The sheer difficulty of getting a table has delayed TO’s review on the “refined” but “deadly dull” dining room of Ramsay’s new Maida Vale pub. Having finally got in, for lunch, TO’s head man finds “sweet but quite ditsy” service, and food that’s “pretty average”.
“The Greenhouse costs a lot of money: live with it or leave it… I'd choose to live with it whenever possible: it's that good.” Right from the beginning, the critic doesn’t leave us in much doubt about her views on this relaunched Mayfair mews restaurant, which now has “an air of understated, power-broking luxury” (and a clientèle “overwhelmingly made up of male City types”). Downsides? A “sickly” pudding, and staff who seemed “a little headless chickeny”.
Ms M reviews the “French equivalent of Strada” – the prototype, in Wimbledon Village, of a bistro chain that’s been established by the management team that built up said Italian chain. A local spy reports it to her as the “busiest and most successful” of the many multiple (or would-be multiple) outlets infesting the village, but Ms M is not particularly impressed. Prices, for example, may “seem gentle”, but Ms M notes that there are many extras to bump up the bill, and “the French experience unravelled… in two of the main courses we tried”. (Unusually, the critic is rather late in the day with this review. It’s nice, however, at last to see a corrective to the launch reviews which, as we noted at the time, we found wildly over-positive.)
Gosh, here’s a break with precedent: David Sexton gets to do a proper (starred) review, as a supporting item to Ms Maschler’s own. She never ‘shares’ her column. What can this mean?
Sexton, as it turns out, does not particularly enjoy himself at the establishment which bills itself as "probably the best Polish restaurant in London".
6th March 2008
