaroni cheese, I genuinely do not understand how anybody in the food business can taste that and think it’s a good idea. It needs to be put in a burlap sack and drowned in the nearest canal.
So what’s OK? The salt beef toastie is OK. It’s not brilliant. The salt beef is cut thin and is too lean, but as a whole the sandwich isn’t bad, and the caper, rocket and tomato salad on the side is fresh and vibrant. At dessert there’s some broken biscuits with popcorn, caramelised nuts and some squirty cream, which I’m sure those Year 6s enjoyed putting together. The best thing is a warmed, squidgy brownie with a scoop of ice cream.
In summary, then, we went to Pret a Manger and had a nice sandwich, a pleasant salad and a toothsome brownie. Which is what we already know they do well. Still, the staff were friendly and engaged. But that makes it only a little sadder. Given the growing sophistication of the mid-market, they have simply under-thought the whole thing. Is it cheap? That sandwich is around £6, and the pulled pork around £7 so no, not really. You’ll end up looking at the bill and wondering whether this money could have been better spent. The answer, I’m afraid, is yes, in an awful lot of other places.
What happened next: Very quietly Pret a Manger discontinued the evening service in 2016. Indeed, they did it so quietly that nobody thought to mention it to the team who run their website, until I raised it two years later. Only then did they remove all reference to the experiment from the site. ‘We learnt a lot from the Good Evenings trial and adapted the offering accordingly,’ a spokesperson told me. ‘We found early on that it was difficult for Pret to run a full-service ‘restaurant’ and that actually our customers don’t expect that from us.’ You don’t say.
Tapas 37
The Ecclestone Square Hotel, London, 3 April 2016
*
Ten minutes into our lunch at Tapas 37, the new restaurant inside the Ecclestone Square Hotel in London’s Pimlico, the fire alarm went off. It was a vast hacking noise like a goose with bronchitis. Our sweet, eager waitress ran down the narrow dining room flapping her hands while bellowing ‘It’s just a test’ and rolling her eyes with a theatrical shrug, as if to say ‘What can you do?’ Some might wonder why a hotel which has invested money in a new restaurant, including hiring a chef with some big restaurant action on his CV, would then schedule a fire alarm test for the lunch service. Personally, I can’t help but fantasise about how much better a day it would have been for all involved had the fire alarm been real.
I wouldn’t wish a fire on anybody’s business. But at least if we had been evacuated by a false alarm I wouldn’t have had to eat their food. They in turn wouldn’t have had to read this review. It would have been a win-win.
The Ecclestone Square Hotel is all shiny and polished and black and white. It’s as I imagine Simon Cowell’s hall might be: a touch Athena poster, a touch posh cosmetic surgeon’s waiting room. I didn’t know whether to order lunch or request Botox. Automatic front doors swish and gasp. Shiny, polished staff brood over the front desk to one side of the hall, while on the other side there’s a cocktail lounge with an enormous 3D TV. As I already see in 3D I don’t regard this as a boon. We will be the only obvious punters in the hotel for the first ninety minutes, if you don’t count the woman who appears to have locked herself in the basement toilet. There seems to be just the one for the entirety of the public spaces. I find my companion outside it, frowning at the door. ‘Someone’s been in there for more than fifteen minutes,’ she hisses at me. ‘I tried knocking quietly but a woman squealed. Then she fell silent. Maybe she’s dead.’
We decide to cross our legs and retreat upstairs to our table and the eventual ice breaker that is the fire alarm. The website names the new chef, but I won’t. Apparently, he has worked with Gordon Ramsay, Jason Atherton and at the world renowned Arzak in Spain. This is not small stuff. It is why I came. Who knows what an Arzak alumnus might be capable of? Now he’s here with a menu of tapas, inspired by ‘authentic French cuisine’ which showcases ‘charming little recipes’ and is driven by the desire to share ‘small French family dishes’. These include Spanish croquettes. There are three on the menu. We choose the chilli cheese and the ham and cheese, and mutter shamefully of Findus crispy pancakes. The waitress says the shrimp croquettes are actually the best, so we order those instead of the cheese and ham.
She doesn’t bring them to us. Not that we notice immediately because it takes a while to distinguish between the various fried balls of flavoured béchamel that she has managed to deliver. Eventually we end up with the shrimp ones, too. They all taste nearly the same, varying only on vague back notes of chilli or shrimp. In retrospect they will turn out to be the most edible part of the meal. We will become nostalgic for those darling croquettes.
They’re also our introduction to the kitchen’s version of tomato ketchup, a gummy condiment full of machismo and casual violence. It is shockingly sweet and acidic and has a texture that usually only comes with the application of industrial emulsifiers, which is remarkable given it must have been made without them. It turns up again in a dish listed as ‘tinned sardines’. It is one whole fish, presented in a faux sardine tin, lying on a plank of oily crouton, smeared with a bitter tapenade and more of the tomato stuff. It is meant, I think, to be witty. It looks like something prepared by a desperate Great British Menu contestant who didn’t quite understand the brief. It looks silly. It tastes worse, a big whack of bitter and salt and sugar and missed opportunities. We leave most of it.
Coquilles Saint Jacques, a single modest-sized scallop for £10.50, looks like a faithful version of the dish. The shellfish should come under a burnished topping of a roux-based sauce with breadcrumbs. Here the sauce had split so that beneath the topping was a watery puddle. It had a lightly bitter back taste. Still, it wasn’t as ill-advised as the ‘deconstructed’ boeuf bourguignon. The centrepiece was a lump of untrimmed short rib, complete with connective tissue where it had clung to the bone. It had clearly been braised a while before, then sliced up and chilled. It had only just about been brought up to warm enough before being glazed. For the lardons, there was a sizable block of exceptionally fatty pork belly, so marble white that I thought at first it was potato. It wobbled as I ca
rved. It was too much fat for me, and that’s the first time I have typed those words together. Alongside some button mushrooms were heaps of deep fried breadcrumbs which began to coagulate as the plate chilled. It was, I suppose, a deconstruction of a boeuf bourguignon. It was also the systematic dismantling of all my culinary hopes and dreams.
Next on this menu of small French family dishes: duck spring rolls with bok choi, splattered with another assault by tomato sauce. The spring rolls were thick and heavy and had not spent long in the deep-fat fryer – some of the pastry inside was uncooked. Outside in the hall an industrial strength vacuum cleaner started up because, as we know from the fire alarm episode, at Ecclestone Square housekeeping waits for nothing. Not even lunch in their own restaurant.
The best dish of the day was a slightly overset plug of mango cheesecake with an unadvertised scoop of refreshing blackcurrant sorbet. The three rectangles of pastry in a chocolate and pear mille-feuille were dry, tired and under-sweetened. The two lumps of pear were completely unripe. They were hard to the edge of my knife. And that detail sums up the place. Why would an experienced chef, one with time at Arzak on his CV, choose to serve an unripe pear? It baffles me. But not quite as much as the £120 bill we were presented with. Come, friendly fire alarms.
What happened next: The Ecclestone Square Hotel closed Tapas 37 in 2017. They now run a straightforward brasserie.
Studio 88
London, 25 March 2018
*
Booking a table at Studio 88, a new live music bar near Leicester Square, central London, where almost all the food is served in cones, took two attempts, seven phone calls, a cancelled booking (because they’d forgotten it was press night and my pseudonym barred me entry), a bunch of emails with fifteen terms and conditions (‘While we welcome pre-wedding parties, we cannot accept any paraphernalia’) and a £50 charge to a credit card. We were warned to bring picture ID.