Champagne Brunch at The Landmark

For all that it's increasingly hard to make money, let alone a living, out of this food writing lark, it's certainly not without its compensations. An endless whirl of breakfast meetings and cocktail soirees, openings and anniversaries, lunches, launches and good old-fashioned dîners à deux keep one tremendously well-fed and watered while also constituting a pretty enviable social life, with only the prospect of high cholesterol, gout or the dreaded NFI to worry about.

But best of all are the occasional really great commissions that come along, the kind that leave you cackling Muttley-style and wondering aloud "This is work?" as you fire off your invoice. The kind that saw me dispatched recently by les Deux Messieurs, the luxury travel guide for which I am the gloriously-titled Editor-At-Large, to The Landmark Hotel in Marylebone to experience their unlimited Champagne brunch.

Now if you're a pedant like me you'll be asking which it is that's unlimited, the Champagne or the brunch. And like me, you'll be delighted to know that it's both. Served every Sunday afternoon in the Winter Garden restaurant beneath The Landmark's soaring eight-storey atrium, brunch here consists of a vast all-you-can-eat buffet served with free-flowing Drappier Champagne, for £80 a head.

If, even taking into account the potential for drinking your own body-weight in fizz, that sounds expensive, rest assured that the quality and quantity of the food are commensurate with the price. Table after table groans with freshly-prepared, regularly replenished fare - hot breakfast favourites and an omelette station; salads, sushi and whole sides of smoked and cured salmon; four - four! - roasts with every imaginable trimming and various gravies, and a couple of stir-fries and stews.

Alyn and I went, as should you, with empty stomachs, determined to try as much as we could; I won't exhaust you (or rather, disgrace myself) by itemising absolutely everything we ate. But we especially liked herby, coarse sausages from the full English counter; the fun build-your-own Caesar salad bar; thick ribbons, cut-to-order, of wonderful beetroot-cured salmon; dainty, colourful temaki and nigiri sushi; and beautifully, bleedingly rare beef sirloin, swimming in gravy made with the roasting juices.

The best, however, came last, with the astonishing selection of desserts and patisseries available for afters. Having as sweet a tooth as I do, I was in seventh heaven faced with the stacks of macarons, mousses and possets, the cheesecakes, brûlées and brownies. Little fruit tarts packed with huge, plump blackberries nestling on crème pâtissière and bite-sized squares of passion fruit cheesecake were my particular favourites. Oh and did I mention the white chocolate fountain with fruit skewers for dipping? I might have visited that just a couple of times.

Throughout the afternoon (your table is yours for the whole 12.30-3pm sitting) a pianist and double-bassist entertain with an eclectic medley of music, and if we were surprised at some of the choices -'Suicide Is Painless' and the German national anthem, anyone? - it provided the perfect acoustic backdrop to the satisfied murmur of the guests and frequent popping of Champagne corks.

Unsurprisingly given the price and the setting (The Landmark may not be as grand as some of London's grande dame hotels but is still very obviously five-star) the Sunday Champagne Brunch mostly attracts dolled-up diners celebrating special occasions; when the pianist broke off from 'Single Ladies' to play 'Happy Birthday' more than one table assumed it was for them. But with so many restaurants now pushing how casual they are as a selling-point, it's rather refreshing to find somewhere where Sunday best is still de rigueur.

It's saying something that, having spent a great deal of time lately staying and eating in some very fancy hotels for les Deux Messieurs, this experience genuinely felt like a treat. Nice work, if you can get it. And if not then heck, just treat yourself.

The Landmark London Hotel, 222 Marylebone Road, London NW1 6JQ
020 7631 8000 landmarklondon.co.uk


 

 


Posted by +Hugh Wright

Reform Social & Grill, Marylebone

About three or four years ago, restaurants offering robust, butch British fare in clubby surroundings (gentlemen's rather than night) were the height of fashion, Dean Street Townhouse being the first and I would still argue the best of the bunch. It was a fashion I was very happy with, this being exactly the kind of food I like to eat and the kind of place I like to eat it in.

Fashions change however, with each new restaurant opening now seemingly contending to be more niche and novel than the last, so just as I was thinking we'd all moved on to places serving only hot dogs and champagne or authentic pork-bone ramen, it came as a not-unpleasant surprise to hear about somewhere as resolutely - one might say wilfully - old-school as Reform Social & Grill.

Located in the Mandeville Hotel in Marylebone, Reform consists of a bar area (the Social) serving some pretty spot-on cocktails - they got my vodka Martini exactly right - and the Grill, a large room which with its bare-wood floors, dark Edwardian colour palette and studded leather banquettes and booths is attractive but almost oppressively masculine. On the night Alyn and I visited we were the only diners for almost the entire evening, word having clearly not yet spread that Marylebone, an area well-served for high-end eating establishments but less so for good everyday options, now has exactly that.

I always enjoy being faced with a menu I find it hard to choose from due to liking the sound of everything, and that was certainly the case here. The starter I eventually settled on, St George mushrooms on toast with a poached egg, was exactly the kind of comforting savoury I enjoy at home, while Alyn's pheasant Scotch egg with mayonnaise managed to be an imaginative, tasty reboot of a dish which appears in myriad variants on almost every pub/grill/bistro menu these days - no mean feat.

For main courses we both ordered from the Charcoal Grill selection. Alyn's 300g rib eye steak - great beef, its origins surprisingly unidentified given the menu writer's attention to provenance elsewhere - was huge and very tender, served on the bone with obscenely moreish chips sprinkled in smoked Cornish salt. I pigged (and cowed, and lambed) out on an exemplary mixed grill of English rose veal, a lamb chop, chipolatas, black pudding (Ramsey's, whoever he is), roasted bone marrow and a veal Scotch egg, all of unimpeachable quality and beautifully cooked. If that sounds gut-busting, it wasn't, the quantum of everything being just enough to appreciate and sate but not to overwhelm. 

If the inclusion on the menu of both Desserts and Puddings seems affected, it only reflects an attention to the semantics of sweets, the  desserts being various sugary afters and puddings proper steamed mounds of Billy Bunterish nostalgia. Alyn's Bakewell pudding with raspberry preserve came with a generous Cornishware jug of custard and disappeared before I could taste it; apparently it was excellent. So too was my Reform trifle, cleverly - and fashionably - substituting sticky PX for the usual sherry, mascarpone for whipped cream and pistachios for almonds. It was the kind of dish I wish was served everywhere, but because it isn't will return here for.

As well as a glass each of a wonderful orange Muscat with our puds we chose a bottle of a complex rosé Malbec, one of few new world bottles on a mostly old world list interesting for its inclusion of familiar grapes from lesser-known vineyards, accessibly-priced.

Service was courteous and, to our relief bearing in mind the emptiness of the place, not overly-attentive. If staff occasionally lingered longer to chat with us than they might otherwise have done, it couldn't be held against them given the lack of anyone else to distract them.

Dedicated followers of food fashion might consider it a folly for anyone to open a restaurant so far off the zeitgeist, now of all times and in London of all places. Those who care about the more important details however  - that Reform Social & Grill  serves extremely good food at fair prices in a pleasant room where, in another sign that current trends are being eschewed, it is possible to book a table, not that currently at least you would need to - should rejoice.

Reform Social & Grill, Mandeville Place, London W1U 2BE Tel: 020 7224 1624 http://www.reformsocialgrill.co.uk







 Posted by +Hugh Wright

I'll have what they're having - London's no-choice restaurants

This post was originally published on Telegraph Online

London. Home to the “Mother of all Parliaments”, epicentre of world democracy, the very bedrock of freedom of choice. Except, that is, on its restaurant scene, where menus are emerging offering minimal choice and, in some cases, no choice at all.

First came Le Relais de Venise ‘L’Entrecôte’. One restaurant in Paris has expanded into a global mini-chain, with London branches in Marylebone and The City. Serving only a green salad with walnuts to start, followed by two helpings of steak frites with a special, secret-recipe sauce, the only decision diners at L’Entrecôte face is how they want their steak cooked.

Fittingly enough I visited the Marylebone branch through a lack of choice; finding myself in the area with a friend between Christmas and New Year, L’Entrecôte was about the only restaurant open. Initially wary - L’Entrecôte polarises critical opinion - I was pleasantly surprised at just how much I enjoyed the experience.

The simple salad, dressed with a bracing mustard vinaigrette, cleansed and awakened the palate, while the steak was tender, the chips hot and crispy and the sauce - a sort of tart pesto - very tasty. It was also excellent value, at £21 for two courses; a regular stream of chauffeur-driven cars dropping off well-dressed families proved that even London’s super-rich like a bargain.

Burger & Lobster in Mayfair is the newest addition to the no-choice scene and it’s been an instant smash. Serving (the clue is in the name) only superlative burgers and whole grilled or steamed lobsters with a side salad and chips, the £20 flat price - exorbitant for a burger but peanuts for crustacea - has seen the restaurant getting through almost two tonnes of lobsters every week since opening at the end of 2011.
 
As with many recent openings, no reservations are taken and waiting times for one of the high diner-style tables are growing along with the restaurant’s reputation for superb quality - to which I can attest, having tried the lobster both grilled and steamed, as well as the only deviation from whole lobster or burger, a delicious, decadent brioche lobster roll. I was underwhelmed by the burger, finding it somewhat so-what for £20, but with superb cocktails and an excitable egalitarian atmosphere there’s nothing not to love here.

Ceviche's Pisco Bar by www.paulwf.co.uk

It’s not just restaurants that are taking choice out of the equation. While some bars might specialise in a particular drink while still offering others - the Campari Bar at Polpo on Beak Street, for example - the Pisco Bar at Martin Morales’ new Peruvian restaurant Ceviche in Soho will serve only the pure grape spirit, in cocktails and fruit- or spice-infused macerados.

Ever the assiduous reporter, I tried a classic Pisco Sour - Pisco, egg white and lime juice - and a Pisco Punch, made with pineapple syrup and grapefruit bitters. Each was excellent, and very different despite using the same base ingredient. I certainly didn’t feel that my freedom of choice had been compromised although my sobriety certainly was; I should perhaps have had rather more of the tasty marinaded dishes from which the restaurant derives its name.

If, as I suspect they do, these no-choice venues signal the start of a trend, it’s one that I’ll be embracing. The sheer range of culinary options available in London is dizzying at the best of times. Far from being a hardship, having a few locales where the decisions have already been taken strikes me as being the ultimate luxury.


Posted by +Hugh Wright

Le Relais de Venise 'L'Entrecôte'

Living, as we are privileged to do, in a democracy, choice is held to be totemic of everything that is good in our society. Who we vote for, where we live, what we do for a living, who we have sex with - or not - are all inviolably our choices; their protection is enshrined in law and if we should ever feel that our freedoms are being restricted we have the choice to take to the streets, airwaves or ballot box to make our dissatisfaction known.

Trying to get through to my broadband provider just after Christmas however, to berate them for the fact that, yet again, I had no service, I came to think that choice was perhaps not such a great thing. "OK, " the recorded woman said in a nasal drone that made me want to kill someone and then myself, "you now have five choices..." I listened and pressed the appropriate button. "OK, you now have five choices" she repeated; "No!" screamed I, "I have just made my choice, were you not listening?" But it transpired that these were in fact five more choices; I made mine and waited to be connected to a human being. 

 "OK, you now have five choices..." "WHAT?!" I blustered, "but madame you have already given me five choices, and then another five; what could I possibly want with five more? What could anyone want with fully fifteen choices, when all I want is to speak to one customer 'service' operative and get my broadband fixed pronto?" My blustering was for naught; I had to make a choice - had to - or I would never be afforded the privilege of speaking to one of their highly-skilled 'people' - so highly-skilled that for me to be put through to precisely the right one necessitated the navigation of fifteen choices. I made my choice and waited, all the while eyeing up my living room window and wondering whether throwing myself from it would bring a swift and merciful death or merely cripple me.

With this trauma still indelibly fresh in my mind, I approached lunch at Le Relais de Venise 'L'Entrecote' with an enthusiasm that might be surprising to anyone who has read the to-say-the-least mixed reviews that have preceded this one. The reason you see is that, at L'Entrecôte, there is absolutely no choice at all.

Although a menu displayed by the door cheerfully announces that 'Today' one can have steak 'with its famous sauce, French fries and green salad with walnuts', that is in fact all you can have, any day of the year, and it's this formula that is strictly adhered to at Le Relais de Venise's handful of sites around the world. Black and white-uniformed waitresses ask how you would like your steak cooked (and then scribble this on the paper tablecloth) and take drinks orders from an ultra-concise six bin wine list, but that's where your choices end.

Even how I'd ended up somewhere about which everything shrieks 'Tourist Trap! Avoid!', comes back to choice, or rather lack of it; my lunch date Scott had wanted to take me somewhere else in his Marylebone neighbourhood for a post-Christmas, pre-New Year catch-up, but like in so many other villages, pretty much everywhere was shut. So L'Entrecôte and its entrecôte were our only choices.

And do you know what? It was fine. Not the best steak I've ever had, nor the best chips and definitely not the best (or most exciting) salad, but very far from the worst and, at £21 for the whole lot including a same-quantity-again second serving of steak-frites, indisputably good value. The 'famous sauce', the exact composition of which excites nerds the world over as much as the exact make-up of The Colonel's eleven herbs and spices or the recipe for Coca-Cola, was really rather tasty, creamy and heavy on herbs like a slightly tart pesto.

A half-bottle of house Bordeaux was perfectly drinkable, and at eight quid brought a very pleasant, filling two course lunch for two, with seconds, to just £50 pre-tip. While I wouldn't race back to L'Entrecôte I certainly wouldn't avoid it, and nor it would seem would the moneyed Russian/Arab clientele who, Scott tells me, pack the place out even on days when other choices are available.

To finish off my broadband saga: eventually - after a quarter of an hour on hold during which I was invited to choose which of four genres of tinny piped music I would most like to endure, which struck me as being akin to asking an extraordinarily rendered innocent whether he'd prefer water-boarding or sleep deprivation - I got through to a real-live person who, unable to fix things remotely, booked an engineer's visit.

When she said "Would you like to choose a time-slot?" all I could think was that if only the clever people behind Le Relais de Venise ran call centres, the world would be an altogether happier place.

Le Relais de Venise 'L'Entrecôte', 120 Marylebone Lane, London W1U 2QG Tel: 020 7486 0878 http://www.relaisdevenise.com 

Roganic

Photography throughout courtesy of www.paulwf.co.uk

Although fully aware that in doing so I am laying myself open to accusations of being an oral examiner of equine gifts, I must admit that I initially declined a very kind friend's invitation to dinner at Roganic. For one thing, I hated the name, a vain, corny play on proprietor Simon Rogan's, to the same irrational extent to which I hate buskers and people who own folding bicycles. For another, I was put off by the cost - £55 for six courses or £80 for ten before even a drop of liquor passes the lips might not shock these days what with the cost of eating out in London soaring to record levels, but it still isn't exactly what I'd call affordable.

I was further turned off by the fact that Roganic is cringeingly styled as an 'extended pop-up' - Rogan having taken a two-year lease on a vacant site on Blandford Street in Marylebone - which irritated me even more than pop-ups do in general; part of the joy for me in eating out often is the sense that I will from time to time come across somewhere so good that I will want to go back again and again, and pop-ups are anathematic to this. Finally, I was afflicted by early-onset review fatigue; with everyone being served exactly the same dishes, within about a fortnight of Roganic opening I was so fed up of reading only subtly different takes on identical meals that the last thing I wanted to do was eat there myself.

Never one to take no for an answer however, my particularly persuasive pal Paul Winch-Furness crossed off all my objections (apart from to the name, which even I was able to see was not reason in itself to boycott somewhere): Cost? I'm paying, he said. Pop-up? That's as may be agreed Paul, but if you like it you can go back a few times in the space of two years, and if you really like it you can always visit its parent restaurant, L'Enclume in Cumbria. As for repetitious reviews, Paul pointed out that the week he had in mind to go would coincide with the first change to the menu since Roganic opened in early July. How could I say no?

Cafe Luc, Marylebone

This restaurant is now closed.

If I gave my blog posts headlines rather than simple titles, you can be sure that they would be dreadful punning ones. Bar Boulud? 'Not worth the hulla-Boulud'; Drapers Arms? 'Cut from some very fine cloth', that sort of thing. I say this only because while struggling to think where to begin with appraising an eminently forgettable dinner at Marylebone newbie Cafe Luc, I came up with several groan-out-loud possibilities: 'A Luclustre Performance'; 'Luc warm at best';  'Luc who's coming for dinner' - you get the picture. And speaking of pictures, you know it's come to something when I break my cardinal rule of not photographing food to snap my smiley-faced gazpacho, just to be sure of having something of interest to share.

This isn't to say I was left feeling entirely luctiferous by Cafe Luc, which occupies a huge site at the northern end of fashionable Marylebone High Street. Much of the experience was very agreeable, not least the company of the devilishly-handsome up-and-coming fashion television producer James Tomlinson who, you heard it here first, will very soon be telling us all what not to wear and how to look good clothed. The cocktails we kicked off the evening with - a vodka Martini and a Sea Breeze - were excellent, although there's no list so you just have to know what you want and hope that they know how to make it. And it's a not unattractive if rather corporate-feeling room, with lucent clusters of lamps spaced along biscuity-beige walls and plenty of mirrors for admiring one's fellow diners (and oneself) in. It's just those rather important elements of food and service that let the place down.

On its website, Cafe Luc boasts that "the classic brasserie menu references French and Mediterranean dishes, drawing on seasonal and local produce." So far so appetising, except that the menu doesn't actually make any references to seasonality or provenance, other than for a dish of Cornish mackerel on the prix-fixe which combines both (if by 'local' they mean 'regional' which I rather fancy to be the case). Sure, the smiley gazpacho was made with tomatoes, which are very much in season at the time of writing, but as a showcase of August's abundant lycopene-rich lovelies it wasn't exactly up there with, say, the beautiful, rainbow-hued salad of Heritage toms I enjoyed on my most recent visit to Dean Street Townhouse.

James and I ordered from the prix-fixe, good value at £15.50 and even better value at the £1 it was costing me thanks to an opening online offer. Good value, yes, but also depressingly pedestrian. As well as the gazpacho, which was garlicky, oily and not at all bad, starter choices were smoked salmon (described by both the menu and James as 'fine') served eccentrically on a toasted crumpet, and a duck terrine. Mains included pea risotto, the aforementioned Cornish mackerel and steak frites. We both ordered the latter; it was all right. Our desserts, lemon tart with raspberries and Chantilly and Nutella crème brulée, were good although the latter tasted more of chocolate than of the promised hazelnut and thus disappointed. I'm honestly not sure if we'd have fared any better ordering a la carte; while it's perfectly possible to szhuszh up a 'classic brasserie menu' (step forward Automat) I don't think that's happening in the kitchen at Cafe Luc based on what we were served.

Ah yes - the service. Like the food, it wasn't actively bad, and I would probably have been more sympathetic had what we were eating been really stellar, but the so what-ness of the meal only served to accentuate the 'So what?' attitude of the people serving it. Excepting the warm welcome at the reception desk, staff were for the most part aloof, absent and seemingly uninterested in making our experience a memorable one. Worst of all, they committed the to-me impardonable table-side sin of serving James's main course to his empty place while he was away from the table. Given that other tables seemed to be receiving rather more attention, I can only conclude that because one of us was only paying a pound, we were deemed worthy of only 12.5 pence worth of service.

Somewhat depressingly, I expect that despite the blandness of all it has to offer Cafe Luc will thrive; while over-priced for what it is, perversely it's pretty cheap for Marylebone and in its very ordinariness could service a need for 'plain' food in an enclave which boasts plenty for the gourmand - The Providores, L'Autre Pied and Orrery are all nearby - but little for the casual diner. Whatever your culinary preference, I can only suggest that you Luc elsewhere.

Cafe Luc, 50 Marylebone High Street, London W1U 5HN Tel: 020 7258 9878 http://www.cafeluc.com