Wasted Calories and Ruined Nights

by Jay Rayner

  What happened next: This was a masterclass in how a restaurant should respond to a less than positive review. That morning Dave Strauss, the general manager for the group that includes Beast, tweeted out that ‘fellating cows’ were en route to the restaurant to satisfy my needs. He told me later that the phone was soon ringing off the hook that day, with people wanting to see what I had described for themselves. He and I became firm friends, and I became a regular at another of the group’s restaurants, Zelman Meats in Soho. Today, the menu is a more standard affair, with various steak cuts available by the 100g, and king crab at £120 per kilo. They do now serve bread. They are hoping to open a Miami franchise of Beast in 2019.

  Dorchester Grill

  The Dorchester, London, 28 December 2014

  *

  Of all the dirty food acts I have committed – that dribbling sausage I ate from the late-night cart in Leicester Square, a solo dinner at Frankie and Benny’s, a Greggs pasty which I quietly enjoyed – this feels like the very worst. I am going for dinner in an establishment I am meant to be boycotting. Recently the Sultan of Brunei introduced sharia law, including the stoning to death of homosexuals. As he owns the Dorchester Hotel, I should not be darkening its door. But I’ve always believed that the best way to deal with bigotry is to laugh in its face. And oh my, is there a lot to laugh at about the Dorchester. And it’s not just the women in the mink bomber jackets with the face lifts so tight the classic Brazilian risks becoming a Van Dyke beard.

  What’s most amusing is that of all the great London hotels, the Dorchester has always been the campest. The wide corridor of a lobby is a riot of soft furnishings and tassels and cushions so plump you could fake a pregnancy with them. It is a masterclass in try-too-hard fabulous. For many years the counterfeit jewel in this paste crown was the Dorchester Grill, a room off to the side where the walls were decorated with 12ft murals of bigthighed chaps in kilts tossing things hither and yon. The carpet was a massive tartan print and the banquettes were studded lumps of red brocade. Stereotyping queer culture as one thing or another is almost as stupid as trying to ban it. But let’s just say it was ironic for an apparently homophobic sultan to own a room like this.

  For years talented chefs came and went from here, knocking out smart dishes that simply couldn’t compete with the walls. It didn’t matter what those poor cooks did. Everyone came out muttering about the kilts. So now Alain Ducasse (who already runs the dour Michelin three-star down the hall) has taken control, and the room has had a makeover. And yes, the murals have gone. But oh my! What they’ve put in their place! It takes an awful lot of money to make a room look this cheap. It’s a space that hasn’t been allowed to hear the words: ‘That will do.’ It’s all mirrors and gilding and desperation. The caramel-coloured leather banquettes even have broad fold-down armrests of the sort you’d find in a Mercedes S Class, so you don’t have to touch your companion. It looks like the inside of a little girl’s plastic music box.

  To view all this, you must first negotiate the sharp-creased and -heeled automatons on the desk in the corridor outside who find our request to wait at the bar difficult to comprehend. It turns out you have to ask just the three times. Through the doors and we are confronted by a wall stacked with five figures’ worth of shiny, pink-tinted copperware. A couple of shelves are taken up with jelly moulds, and it is those which sums up what’s going on here. There may be battalions of impeccably French staff both front and back of house doing their best to patronise the hell out of you. But when you drill down on the menu it’s what the faded gentry used to call high tea. It’s nursery food at stupid prices. Come on, Nanny: safety-pin my XXXL nappy in place and bring me din-dins.

  You can call breaded fingers of lemon sole ‘goujonettes’ if you really like, but that doesn’t stop them looking like something out of a freezer bag from Iceland, and it certainly doesn’t justify a £17 price tag. As for the rest, there’s no doubting the technique. There are people in that kitchen who doubtless could recite pages of Larousse Gastronomique at you like it was the litany. But all that technique is then pressed into the service of the dull and lifeless. A puck of cheese soufflé in a cheese sauce has a fine, soft texture, but eats like a dish you would get spooned into your mouth by someone else when you’re feeling poorly.

  A lobster bisque makes its point through uddersquirts of cream. Pâté en croûte is a dense cramming-together of blitzed animal between two slivers of pressed pastry, all served far too cold. Main courses are prime ingredients at excruciating prices. A beef fillet for £46 comes with a Yorkshire pudding which isn’t as good as those I make, alongside a dry bit of sawn-through marrowbone topped with breadcrumbs. Most odd is two slices of pork belly, cooked for seven hours before being grilled, in a sticky glaze that smells lightly of Marmite. The fat yields, but the meat is hard, which is a remarkable achievement for something that’s apparently been cooked for so long. A veal chop escapes with its virtue.

  If there’s a point to coming here it’s dessert – especially a pistachio soufflé with a liquid salted-caramel centre from its ‘soufflé list’. But again, while I can admire the technique I can’t admire the £14 price tag. Worryingly, lemon tart is described as being made ‘our way’, which predictably means it’s not a tart at all but a dome of meringue filled with lemon curd. If only they would do it someone else’s way.

  Thank God for the company I kept that night, for there is something utterly joyless about this place. It’s that killer combination of smugness and dreariness; it’s the restaurant equivalent of the office bore. Often I’m asked why I bother visiting restaurants like this where the bill swiftly reaches enough to buy the cuff on a mink bomber jacket. Partly it’s rubbernecking. I do love watching the oblivious rich in surroundings of acute bad taste masquerading as good. But it’s also that these restaurants attempt to fool people into thinking they are worth it if only they could save up. It’s useful to know that they are not.

  So yes, you can hate the Dorchester Grill on principle. You can avoid the whole damn hotel on the grounds that its knuckle-dragging owner thinks stoning strangers to death is a reasonable response to their sexual orientation. But I think it helps to know that you can also hate it on its own terms; that the price tag will not buy you bliss or, as the best restaurants do, a moment suspended in time. It will simply buy you the sense that some people have too much money and others know how to take it off them.

  What happened next: In 2017 the grill was included in the ‘Top 50 Best Restaurants in London’ as compiled by reservation service Bookatable. The menu is still fiercely expensive but has been rewritten into plain English so no longer includes ‘goujonettes’ or ‘pâté en croûte’. Most disappointingly vegetables ‘of the moment’ have been replaced by vegetables which are merely ‘seasonal’. While it does not have a star, it is included in the Michelin guide.

  The Rib Room

  The Jumeirah Carlton Tower Hotel, London, 4 December 2011

  *

  At the Rib Room you are never alone. It doesn’t matter whether you might wish to be; whether you thought you might have a quiet, relatively uninterrupted chat over dinner with your companion. The waiters will still come at you in waves, fiddling with glassware, fidgeting with bread, asking you how everything is.

  ‘Not sure, mate,’ I wanted to shout. ‘Every time I’m about to taste something you come up and ask how everything is.’ Not that they are completely unhelpful. Having asked to be moved from an over-lit table in the middle of the room to a corner banquette, we were handed one of those flashlights on a flexible stem for reading books by. ‘We find this is a rather dark corner,’ the waiter said, ‘so we thought this might help.’ He wasn’t wrong. This is the first time I have found myself in a space so dark that I literally needed a torch to read the menu.

  It read well. Sadly, reading well was pretty much all it did, which was a disappointment. Eating at the Rib Room at the Carlton Tower Hotel is a Knightsbridge tradition, much like money-laundering and Botox. When th
e hotel opened exactly fifty years ago it was the tallest in London and the oak bar with granite inlay in the restaurant was the place to be seen. It has a reputation for being a little bit flash and a little bit louche but for trading in the most basic of virtues: prawn cocktails, ribs of Aberdeen Angus beef and so on.

  Back in 1961 it described itself as offering: ‘A gourmet’s feast in an atmosphere of masculine hearty good cheer,’ which makes it sound like a rugby club changing room.

  I’m not sure much has changed. Today it’s the kind of place where chaps with broad necks and suits that shimmer under the down lighters talk softly of the old days in Odessa before they all struck it rich.

  And rich they must be for, famously, the prices are brutal. Recently the Rib Room went through a makeover, to give it a new interior in shades of green and amber, and a new chef with experience at Northcote Manor in Lancashire. The website now talks about his commitment to local produce which is all very now and all very silly in this corner of London, unless they really are digging up carrots from Battersea Park. Or shooting the ducks on the scum-laden boating ponds. Which they aren’t. In any case it probably is best to get the scallops from Orkney rather than, say, the Thames down from Bermondsey.

  The scallops, a plural apparently achieved by the slicing of one large one into three, came nicely seared, and laid on what was described as apple-glazed bacon, but was instead something half an inch thick and soft and braised and an insult both to the word bacon and to the pig. At £16 we expected more. A lot more. By comparison the thickly piled Rib Room prawn cocktail for the same price almost felt like good value (though only if you did happen to get lucky in the botched nationalisation of Russian public utilities all those years ago).

  The famed Rib of Beef, an inch-thick hunk of Aberdeen Angus served with gravy and a Yorkshire pudding, is listed online as costing £40. Get to the Rib Room itself and suddenly it’s £42. Why is it never the other way round? There are lots of jokes I could make here about how, for that price, you’d want the animal to come out and give you a dance and a joke, perhaps a tour of the new dining room. But, actually, I’d have happily settled for it tasting nice. In the sixties the Rib Room declared their ambition to serve the best beef in London. Today I’m not even sure it’s the best beef on Cadogan Place.

  The meat was completely under-seasoned and was so much dull, wet cotton wool. I left at least fifteen quid’s worth of it on the side of my plate, because I simply couldn’t be fagged to carry on dragging it through my teeth. The gravy was like an episode of Downton Abbey: it looked all right but had absolutely no depth. The Yorkshire had the texture of something that had been loitering in the kitchen for a while.

  Generally, I have little time for people who say they could have made a restaurant dish at home; eating out is about so much more than whether you can be fagged to cook or not. But I really can make this so much better at home – and at a quarter of the price. Or make that a fifth of the price, for side dishes – a thin cauliflower cheese, a more pleasing bowl of spinach with shallots – are £4.50 each, or just over a fiver if you chuck in the obligatory 12.5 per cent service. Funnily enough online they are listed at £4. Sorry to bang on about this but, given they have literally just re-launched, the under-pricing online feels like a conveniently sloppy mistake.

  A more complex duck dish – a bit of breast, a braised and re-formed leg, some figs – was exactly the same. It was a big plate of blah, an essay on the finer points of dull and, in the darkness of our corner, didn’t even have looks going for it. ‘If they’d put as much effort into the food as they do at hounding us with waiters it might have been a good meal,’ said my companion. She had a point.

  The best part of our dinner was a light, wobbly apple-crumble soufflé, which lived up to its title. Far less appealing was a martini glass layered with an (over-) set cream of white chocolate and cardamom, and a coffee and whisky jelly, all of it beneath a thick layer of milk foam. The latter was the stuff of so many adolescent school-boy jokes that aren’t even worth making.

  The 500-strong wine list is priced to keep the hoi polloi out and succeeds. There is, it should be said, a cheaper lunchtime menu at £25 for three courses, but for that you get not rib but braised heel of beef, a cut so lowly even the shin looks down upon it.

  I am minded to say that after a few weeks of eating outside the capital this is the sort of thing which gives London dining a very bad name and that they wouldn’t get away with it outside the M25. But, actually, I don’t think they’d get away with it outside SW1. They charge like this for such lacklustre food because they know their clientele don’t really care about either cost or quality. And it really shows.

  Throughout the meal the waiters insisted on addressing me rather ostentatiously by the pseudonym I had used when booking. ‘Yes Mr—’, ‘No Mr—’, ‘Here’s your dessert Mr—’. They did it so much and with such conviction that I began to wonder whether, refreshingly, I actually hadn’t been rumbled. No chance. I was in a cab on my way home and looking at my Twitter feed – a filthy habit, I know – when I noticed a tweet from the Rib Room thanking me for dining with them that evening. Amazing. I was a mile away from the place, and I still couldn’t get rid of the bloody waiters.

  What happened next: Apparently not very much, because the roast rib of beef is still £42, a remarkable lack of price movement over seven years since the review. In 2017 it was announced that chef Tom Kerridge of the Hand and Flowers in Marlow would be taking over the Rib Room; however Kerridge pulled out of the deal a few months later in favour of the Corinthia Hotel near London’s Trafalgar Square. The Rib Room continues to operate much as it did in 2011 and has generally positive ratings from online reviewers.

  Quattro Passi

  London, 7 September 2014

  *

  In the closing years of her life my late mother, who once loved restaurants, came to despair of them. Her hearing was failing and the spaces that were once ideal for banter and gossip became the enemies of such. Restaurants, it transpired, are mostly designed by young people with no understanding of acoustics; who think hard surfaces and polished concrete are easy on the eye, regardless of how cruel they are to the ear. The crash and clatter of self-regarding modern restaurant design managed what almost no one and nothing else could: they rendered my mother silent.

  September 9 marks the start of Lipreading Awareness Week, and they asked that I consider the impact of design on those who are hard of hearing. I’m more than willing to oblige. What’s wrong with a bit of carpet? And maybe the odd curtain? A low ceiling and a bit of enclosed booth seating wouldn’t go amiss either. I hate the fact that some people are missing my wittiest lines over dinner simply because of crap design.

  And so I decided to book a restaurant that I was sure would be acoustically sympathetic. Actually, I needed one, because the fates have a cruel sense of humour. I had returned from my summer holidays with both a glorious tan and a less-glorious ear infection. I was genuinely hard of hearing. I fell upon the newly opened Quattro Passi in Mayfair. The original on the Amalfi coast has two Michelin stars. Now chef Antonio Mellino has apparently moved it here to ‘introduce Londoners to real Italian fine dining’. Charmed, I’m sure. The website talked of leather wall finishes and French silk wallpaper and a chandelier made from thousands of tiny silk petals. It bellowed softness. Perfect.

  Except it isn’t. It’s all hard floors and hard walls and high ceilings. Happily, there was no sound system. Until we sat down. Then they cranked it up right over our heads. We were the only people there that lunchtime. I shouted to the waitress to please, in the name of all that is holy, turn it off.

  She shouted back: ‘What?’

  Well, exactly. Eventually we convinced them to return us to a hard, echoing silence. Still, I cannot recommend Quattro Passi to the hard of hearing. Happily, on this occasion they need not feel excluded, because I cannot recommend Quattro Passi to anybody. Few restaurants have left me feeling so angry, and it has nothing to do with the
acoustics. Because few restaurants sum up the shameless, disfigured, toxic economics currently at work in certain central London postcodes as much as this one. It is a business seemingly designed to milk a luxe economy that values pointless fripperies over real value. It is an insult to good taste in three courses.

  We drank one glass of sparkling wine each (not champagne) and one glass of white and ran up a bill of £282. I could find no bottle of wine on the list for less than £40. After that you need oxygen to read the prices, which top out in five figures. Antipasti and pasta dishes are between £20 and £34. Main courses are almost all £40, with some more than that. I tried to imagine the meeting where they priced a bowl of poorly roasted new potatoes – oily, sweaty, soft-skinned, as though cooked a while before and then reheated to order – at £6. Did they urge each other ever higher, giggling as they calculated the enormous gross profit?

  I’ve said it many times: I have no problem spending big money on meals out. I’ve paid more than £282 of my own dosh for lunch. It just needs to be utterly memorable, the stuff of recollections whispered breathily late at night. It can’t be a pallid fart of mediocrity, priced for some dodgy clientele that’s ripped off the gross national product of a small impoverished nation and is now domiciled in London for tax reasons. That’s what your money gets you at Quattro Passi: clumsy cooking, trying to make itself look grown up and clever, generally by the application of flaky precious metals, like King Midas has suffered psoriasis over your dinner. Yes, really. We’ll get there.

  Of course, a kitchen at this level can do basic things. They can make good breads. They can grill a bit of fish. They can make a pistachio ice cream. But none of that is good enough, not for £282. An amuse-bouche brings a stodgy croquette, the size and colour of a cat’s turd, on a thick tomato purée full of metallic tang. Apparently the brown item is made of aubergine; I’m grateful for the heads up or I wouldn’t have known. It is a dull vegetal thud. The seafood risotto costs £34. At that price it should be the best I have ever eaten, Neptune’s-tears-made-lunch. This is a dense salty pond, with little in the way of the iodine tang seafood lovers crave. The shellfish has been diced up so finely that it is undiscoverable amid the soupy rice, because obviously rich people don’t like chewing. The fact that it is flecked with silver leaf does not make it better. Does it make it better for anybody? Who swoons over such things?