Number 17 Sloane Street
IN honour of the New Year I decided to go to a new restaurant, and one with its chef from the new world. Should I really have expected anything other than new dis- appointments? Mark Gregory is hailed as the newest best thing to come out of New Zealand, ready to rank alongside Madge Allsop and Dame Kiri, and comes to the Chelsea Hotel weighed down with antipo- dean trophies and awards. That should have been warning enough. When de Gaulle was invited to go to New Zealand he refused, saying that no Frenchman would go to a country which had only two cheeses, hard and soft. Having now seen what that country's star chef can do, I find myself in sympathy with de Gaulle.
This place makes the mistake of so many hotels and restaurants in this country in that it aspires to a ridiculous, outdated, costume-drama notion of grandeur which it cannot attain, so that one is left with an impression of both snobbery and incompe- tence. Some poor, acne-grazed Irish boy is trussed up in full bell-boy rig, including hat, to take the coats, though he doesn't seem to know how to take a coat off or, it would appear, what to do with the coat once he's wrenched it from you. An army of waiters hovers to convey further the required from-bygone-days opulence. This is not helped by the fact that one of them has got terrible BO, another has to go back into the kitchen to ask what the soup of the day is and a third came up to us when we were pausing not even halfway through the main course (admittedly struggling) and made to clear the plates saying, 'Now, have you had sufficient?'
A fatly curling staircase leads you up- stairs to the restaurant. The decor is a cross between a swollen, vulgarised Eileen Gray and swimming-club chic. There's an atrium, natch, but it is beautiful. What they should have put here is a brisk, lively brasserie, somewhere between the Caprice and Bibendum. Instead, one is assaulted by pomposity, pretension and poor cook- ing. Admittedly the night I went the atmosphere was blighted by the Harvey Nichols Christmas party. But the hotel should be grateful since there were only four other diners besides, including the two of us at my table.
One of the most irritating aspects of the menu is the obsessive use of ellipses. Thus you have 'A PATE OF SMOKED SALMON . . . served in a parmesan choux pastry swan on a pool of tarragon vinaigrette'; 'NEW ZEALAND FRUITS WITH FEIJOA SOR- BET. . . upon a rainbow of fruit-coulis', and so on. I resisted both those (easy enough to understand) though my eventual choice proved unrewarding. The seafood minestrone ('. . a medley of seafoods with florets of vegetables in tomato broth') showed, in my view, that Mr Gregory simply has no feel for food. The pool of thick tomato soup the consistency of ketch- up had no place to be anywhere near the fish that was plonked in the middle of it. This was a misconception in terms of taste and texture. The other starter, a lamb kidney tartlet in a 'rosemary hollandaise', was a better idea, but ill-executed: the pastry was among the worst I have ever eaten, rock-hard and knife- and mouth- resistant, the kidney was cut in half, not sliced, and didn't adhere to the pastry, and the rosemary hollandaise was a smearing of yellow stuff with a few green needles lying in it. With the main courses I went for the more obviously antipodean dishes. This involved trying carpetbag steak by another name, that is, oyster-stuffed steak, Austra- lia's supposed contribution to culinary culture, and chicken rangitoto, `. . . sup- reme of chicken filled with rock-lobster mousse, topped with roasted hazelnuts and glazed with a swiss herb butter'. The steak itself was rich and gamy, but the sauce it sat in was an oversalted, over-reduced Bovril-like glue; the chicken was not a success, the whole badly devised, the lobster mousse watery and the sauce it sat in seemed the same oversalted, over- reduced Bovril-like glue.
The chef did not even manage to redeem himself with the puddings: the creme bru- lde ('. . . with wild berries. Totally deca- dent!') had a gritty texture and cornfloury taste, the chilled apple crêpe turned out to be an icy triangular wedge of apple lined with a strip of pancake. Drinks are better: the vodka martini was better than you often get and the New Zealand chardonnay (£3) had a good crisp green taste to it.
The bill for two of us came to £70. It is lamentable that that is what good food can cost in restaurants now, but it is prepost- rous to pay it for bad food.
Number 17 Sloane Street at The Chelsea Hotel, 235 4377
Nigella Lawson
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