by Jay Rayner
My sauté of chicken liver and bacon ‘satay’ was no less bonkers. Chicken livers. Peanut butter. And bacon. Believe me. However hard you try, nothing good could ever come of that, and nothing did. It was a mess of something dark and heartbroken. Duck & Waffle, which I reviewed a few weeks back, served drunk food; this is food for drunks whose partners have abandoned them, leaving them with an almost empty fridge. By comparison the hot smoked mackerel on a rhubarb and ginger relish sounded relatively sane. The brilliance here lay in the kitchen’s ability to flatten the fillet’s skin and stamp it with creases of the sort you normally only find in the shop-bought vacuum-packed kind. It came with two equally industrial-looking slices of brown bread and an under-sweetened mess of rhubarb.
Onwards. Reasonably well-cooked fillets of sea bass came swaddled in a deadening blanket of unseasoned over-reduced cream. Alongside them were ‘laver bread croutes’, which is what happens when you put that Welsh seaweed mush between two greased pieces of bread and into a Breville sandwich maker. Sweet and sharp chocolate-brushed duck – a version of which genuinely was on Timothy Spall’s menu – brought chewy animal cooked to the grey of a winter seascape. It tasted of the sweet counter at WH Smith. The roasted sweet potatoes and butternut squash didn’t really help. At least there was the distraction of those potatoes sautéed in Marmite, in a puddle of fat so deep you could measure it with an engine dipstick. Oh God. Never again.
The red velvet and cherry mille-feuille, a take on Black Forest gateau, stood out for being sensible and reasonably well executed. It was sweet; it was ‘bring me my insulin’ sweet. But that’s not necessarily a failing. Our other dessert, the vanilla chocolate-box surprise, sounded like a full-colour spread from the politically incorrect pages of Razzle, circa 1983. Never order anything with the word ‘surprise’ in the title. Here the surprise was that, if you don’t know what you’re doing, you can turn what’s meant to be a chocolate torte into something with the consistency of hard, cold butter.
If any of this was dirt cheap it might not have mattered, but it wasn’t. Main courses are in the high teens, with some topping £25. Service, by a sweet young couple, is kind and efficient. It really wasn’t their fault they had to bring us all the things we had to eat. Or didn’t, as the case may be.
What happened next: Mostly a series of emails from the yachting fraternity who told me they always stopped off at the Red Duster during Cowes week, the famous sailing regatta, and that they rather liked it. They did, however, acknowledge eccentricities. The current website has the words ‘Marvellous Marmite’ on the home page, although the famed potatoes in Marmite are no longer listed on the menu and nor is the ‘basil-enthused pasta’. What a shame. It now reads like that of a normal restaurant – seafood chowder or Waldorf salad to start, a rib eye or roasted salmon for mains – which may explain the five-star ratings on most review sites.
Fancy Crab
London, 27 August 2017
*
Eating crab, like building kitchen extensions and sex, is very messy when done properly. You have to roll up your sleeves and abandon yourself to the mucky business at hand, with hammer, crackers and pick. The white meat must be hard won, the brown meat scooped from nooks and crannies. I’ve always thought of it as being akin to that myth about eating celery: that you burn as many calories breaking the bastard down as you gain from the seafood with which you are rewarded.
Fancy Crab, which sounds like an unnecessarily extravagant yoga position, is designed to take the mess out of crab, which is like trying to take the rum out of a mojito or the meaning out of life. It’s a crab restaurant for recently married couples who hope they’ll get divorced before they ever reach the companionable stage in which one of them brushes their teeth while the other has a pee. It’s an extraordinarily expensive way to wonder about the point of it all. You could get the same effect for free by staying home and watching Love Island.
The restaurant’s shtick is the enormous red king crabs, fished from the cold waters of the North Pacific around Alaska, which can grow to be five feet across, and have legs like Arnold Schwarzenegger in his prime. The leg meat is the whole point. It is meant to be the sweetest and the best, the Bugatti of the shellfish world. At the start of the meal our waiter, who is by far the best thing here, brings out a whole king crab on ice for us to look at, its legs curled under. When confronted by these at Beast, still alive in tanks and backlit in icy blue, I was reminded of the facehugger in Alien. Now I recall the scene from Douglas Adams in Restaurant at the End of the Universe in which a genetically modified cow is brought out to the table still alive, so it can recommend its own primest cuts.
Let me dial down the snark for a moment. I can see the point of a restaurant dedicated entirely to one glorious ingredient. I can admire the way the menu goes all in. Sure, there’s a steak for the shmuck in your group who didn’t quite understand the point of the outing. They have some oysters. But for the most part it really is all about king crab. They’ve put effort into the decor, from the huge blow-up of a king crab on one wall to the way the beast has been subtly included in other works of art, in a Where’s Wally? sort of way. There are bare brick walls and high ceilings and those lovely waiters wear real bow ties, which they had to learn to tie from YouTube videos. Obviously you know it’s going to be nose-bleedingly expensive. That doesn’t mean it can’t also be good.
Fancy Crab isn’t good. It’s a terrible waste of their money and our money and everybody’s time. It starts with the smallest thing. A plate with two warmed bread rolls, dull and springy, come with discs of seaweed butter. They have been dredged carelessly from a bowl of iced water. Accordingly, there is a puddle of cold water all over the plate, soaking into the rolls. The butter is unsalted and, like me, tastes only of cold, hard fat. A wine waiter doesn’t take our order until just before the starters arrive, and returns with entirely the wrong bottle, a massive red. The starters are half finished before the correct bottle of Spanish white at an excruciating £40 turns up.
A ‘tempura’ crab claw costs £12 and isn’t. Tempura refers to a particular kind of lacy batter. These look like inflated versions of the ones you can buy at Iceland for pennies and come coated in exactly the same sort of DayGlo orange breadcrumb shell. Three bites and it is gone. An accompanying ‘chipotle’ mayo tastes like Marie Rose sauce. There is no heat. The crab is also offered cold on ice, or grilled. We go for a leg cut of the former, the shell already sliced through so there is no effort getting at the meat: £24 worth disappears in about ninety seconds. A squid ink mayo is salty and blunt. A mango dip is fruitier and rather pleasing.
Outside of eating it cold with mayo, Singapore chilli crab is one of the very best dishes using both meat and shell ever invented. It should be salty and sweet and spicy. Eating it should get sauce on your ear lobes and sweat on your brow, and a massive burst of endorphins into your bloodstream as your body recovers from the burn. So surely, how much better if it’s made with this king of all crabs? Here it costs £34, which does rather encourage expectations. It’s a slippery, sugary mess, with no heat at all. This is because they serve chopped red chilli on the side. It’s like serving pork belly without the fat, or smoked salmon without the smoke. It’s missing the point entirely. There’s also a sugary, toasted sesame seed bun of the sort burgers come in at Byron. The sweet notes continue in a sashimi of sea bass. The knife work is good, but the dressing is all sugar and carelessness and a shrugged teenage ‘whatever’. It only gets finished out of hunger.
Chips come doused in truffle oil, are tepid and remain unfinished; a garden salad is dressed well enough but contains fridge-cold slabs of tomato that taste of nothing. The desserts include something called ‘king crab’ cheesecake, which obviously has to be ordered. It’s a loose oblong of crushed biscuit base, topped with a foamy vanilla cream sprinkled with pink stuff to make it look like a king crab leg. Which is, I suppose, better than a cheesecake that actually tastes of king crab. The best dish of the night is a luscious salt caramel ice
cream with a perfectly serviceable chocolate fondant. It’s nothing special. It just manages not to be actively offensive.
Who is Fancy Crab for? I have no idea. It occupies a stretch of London’s Wigmore Street crowded with shops selling stupidly expensive kitchens to people who probably don’t cook. It feels of a piece with that. It’s a restaurant predicated on one idea: that a single really expensive ingredient will make your life better. I’m sorry to be the one to tell you this, but it won’t.
What happened next: The restaurant continues to trade and while dishes have been added to the menu – you can now get a ‘deluxe’ seafood platter to share for £100 – it is still the same concept. A few months after this review, there was another in the Daily Express by the grandly bylined Lady Barbara Judge. She said she liked it very much and complimented the crabs for being ‘red and white and huge’. She liked it so much she went twice.
Smith & Wollensky
London, 12 July 2015
*
Cooking a steak well is tricky, because you cannot see inside the meat. It takes experience and knowledge. Cooking chips is easy: use the right potatoes, give them a couple of runs through the hot oil, make sure they’re the right colour, perhaps even taste a couple. The job is done. At Smith & Wollensky, the new London outpost of a well-known small American steakhouse chain, we sent back the chips because they were tepid and undercooked. They returned to us hot and undercooked. And in that one example of carelessness and lack of attention to detail, you know all you need to.
But I had to sit through the whole damn meal so I don’t see why you shouldn’t, too. This US business has swaggered into London like it thinks it’s the bollocks. The description is almost right, if you remove the definite article before the reference to testicles. It is about as shoddy an operation in separating people from inexcusable amounts of their cash as I have seen in a very long time.
But first a little context. Until about a decade ago Britain was crying out for a proper steakhouse on the American model; one that knew how to source beef, cut steaks thick enough and char them properly. Endless feeble attempts came and went. Then we got both Goodman and Hawksmoor, the latter adopting all the tropes of the US steakhouse, but giving them a pronounced British accent. It put prime cuts of British beef centre stage.
And now comes Smith & Wollensky (hereafter S&W), which bellows loudly about importing US Department of Agriculture beef from Iowa, but which is backed by a consortium from Ireland, a country which produces some of the best beef in the world. They have spent a reputed €10 million, and you can see where every cent has gone. The conversion of the basement and ground floor space of the 1930s New York pastiche Adelphi Building just behind the Strand is an orgy of leather and wood, of brass rail and tasteful mural. It can seat 300 people. Across fourteen services a week I calculate they will need to find roughly 4,000 people able to pay the prices required to return that investment.
Cocktails are £13. That buys me an insipid Moscow Mule served in a stupid brass mug with a thin plastic straw. Five pleasant enough medium-sized seared scallops with shards of crisp bacon are £18; four jumbo prawns are £14. Except they don’t call them prawns, because despite the London setting the place must have a transatlantic drawl. So prawns are shrimps and all steaks are listed in imperial measurements. The USDA cuts include a 24oz bone-in ribeye and a 21oz sirloin. The prices for these are astonishing. The former is £65, the latter £62. To put this in context, at Hawksmoor the bone-in sirloin is £5.60 per 100g. At S&W it’s £10.42 per 100g.
Is that simply because it has travelled? Not if the fillet steak prices are anything to go by, because S&W have sourced those from the UK. At Hawksmoor fillet is £11.33 per 100g; at S&W it’s £14.55. Both the menu blurb and the waiting staff bang on about this being the best steak you will ever have. The menu also mentions a list of blackboard specials – T-bones and so on – all of which have run out by 8.20 p.m. We order the bone-in ribeye. The char is feeble and the overwhelming taste is of salt. Worse is the texture. It’s floppy. Part of this, I think, is a cultural difference; Americans like to celebrate steaks based on tenderness, as if being able to cut a piece of dead animal with a butter knife is an aspiration. I think that if you’re going to eat beef, you want to know it has come from an animal that has moved. This steak slips down like something that has spent its life chained to a radiator in the basement.
The sauces are dire. A béarnaise is an insult to the name, lacking any acidity or the anise burst of tarragon. An au poivre sauce is just a shot of hot demi-glace. A side salad is crisp and well dressed. We take comfort in it. Many other sides are priced for two which is a quick route to higher profit margins and greater food waste. The £9 battered onion rings are good; the £10 truffled mac and cheese is dry and tastes not at all of truffle. Those terrible chips come in the kind of mini-chip-fat-fryer-basket used at chain pubs.
Service is omnipresent. Twice we ask to keep our bread and side plates when they attempt to remove them. When a third waiter lunges in I finally admit defeat. Take them if you’re so bloody desperate. How hard is it to communicate a table’s wishes to the half dozen people working a corner of the floor, especially when a meal is going to cost more than £100 a head?
Our waitress, an escapee from Hawksmoor, is lovely – efficient, charming and utterly wasted here. She has been sent out on to the floor in a jacket she admits is about three sizes too large for her and is already stained. Either the management gives a damn about the dignity of its staff or it really doesn’t. Still, she speaks fluent Smith & Wollensky, intoning the oft-repeated figure that theirs are the best 2 per cent of all USDA steaks. God help the other 98 per cent. We try to love it, really we do, but we just can’t. Clearly the poor animal died twice: once in the slaughter house, once on the grill. We give up and hope she doesn’t look too distraught. Curiously, the menu announces in small print that items ‘may’ be cooked to order. May? Only may? Don’t put yourself out, guys.
We finish with the ‘gigantic chocolate cake’ which costs £15. It comes with a mini milk urn full of chilled, lightly whipped and sweetened cream. That cream is by far the best thing we eat all night. The cake is an obscenity, a foul, brusque monolith of heavy sponge and cack-handed mousse almost a foot high. It tastes of fat and sugar and disdain. It eats like those showpiece cakes that have sat for years in coffee shop windows look. We are told there is an option to take left-overs home. We choose not to. The last thing we want, as we walk out the door, is to take any part of the dreadful Smith & Wollensky experience with us.
What happened next: This branch of Smith & Wollensky continues to say on its website that it serves ‘the best steak in London’. As a later review in The Spectator said, it probably isn’t even the best steak in Covent Garden. No matter. Prices remain exactly where they were, and it is still highly rated across customer review sites.
Farm Girl Café
London, 11 March 2018
*
The menu at the Farm Girl Café features lots of initials. There’s V for Vegan. There’s GF for Gluten Free. There’s DF for Dairy Free. I think they’re missing a few. There should be TF for Taste Free and JF for Joy Free and AAHYWEH for Abandon All Hope, Ye Who Enter Here. If you examine the company’s website, and I would only advise doing so if you have strong teeth that can cope with a good grinding, you will learn that the Farm Girl group offers: ‘A holistic and healthy yet comfortingly simple approach to Australian café culture.’ Nope, me neither. Apparently, they like to use ‘nutritionally nurturing ingredients’, which sounds rather nice. I could have done with a bit of nurture, rather than the dishes that came our way.
I have nothing against eating healthily. I have only one body and I try to look after it. My mother used to say that she hoped to die aged ninety-eight, shot dead by a jealous lover. She didn’t quite manage it, but it’s an ambition I’m happy to inherit. The menu here is omnivorous with a heavy emphasis on non-meat cookery, which is a fine thing. I like vegetables, me. They can taste reall
y nice. But this sort of cooking does have to be done with skill, grace and, ideally, an absence of malice.
The Farm Girl Café, Chelsea, is the third in a group which until now has stuck to charcoal or matcha lattes, and light lunches involving an awful lot of almond butter, avocado and something called coconut bacon, which you just know isn’t. This is the first to serve dinner, and it does indeed look like a proper restaurant in a very Chelsea sort of way. There’s a giant blue Welsh dresser behind the bar, faux wooden beams across the ceiling and banquettes in a field shade of green. It’s like a cartoon version of a farmhouse as imagined by someone who hasn’t been in one.
It fills quickly on a cold winter’s evening, with blonde-tressed Chelsea women just bubbling with intolerances. They are fizzing with them, these dairyand gluten-fearing dietary warriors, seeking sanctuary from the terrifying world of modern food. With them are their pink-cheeked, anxious-looking boyfriends, who clearly fear they are just one more rugby club, traffic-cone-on-your-head piss-up away from being chucked. A woman arrives clutching her Yorkshire terrier. They are given a corner table. The dog is offered a bowl of water and a plate of food and disappears on to the floor for dinner. At least somebody gets to eat well.
From the small plates we order the whole (completely out-of-season) globe artichoke, which apparently is gluten free. It’s tough to see how it would be anything other. It has been prepared by someone who either hates globe artichokes or has never met one before: boiled until it is as soft and rank as Grandma’s cabbage, only with none of the glamour. It is just so much mushy leaf matter, and smells of a long Sunday afternoon in someone’s overheated suburban front room. The damn thing could be disposed of without the aid of teeth or, better still, using a composter. That would remove the middleman, which in this case happens to be me.