Hawksmoor Air Street

I love steak. If in the final hours prior to my expiring I retain any capacity to choose and masticate then I am certain to include a great big slab of beef, bleu, in my last meal. But I very rarely order it in restaurants, or go to steakhouses, because of what is known in my family as The Pam Principle™. 

My mother, Pam, never orders in a restaurant anything which she might reasonably expect to make at home, believing that it's wasteful to pay someone to do something you can do yourself. I have an excellent local butcher (Moen & Son of Clapham, if you're interested) and a heavy griddle pan, and as such I cook steak - really, really good steak - exactly how I like it, often and well.

As a result, the crop of high-end steakhouses that have exploded onto the London restaurant scene over the last few years have largely passed me by; sure I've heard of the big players - Goodman and Hawksmoor being the Titans of the genre - and had good times at steak specialists 34 and CUT at 45 Park Lane, but as a general rule I've abided by The Pam Principle and enjoyed my sirloin strictly chez moi for no more than about a tenner a time, including service (of course I tip myself - doesn't everyone?) 

Something piqued my interest however about Hawksmoor Air Street, the latest and largest opening from partners Will Beckett and Huw Gott. It's the first of their restaurants to focus on fish as well as flesh, bringing in esteemed seafood specialist Mitch Tonks to curate the crustacea; 2012 has very much been the year of restaurants doing only one thing, well so I was curious to see if Hawksmoor could pull off doing two. 

The answer (for the impatient among you who like to skip to the last page of a book first) is yes, although the main courses dinner date David and I tried were actually the least exciting part of an overall extremely good meal. Char-grilling lent my 'Hawksmoor Cut' turbot - a thick lateral tranche served on the bone - a wonderful subtle smokiness, but the same savour was a little overwhelming on David's slightly-too-chewy 600g bone-in sirloin. Both were good, but only as good as you'd expect at Hawksmoor's prices.

What we really enjoyed were the supporting elements, the accompanying bits and pieces that distinguish Hawksmoor Air Street from its competitors. Cocktails - from a list divided up by suitability to the time of day, and a real joy to read - were ace, from a perfect dry Martini to an after-dinner Buttered Old-Fashioned using bourbon stirred patiently with clarified butter to produce a rich post-prandial soother. Wines were chosen for us from the reasonable-enough selection on offer by the glass, the house Grenache proving particularly fine for £6.

A pre-starters dish of seasonal pickles - which on our visit included mushrooms, carrot and cauliflower as well as an egg, but changes - was sensational, each ingredient pickled in different vinegars and spices creating complex layers of flavour. Sides were unusually good, too; Jansson's Temptation, a Swedish potato gratin with anchovies, worked well with both the steak and the turbot, as did a light, fresh dish of spinach tossed with lemon and garlic in which every component could be discerned. Starters were one hit, one miss; David's roast scallops were terrific, three fat succulent specimens served on the shell with white port and garlic, but my potted beef and bacon with Yorkshires suffered from the puddings being slightly toasted and bitter.

We went a bit salt caramel crazy for dessert; a peanut butter shortbread with salt caramel ice-cream was astonishing (although surely anything which combines peanut butter and salt caramel has got to be A Good Thing), as were three salt caramel 'Rolos', larger than Nestlé's finest and easily ten times as tasty although I'll be interested to see how long the Swiss confectioner's IP lawyers let Hawksmoor keep calling them that for.

Interior detail of Hawksmoor Air Street
by Niamh Shields eatlikeagirl.com

The room  - a 235-seater first-floor behemoth overlooking Regent Street - is attractive, decorated in clubby dark wood, parquet and green leather with some beautiful stained glass and salvaged Art Deco light fittings, but too huge properly to appreciate. It's also very loud; perhaps unsurprisingly the vast majority of tables were taken by all-male groups bellowing at each other over their bone-in prime rib.

Service was good if at times a little disjointed, but it jarred that in these grand surroundings the clothing worn by the staff was mostly the type of jeans-and-check-shirt combo that even local boozers would consider too casual. I found an interview with Will Beckett in which he explains that staff are allowed to wear their own clothes as it makes them happier and therefore able to deliver better service. Well sorry Will, but if I'm handing over forty quid for a bit of turbot I think I'd rather it be served by someone in a nice starched apron, thanks.

Hawksmoor Air Street is a glamorous place serving some pretty good, and at times very good food (I'd go back for a cocktail or two and those pickles alone) but didn't wow this diner enough to question the validity of The Pam Principle. Fortunately for its owners however, not everyone's mother knows best.

Hawksmoor Air Street, 5A Air Street, London W1J 0AD Tel: 020 7406 3980 thehawksmoor.com/airstreet

I was a guest of Hawksmoor Air Street on this occasion




 


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

34, Mayfair

For those of us, and we are many, who follow the movements of London's lively restaurant scene with the devotion of a celebrity's stalker, the last few months have offered particularly rich pickings. From former food-trucks graduating to permanent premises to world-famous chefs popping up for blink-and-you'll-miss-'em residencies in department stores, the pace and variety of new openings has been thrilling and dizzying.

Of the lot, the one that's had me most excited - which is saying something, as despite what the existence of this blog might suggest I generally don't get all that excited about new openings - is 34. By my own admission something of a Caprice Holdings fan-boy, from the moment it was announced early last year that 2011 would see the first new UK restaurant from the group since their relaunching of Scott's in 2006, I'd been looking forward to going.

Alas, delays with the lease and fit-out meant that 34's projected Autumn launch slipped back to early December, when I was being good and saving up for Christmas; by the time January, and with it the gnawing poverty and seemingly interminable wait for the new year's first pay-day that typifies that month, loomed, it felt that I would most likely have to wait as long again to actually eat at 34 as I had for it to open. But Santa must have been spreading the word about just how good a boy I'd been, because lo and behold a couple of weeks into the month an invitation came to dine at 34 as their guest; I was there as fast as you can say "Taxi to Grosvenor Square!"

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 

CUT at 45 Park Lane

45 Park Lane, the new super-duper-deluxe boutique hotel from the Dorchester Collection, stands out from its grand but characterless neighbours like a particularly stylish sore thumb. The beautiful art deco-style building, its name picked out in two-foot high neon yellow letters, looks as if it has been transplanted lock, stock and curvaceous chrome-embellished frontage from Miami Beach, bringing a splash of colourful, youthful glamour to London's five-star strip.

Such a glamorous destination needs a restaurant to match and boy, has it got it in CUT by Wolfgang Puck, the first European opening from the eponymous Austrian-American megachef. Puck's vastly successful empire runs the gamut from fine dining to fast food (at Wolfgang Puck-branded Express outlets in airports and department stores) and CUT, his high-end steakhouse brand, sits firmly at the top of the scale.

Although it's a grand, dramatic room - all high ceilings, swagged curtains and Damien Hirst circle paintings - CUT is actually smaller than it seems, a floor-to-ceiling mirror at its far end giving the illusion of a much longer space. For somewhere so new and opulent it feels surprisingly intimate and warm, the quirky soundtrack of eighties soft rock - yes really - creating an unusual but undeniably buzzy atmosphere. It's an impressive and exciting backdrop for some mostly impressive and exciting food.