Simon Parker Bowles’s “old-fashioned” St James’s bastion has traded less on its “clubby” credentials of late, and more on the attractions of some “first-class” fish and seafood; its offshoot – in an “impressive” banking hall by Bank – offers “one of the most civilised settings for a City lunch”.
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“Monumentally disappointing.” That’s a phrase people usually use figuratively. You can, however, apply it literally to this new City operation. However good the building was as a bank, it jus...
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Press Reviews (4)
AA Gill (28th September 2009)
0/5 stars
On a Monday evening in the City – hardly, one might observe, the fairest of test meals – the critic discovers “the most depressing restaurant in London”. Above the “hangar-like bar, bereft of human beings”, is the mezzanine restaurant, which feels to him “like an Aberdeen Angus Steakhouse in Leipzig.” Oysters – the speciality – disappoint, and the rest of the food is “tortured”, with one dish actually being sent back.
Marina O'Loughlin (24th September 2009)
2/5 stars
The new outpost of the St James’s clubby restaurant, housed in a former Lloyds banking hall, is, for the critic, an “intimidatingly vast” space where “[a]cres of marble echo spookily”. The mezzanine restaurant is “altogether more manageable” than the ground floor bar but “[s]till stuffy”, and the atmosphere is not improved by the punters, who are “few, sober and middle-aged.” The food is “pretty conservative stuff”, and she seems irritated by the “foofy” presentation, as well as the servers’ attempts at upselling.
(24th September 2009)
2/5 stars
The “very grand art-deco style” of Simon Parker Bowles’s City venture impresses the critic. (Well, he’s quite entitled to his opinion, but this isn’t in our view really an Art Deco building; it would better be described as ’30s-bombastic with the odd Deco flourish.) The restaurant, itself, however, he finds “a bit fuddy-duddy and lacking any thrills”, and the menu offers “nothing to challenge the palate of a jaded business diner”, and all at prices that “hail from a time when the markets were more bull than bear.”
Rowan Moore (18th September 2009)
4/5 stars
One of those reviews which – no disrespect to Mr Moore, whose architecture reviews we always read with enjoyment – we wish had been written by one of the Standard’s two standard restaurant reviewers. This is the second time that Mr Moore has written a ‘stand-in’ piece that we can’t help feeling is wildy over-positive. We just cannot see this new artisto fish and seafood parlour as four-star material. (Last time we had a similar difference of view with Mr Moore – Bombay Brasserie – our survey ultimately tended to agree with our own more negative view; that’s not to say, of course, that it will necessarily be the same this time round.)
AA Gill (28th September 2009)
Marina O'Loughlin (24th September 2009)
(24th September 2009)
Rowan Moore (18th September 2009)
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