Quo Vadis
Chris Blackhurst, Evening Standard (Rating: 3/5 stars)
Ms Maschler’s stand-in’s review proper begins with the rather dodgy proposition that “The Ivy, Scott’s, Le Café Anglais and indeed, The Wolseley, have all gone down the English brasserie route”: the Ivy and Scotts are in no obvious sense brasseries, and the Café Anglais and the Wolseley are not notably English. Anyway, he praises the Hart brothers’ decision “to stick to English” – which undoubtedly is the case – for their relaunch of this famous Soho restaurant. Without any irony, he goes on to note, apparently approvingly, that the head chef is Jean-Philippe Petruno (French) from Fino (Spanish).
We get a fully itemised (and priced) description of the dishes he ate. Meat was “perfect and sumptuous”, and “in the dishes like the salad that the Harts’ love of Spain shines through” (“there will not have been many English grill rooms, if any, down the years that have been able to call upon tomatoes of that quality”). “ The only negative was the treacle tart (£6.50), which was cloying and gave the impression of having stood around.”
Jan Moir, Are You Ready To Order?
The critic is not sure that the (half-Spanish) Hart brothers’ “relaunch of Quo Vadis as an English grill room is quite as sure-footed and winning as their other enterprises”. She finds the seating “sardine”-like, and complains (it seems to be a complaint) that the ‘British’ menu “boasts a number of dishes that fail to meet any of the stated criteria” (“crab spaghetti, sea bass carpaccio, pesto gnocchi and L’Ami Louis potatoes among them”).
However, it is the cooking which is the real problem: she finds failings with almost everything she ate, and a summer pudding, in particular, is “catastrophic”: “constructed as if a Martian had attempted an olde English recipe while unsure if he was supposed to eat it or lag his spaceship with it… There is something wrong here and perhaps it is because the Harts should be focusing less on their roles as mine host and more on the food… Launching an old fashioned grill like this is a brave move, but they need to get more in touch with their English side if they want this to be a success”.
(The critic, incidentally, alleges that the Evening Standard “managed to review the restaurant before it was even serving meals, which is quite a catering miracle”. Not quite sure what she’s driving at there: the Standard’s main review was published several days after the opening).
The Botanist
Sebastian Shakespeare, Evening Standard (Rating: 2/5 stars)
The critic and his wife have a disastrous meal at the Martin (‘Gun’) brothers' new Sloane Square brasserie. “We both left the restaurant feeling so angry we walked most of the way home.”
Guy Dimond, Time Out (Rating: 5/6 stars)
Time Out’s head man seems to have been to a totally different place from the one the Standard reviewed so poorly (and, for what it’s worth, which we ourselves reviewed as being very ordinary and overpriced). He finds it simply “terrific”. “The service is well-drilled, the place is airy and attractively understated”, he raves. “At our lunchtime visit in the second week, the dining room was already packed but the staff didn't miss a trick, and the kitchen was already on top form”. “It seems the Martins are doing a brilliant job of trading up from their pedigree of running good gastropubs to fine dining… Let's hope they're able to sow more seeds in other parts of London.”
Maze Grill
Marina O'Loughlin, Metro (Rating: 3/5 stars)
The Ramsay group’s new Mayfair steak place is “so butch it should be advertising in the back pages of Boyz magazine”, says the critic… Perhaps that's why they haven't bothered making the place look too stylish”. She finds the steaks good but “wildly expensive”, especially those sold at ‘market price’. (There are, as she so sagely observes, “no words on a menu that could strike more fear into a diner's heart – apart from 'chef patron Jean-Christophe Novelli' – than 'market price'”.) “Though good, [the steaks are] simply not as memorable as their Stateside counterparts.”
Osteria Emilia
Guy Dimond, Time Out (Rating: 4/6 stars)
Mr Dimond seems to be in a very benign mood at the moment, with four stars awarded to this “good, honest neighbourhood Italian at the top end of Fleet Road”.
Chicago Rib Shack
Richard Vines, Bloomberg (Rating: 1/4 stars)
A nicely factual review of the relaunch of this self-promoting Knightsbridge legend, where the critic has one meal that was “terrible…, worse than you might expect in a suburban U.S. mall or a highway rest stop”, and another that was “OK”.
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