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Review of the Reviews - London

Il Vaporetto

Marina O'Loughlin, Metro (Rating: 3/5 stars)

The critic finds “very odd” that the Santin family’s new Belgravia Italian has remained totally “under the radar”. As Harden’s reviewed it in June that’s not 100% accurate, but it does seem there have been changes since then anyway – the place “started off with a retro brief and Italian chef”, but the chef is now Andrew Lassetter, “a fan of that much-maligned culinary conceit, fusion”.

She finds a place “exactly like a fashionable restaurant in Italy in that it doesn’t look vaguely ‘Italian’”, with “smiling staff… dressed in beautifully cut suiting”, and concludes – in a worryingly Time Out-goes-to-SW1 sort of way – that this is “[o]ne for the rich”. Anyway, the staff are “so lovely”, and the people-watching “so intriguing” that she begins to “enjoy the whole nonsense.” “And our food – faintly ridiculous though it might be – is pretty good.”

Bel Canto

Fay Maschler, Evening Standard (Rating: 2/5 stars)

A review of the song-with-your-supper restaurant that has “moved from an almost-impossible-to-find location in the City to a hotel in Lancaster Gate, reduced the fixed price of dinner by £20, and maintained a high standard of performance”.

“The almost fatal flaw in the production” turns out to be “long waits for food as the kitchen fits around the singing and vice versa”. When it did appear, though, the food seems to have been broadly satisfactory.

Le Caprice, New York

Adam Platt, New York Magazine (Rating: 2/5 stars)

The influential reviewer notes good times coming back to the city. “Downtown demigods like David Chang and April Bloomfield [ex-River Café] are opening ambitious new ventures farther uptown (Má Pêche, in the Chambers Hotel, and the Breslin, at the Ace), and for the first time in years, Danny Meyer is rolling out an ambitious upscale restaurant (Maialino, in the Gramercy Park Hotel) instead of a burger joint.”

And when he called this “new high-end bistro” at the Pierre (now owned by the Taj group), “the uninterested voice on the other end of the line informed me that their tables were booked for [both that week and the next]. Echoing a point made in the NY Post rather less politely, he says that a “patina of old-fashioned Euro snootiness that permeates the operation”.

“The long, low room looks like a grand, Gilded Age train car done over by Noël Coward and his friends in Art Deco tones of black and pearly white” and the staff “speak in a variety of Continental accents (French for our waiter, London posh for the maître d’). Jesus Adorno will not be pleased to know that he speaks ‘continental’ English.

Appetisers were “the weak link” in food (from an ex-Ivy chef) which seems to have been a little up and down, but the place does have a “casually stylish, old-world charm”. Predictably, however, “Le Caprice is already being overrun by crowds of pink-faced, Champagne-swilling Englishmen and Fifth Avenue couples out on the town bundled in their fur coats. But this is the Pierre, after all, and after spending the better part of the Great Recession gnawing on burgers in the back rooms of downtown speakeasies, visiting a restaurant that attempts to strike a balance between casual, bistro-style intimacy and old-fashioned uptown grandeur is refreshing.”

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