by Jay Rayner
And finally, the mussels. They needed to be good. Being a mussel restaurant that can’t do good mussels is like being a cardinal who’s crap at praying, or a slaughter man who can’t stand the sight of blood. Léon de Bruxelles is all these things and far less. The meat inside the shells is small and shrivelled and dry; each shell contains what looks like the retracted scrotum of a hairless cat. They appear to have been left to steam for too long. Those with Dijon mustard are vinegary. I order the Madras mussels, because it’s my stupid job to do so. It’s exactly as you would expect Indian food to be were it cooked by Belgians. It smells of old curry-flavoured Pot Noodle; the flavour is not dissimilar. Eating these mussels is not meditative or compelling. It’s just disappointing.
The unlimited chips come in deep ceramic pots and are crisp at the top and damp at the bottom where they have steamed in their own heat. Each mussel pot costs a fearsome £14.90. We finish on a high with a freshly made waffle, a crisp puff of malty wonder with whipped vanilla cream, ice cream and maple syrup. I could say I’d come back for that waffle alone, but we all know I wouldn’t.
Obviously our meal at Léon de Bruxelles isn’t great. That goes without saying. But what really matters is that it’s also terribly, terribly sad. That is a failure of a much deeper kind.
What happened next: It was indeed a dying restaurant. A year later, it had closed, to be replaced by a large branch of McDonald’s. I’m just so sorry. However, the rest of the Léon de Bruxelles group across Europe – there are ten of them in Paris alone – continue to trade vigorously.
City Social
London, 29 June 2014
*
You can tell a lot about a place by the punters it attracts. By that measure the City Social, Jason Atherton’s new restaurant on the twenty-fourth floor of Tower 42 in the City, is to be avoided, at least by me. Early on I am waiting at the bar where I am approached by a middle-aged woman with hair the colour of the peroxide aisle at Boots. ‘I don’t normally interrupt people,’ she says with the nasal twang of Alison Steadman’s Beverly in Abigail’s Party. ‘But I’ll make an exception for you. I’m a newly elected UKIP MEP and a real foodie and I’d like to invite you to lunch.’
It speaks much for the Liberal-Left bubble I inhabit that I am astonished she should admit to her UKIP victory. But she’s said it with such enthusiasm that it’s clear she’s said it before and been met with applause. Not this time. ‘You support a party which attracts racists, homophobes and bigots,’ I say. ‘Lunch is not going to happen.’ Her lips quiver. ‘You’re … you’re the bigot,’ she shouts. And she storms off. I suppose in the sense that I am bigoted against bigots I am indeed a bigot, but only over a very narrow bandwidth.
City Social, the latest in a line of London restaurants with the S word in the title, really isn’t very. It is all the very worst of the 1980s revisited. It’s full of clumping tumours of men, jangling change in their pockets and barking at each other about the latest position taken by Millennium Capital. There are large tables of men, with hard jaws and bald heads and glazed eyes from the working hours, boasting, and stamping and clapping each other on the shoulders. The testicle count is enormously high here, which is fitting because there’s an awful lot of bollocks at City Social.
The place is fitted out in the 427 shades of brown visible to the naked eye so as to suggest an old gentlemen’s club: curving leather banquettes by the windows, wood trim everywhere, dark floors that suck what available light there is so that menus have to be read by the torch app on your smartphone. Except it’s only just opened and has the whiff of the glue-gunned stage set.
They try to serve cocktails in pewter tankards, as if it’s a proper old inn that is slipping into the Thames. It isn’t. You can tell that from the wraparound view of London up here. It should be said that the chaps behind the bar quickly nod agreement when I laugh in the face of pewter and ask for a bloody glass. Indeed, the barmen are the most human aspect of the whole place.
The rest is faff and bother and heel click. It’s the kind of place where dishes are brought on trays by one person but delivered by another in a clumsy dance that stops all conversation; where waiters are drilled to scrape the table for crumbs none can see; where if you decline bread they will remove your bread plate so you may never change your mind. The staff behave as if constantly on the edge of being bawled out by the customers. (Nothing to do with me being recognised; the PR company later made it clear that they didn’t know I’d been in.)
Wine service is the pits. It’s one of those lists priced to make you feel inadequate. It’s priced to give the tedious men barking at each other about Millennium Capital a way to look interesting by spending stupid amounts on wines with names they can’t pronounce. I ask the sommelier to find me a bottle of Pinot Noir for under £50. He puffs out his cheeks, shakes his head, points at things costing £56 and, at one point, something costing £99 which isn’t Pinot Noir. ‘It’s very difficult with Pinot Noir,’ he says. No it isn’t, I tell him. You can get a great one for under a tenner wholesale. It turns out there is one for under £50 – a Chilean for £49 – but I spot it after he has left our table. The man either doesn’t know his own list or wants us to spend more.
All this grind and hand wringing and willy-waving makes the food an afterthought, which is a shame. At his best Jason Atherton, who oversees the kitchen here for the consultants Restaurant Associates, which actually runs the venue, can be very good indeed. Witness his seafood linguine: a coil of silky pasta lies in a bowl surrounded by curls of crisped squid, steamed mussels and cockles and a dice of razor clam on the shell. On to this is poured a seafood velouté that is heavy with the cooking juices. Aside from the irritation of wrestling the sauce boat off the waiter so you can have more, it is about as good a seafood pasta dish as you could hope to find in London. As it should be for £14.
But Atherton does have a tendency to overwork things. What might be a great steak tartare – heaps of chopped and seasoned prime beef scattered about the plate – is undermined by splodges of ‘dried vinegar’, a vinegar gel, the acidity of which bullies the subtleties of the meat. A beautiful tomato salad with tomato jelly and sprinkled with basil granita is let down by tomatoes which are like some of the clientele: all right to look at but with little to say for themselves.
Technically, mains are a masterclass. There are pieces of rabbit saddle, bound together and wrapped in ham to form a cylinder, plus an impressive rabbit sausage and a side dish of a barley-like grain with braised rabbit. A duck dish brings hunks of breast and boulangerie potatoes and a berry compote. Technically impressive they may be, but they lack heart and soul. About the meat there is the raw squidge and bloodiness of sousvide. The animal proteins have been denatured under vacuum, but not uproariously cooked. A kind of perfection has been achieved; it is not the kind I enjoy.
Dessert, at least, is without a fault: a foamy strawberry soufflé, a classic custard tart with a welcome dusting of ground nutmeg. But the whole effect is deadening. Across from Tower 42 is the Heron Tower with, at the top, Duck & Waffle, looking down upon us. Midway through my meal I look up and know that if it’s dinner and a view I’m after, that’s where I’d rather be. It’s twenty floors higher, 50 per cent cheaper and 100 per cent more fun.
What happened next: In Autumn 2014, City Social was named best new restaurant by the website and guide SquareMeal. It went on to be awarded a Michelin star which it has retained year after year. I didn’t name the UKIP MEP I got into a row with but it was Janice Atkinson. In March 2015 she was expelled from the party after the Sun newspaper filmed her allegedly requesting a bill from a restaurant for three times the actual cost of the meal, with the intention of claiming it on expenses.
The Ten Room
Café Royal, London, 10 February 2013
*
It was a simple question, and the waiter flunked it. What type of tuna, I asked, do you use in your tartare? I wanted to know if it was endangered bluefin. ‘It’s from Scotland,’ he said, with
an authoritative nod of the head. My companions and I looked at each other. Scotland? Why? Was it on holiday there? Had it nipped over from the Pacific to get a job in the oil industry? Later the waiter would return to admit his mistake and tell us it was yellowtail from roughly 8,000 miles to the west of Glasgow. By then it was too late. I already hated the Ten Room at the once-grand Café Royal. In truth I had really started hating it when, just after we sat down, the same waiter offered to recommend something from the menu. He then listed half the dishes, including three of the most expensive starters. So, I asked him, what’s wrong with the rest of it? He came out with a special rictus grin, muttered: ‘Nothing’ and retreated. If you’re going to upsell shamelessly, please do it with style.
When they come to hold an inquest into what has gone wrong here – and they surely will, for a deathly echoing space like this cannot afford to be so empty – the kitchen will, for the most part, be found innocent. The food is not spectacular, but nor is it bad; it’s the kind of stuff people who don’t look at the bill call comfort food, because it comforts them to eat it.
There’s a £12 scallop dish with very little scallop in it. It’s amazing how far you can make those suckers go with a sharp knife and a steady hand. There’s that tuna tartar and a grilled quail thing with pomegranate to make the kitchen look like it has a bit of Middle Eastern soul. A grilled duck breast for £24 is unevenly cooked: rare as requested at one end, less so at the other – but fine for all that; ditto both a veal chop Holstein, breaded and dressed with a fried egg and anchovies, and a suckling-pig stew. Desserts are better than just OK, especially a warm, soft, spreading chocolate cake and a wobbly custard tart.
The problem is everything else. The space is rather grand – one of those balconied public areas you find in the old art deco hotels of downtown LA. Into it they have plonked a pile of red leather seats and almost nothing else. It’s an airline club-class lounge without the design features or the nibbles. Along one side is a wall of square marble posts, backed by glass. The wall looks like a design feature from a self-consciously modernist men’s loo. Frankly I didn’t know whether to rest upon it or pee against it. By the end I was sorely tempted.
Off to one side, through a doorway, is a bar so dark you need an iPhone app to read the excruciatingly expensive cocktail list. Music thumps. It continues its muffled thump throughout dinner so that sitting at the table back in the dining area you feel like you’re listening to a disco full of young people exchanging rare strains of chlamydia.
Service is silly and pompous and haphazard. I order that suckling-pig stew which, the menu says, comes with crackling. But the crackling doesn’t turn up. I have to get the menu back and point it out to the waiter. Don’t promise me crackling and then not deliver it.
It’s the kind of place where if you decline to have your wine refilled just twice, they’ll nick your glass so that you have to ask for it back. Not that you’ll be able to afford much to put in it. The cheapest red is £30, and the next cheapest is £40. When the bill comes they ignore the name the booking was made under, presuming they know exactly what I’m doing there, and put my name on it. Only they spell it wrong. And that one detail sums it up. The Ten Room is clumsy, stupid, self-serving and a waste of the once-great Café Royal. It’s a crying shame.
What happened next: It was not the happiest of restaurant openings. The Telegraph called the Ten Room ‘dismal’, while in Metro it was dismissed as a ‘sorry, soulless misfire’. However, it traded for five years until, in early 2018, the Café Royal announced it would close and be replaced by a grill and sushi bar under French-born chef Laurent Tourondel, who made his name in New York. Laurent at Café Royal opened in the summer of 2018.
4
All Fur Coat …
Beast
London, 19 October 2014
*
You could easily respond to this week’s restaurant with furious, spittle-flecked rage. You could rant about the posing-pouch stupidity of the meat-hanging cabinet that greets you as the lift doors open, and the frothing tanks of monstrous live Norwegian king crabs next to it, each 4ft across. You could bang on about the bizarre pricing structure, and the vertiginous nature of those prices; about the rough-hewn communal tables that are so wide you can’t sit opposite your dining companion because you wouldn’t be able to hear each other, and the long benches which make wearing a skirt a dodgy idea unless you’re desperate to flash the rest of the heavily male clientele. You could shake your fists and roll your eyes and still not be done.
I think this would be a mistake. Instead you should accept Beast as the most unintentionally funny restaurant to open in London in a very long time. It’s hilariously silly. The most appropriate response is to point and laugh. I don’t even think I’d advise you not to go. As long as you go with someone else’s money, because God knows you’ll need a lot of it. Got any friends who are, say, international drug barons? Excellent. They may be able to afford dinner. It’s worth going to see what the unmitigated male ego looks like, when expressed as a restaurant.
If Beast were a chap, he would be a part-time rugby player smelling of Ralgex who’s trying to tell you he’s deep and thoughtful, even though he’ll later be implicated in an incident involving a traffic cone and a pint glass of his own urine. It is a venture by the Moscow-born company behind the admirable steakhouse Goodman, and the clever and ever-expanding chain Burger and Lobster, where you can get only an expensive burger or a cheap lobster, both for £20. Beast is essentially a luxe version of the latter.
When it first opened a few months ago, it offered only a set menu for £75 a head: a few antipasti of aged Parmesan and the like, followed by 400g of bone-in rib-eye per person, and a quarter each of Norwegian king crab, a species which cleverly manages to be both a delicacy and a cause for concern to environmentalists due to the way it is advancing down the Norwegian coast. This is to be eaten at those huge 6ft-wide communal tables, planted with guttering candelabras. There are dry-stone walls and glass-fronted wine cabinets bulging with Montrachet and Pomerol, priced in four figures for men with teeny-weeny penises. I order one of the very cheapest options, a Bordeaux by the glass.
A few days before our booking, Beast had introduced an à la carte option. Apparently not everyone wanted the full Beasting. Given the apparent intention to make everything more relaxed, the pricing system is utterly dysfunctional. The starters, priced in the mid-teens, are the best value. Thick slices of impeccable yellowfin tuna, seared and then chilled, come with an insistent lemon aïoli. Even better are the grilled red prawns, offering huge head-suckage possibilities.
We watch the salty juices pool on the plate, exploding with umami, and conclude we need bread. ‘I’m sorry sir, we don’t serve bread.’ Eh? What’s all that about? I could see this as some stand for a bang-on-trend, carb-free Palaeolithic diet, were it not for the fact they serve chips. Mind you, they’re crap chips, huge fat things that could exclude draughts. Who actually likes their chips this way? They’re advertised as coming with truffle and foie-gras salt, which is like getting a gold-plated, diamond-encrusted case for your smartphone because you’ve run out of things to spend money on. It’s a spoilt person’s version of luxury; the pillowy ‘chips’ do not taste either of goose liver or truffle.
Next, we want a single serving of the rib-eye – 400g – and a single serving of the crab. This is where it all collapses. The beef is listed at £10 per 100g. But the smallest cut they have is 600g. You’re in for £60. With the crab, which costs £75 a kilo, it’s even sillier. You have to buy a whole beast, and the smallest they have is 4.3kg, at a mere £325.50. Before service. We have to make do with a single spindly leg at £25. It’s served with a cloyingly sweet basil and chilli dressing which makes us bare our teeth. Of course, despite the price, you have to extract the meat from the shell yourself using scissors, picks, crackers and a heart monitor. It’s a messy business for not very much sweet meat. I ask for a finger bowl. They don’t do those either. I am directed to the hard stone s
inks around the edges. Maybe I should save on a walk to the men’s while I’m there. It feels like that sort of place.
The corn-fed, dry-aged Nebraskan rib-eye, with a carbon footprint big enough to make a climate-change denier horny, is bloody marvellous: rich, deep, earthy, with that dense tang that comes with proper hanging. And at £100 a kilo it bloody well should be. At that price they should lead the damn animal into the restaurant and install it under the table so it can pleasure me while I eat. We love the buttery truffle sauce that comes with it. We love the bone, which demands to be taken in hand. We especially love a side salad of plump multicoloured tomatoes in a smoky dressing.
At the end there is a lemon mousse which is too much acidity and nowhere near enough fruit. There is also a ‘deconstructed’ vanilla cheesecake, which, as too often, is code for: ‘We couldn’t be bothered to make a proper cheesecake.’ A cushion of whipped vanilla cream lies under a landslide of shattered digestives with a few berries in mourning. And all of this is served with huge solemnity and seriousness. It may be hilarious, but those involved have no idea. It is also full of men, being manly. Looking around I finally conclude that Beast is the sort of restaurant invented solely to be photographed for in-flight magazines determined to present a portrait of your home city you do not recognise. I imagine there will soon be one in New York which will look just like this, with Dubai close behind and Moscow after that. They will all look the same. They will all cost the earth. They will all be completely and utterly absurd.