Wheelers
Jasper Gerard, The Telegraph (Rating: 4/5 stars)
Bah, humbug! If a critic starts off a review by telling you how he’s mates with the celebrity chef concerned – such as: “I don’t always understand [Marco Pierre White], but I always like him” – you may as well stop reading at that point.
If you persist, what you may find, as in this case, is a view of history so warped as to be pointless. “Wheeler’s sank. MPW bought the name and to re-establish the brand has turned his restaurant Luciano into Wheeler’s”, the critic breathlessly tells us. This may all be true as a matter of strict literal fact, but it’s so much half the story as not really to be the story at all.
What the critic’s account conveniently (of just ill-informedly?) glosses over is the fact that it was after an earlier stint of Marco Pierre White management that the original Wheeler’s slipped beneath the waves. Admittedly, MPW had fled the bridge by the time of the sinking, but we suspect any dispassionate board of enquiry would have blamed him for the demise as much as anyone else.
On the food front, “[t]he emphasis is on massive helpings, simply cooked”, and the presentation is “impeccable”, but the cuisine shows little spark: “[o]ld covers are delivered masterfully, but you crave a new composition”. Prices are “perky’, too, and the kitchen of this fish restaurant – astonishingly – seems to know nothing of the provenance of its fish.
How, you might ask, could that possibly be a four-star performance? Well, 4/5 star ratings seem to have become Mr Gerrard’s ‘default’ of late… which doesn’t leave many nuances for the sorts of restaurants which really are worth praising.
Galvin La Chapelle
“It is, of course, a cliche to describe a fancy-pants place as a temple to gastronomy”, says the critic, but in the case of this Galvin brothers’ Shoreditch newcomer “it is perfectly apt”, and it is a venue he admires “very, very much”. “But I can't quite find it in myself to love it”.
Problem is that with each of their ventures the brothers “have ramped up the offering, and the prices. Add “lip-puckered service which is the sickly side of ingratiating”, and a main course côte de boeuf (£53 for 2) didn’t quite measure up; the critic concludes that “[i]n the great echoing vaults of La Chapelle [the brothers] appear to have mislaid their lovely, light touch.”
“[A]t the moment, this is Michelin food at mid-range prices”, says the critic, who is much impressed by the Galvin brothers’ Shoreditch newcomer.
Dean Street Townhouse
John Walsh, The Independent (Rating: Food 4/5 stars, Ambience 4/5 stars, Service 4/5 stars)
Richard Caring’s new establishment “brings style and warmth to the heart of Soho”, says the critic, and “you can't move for people trying to get in”. And so begins a hymn of praise, which lasts all the way to the end of the piece. “If ever there's a London restaurant to enter out of the winter snow and fall in love with, this is it.”
Polpo
Jasper Gerard, The Telegraph (Rating: 3.5/5)
“The emphasis is on affordability, informality and vitality. And it works”, says the critic, the latest to be impressed by this New York-style Soho ‘bacarao’ (or “Venetian pub”).
Vijay
Toby Young, The Independent on Sunday (Rating: 17/20)
“If someone who lives more than 5,000 miles away had heard of this restaurant, maybe it was worth a visit”, says the critic, as he finally – at the behest of a friend in Los Angeles – plucks up the courage to make a trip to this Kilburn Indian (which has long been highly rated in Harden’s). From the first bite of his dosai onwards, he realises “why my friends have been raving about this place”.
Roka
Giles Coren, The Times (Rating: 8/10)
Bringing his habitual skill to the restaurant reviewing lark, the Times’s man spends much of his critique disparaging an establishment which turns out not to be the one he had intended to visit at all. This leaves him space not to say much more about the new Canary Wharf outpost of Roka than that it “was excellent… Given the limitations of the site, the place is very pretty, very golden, very modern. And it was full of all sorts of glamorous people, lots of drop-dead wives of Russian billionaires and the editor of the Daily Mirror”. The food was “well executed” too.
The French Table, Surbiton
The critic visits a “minor curio” – “a cracking, authentically French gaff in Surbiton” – and finds it “packed”. “[A]nd no wonder when it serves such sparkling food at prices better suited to Tom and Barbara Good than to Margot and Jerry Leadbetter.”
Older readers will understand this. Note to old codgers in the media everywhere: not everyone nowadays is going to know that the named characters were heroes of a definitive BBC sitcom, the Good Life, whose heyday is more than three decades past.
The Kingham Plough, Kingham, Oxfordshire
AA Gill, The Sunday Times (Rating: 4/5 stars)
“[A]nyone thinking of opening a local pub restaurant should come here and see the gold standard”, says the critic, who is much impressed by this seemingly rural gastroboozer. Problem is, the critic is not convinced that this neck of the woods can really be described as ‘country’ at all: “[i]f you want mud round here, you have to order it from Daylesford”.
Le Caprice, New York
The most unequivocally damning of the critiques of the Midtown offshoot of the St James’s legend so far. It does make one question whether Richard Caring’s empire – normally so sure-footed – really intended to provoke quite so many discordant commentaries with this mega-high-visibility Big Apple opening.
It’s all the worse as the critic clearly has a good impression of the London original, and he still puts himself among the majority of local reviewers who have left disenchanted by this “incestuous clubhouse”, which is “packed with the sorts of idle blue bloods and arrivistes who’ve kept nearby Harry Cipriani going for years despite dismal reviews”.
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