BrianH
At the Start
Restaurants
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One is not amused
Take one over-ambitious chef, a gloomy dining room and a bizarre approach to classic seafood dishes, and you have a recipe for disaster ... Jay Rayner goes plate crazy
Sunday March 11, 2007
The Observer
Langtry's
21 Pont Street, Knightsbridge, London SW1
Tel: 020 7201 6619
Price: Meal for two including wine and service, £80
There was a funereal air to the deserted entrance hall at Langtry's. When I received my starter, I understood why. The whole place was in mourning for the wasted lives of the Morecambe Bay brown shrimps that had been sacrificed to make it.
Langtry's, part of the Cadogan Hotel, occupies what was once the Knightsbridge home of Lillie Langtry, actress and famed squeeze of Queen Victoria's eldest boy, and uses that as the cue for a menu of British dishes, among them the prawn cocktail. I hadn't had a good one in ages and I'm afraid I still haven't. For this was not any old prawn cocktail. This was 'Langtry's prawn cocktail', the 'signature dish' of their head chef Robert Lyon who, the website tells us, has a passion for creating 'interesting and innovative dishes'. Oh how I wish that he didn't.
What arrived was a highball glass piled with hot battered prawns, their delicate flavour mislaid in the deep-fat fryer. Underneath that was a cloyingly sweet marie rose sauce ice-cream - there are good reasons for not making ice-cream out of mayonnaise and tomato ketchup, not least politeness - then a layer of avocado cream, and finally, a plug of underpowered shellfish jelly. From this I can tell you Langtry's does indeed celebrate British food, but only in the way a murderer might dance upon its victim's grave.
I recognise the pressures that lie upon the shoulders of young chefs employed to make a splash in London's fraught restaurant market. They read about Heston Blumenthal's deconstructions and re-engineerings at the Fat Duck, and they think, 'I can do that too.' But the truth is, few of them can. I beg any young chef to ask themselves two questions before reinterpreting a classic dish: is their version an improvement on what went before? And does it, at the very least, make us look at the traditional version anew? If the answer to either of these is no, and with this prawn cocktail it is 'no' in pink neon letters 10ft high, then Please Don't Do It. (I'm also minded to ban chefs under a certain age from eating at the Fat Duck in case they get ideas they lack the skills to execute.)
The problem at Langtry's is not just lousy concepts, but inconsistency. A starter of beef tea - though we can call it beef consomme, what with it not being 1893 out there no more, guv - had a lovely intense depth of flavour. There was, however, nothing lovely about its toad-in-the-hole. Instead of sausages there was a fillet of pork crusted, for reasons which escape me, in almonds. The Yorkshire pudding was burnt around the edges, and dumped inside was Savoy cabbage with shards of bacon. All it made me think was how nice toad-in-the-hole is, and how nice this wasn't.
A stuffed pheasant leg in my main course was overdone, though slices of the breast and some creamed kale showed they can get other things right. At the end, the filling in a custard tart was pleasingly heavy on the nutmeg - though, because nothing at Langtry's seemed reliable, the pastry was stiff and heavy - and a rhubarb-ripple ice-cream lacked any tooth-sucking tartness.
All in all, a gloomy meal in a gloomy spot. It costs £21 for three courses, which is only good value if you lost your taste buds to a threshing machine. They have retained the original plaster features but painted them battleship grey and surrounded them with the sort of fake Rocco chairs, upholstered in primary colours, that Victoria Beckham might think classy. The surprisingly cheerful staff, given the lack of custom, seem to think that asking you how everything is when you are in mid-conversation is the same as good service. I have been criticised in the past for picking on staff who are, I am told, only doing their job. But I will make one observation. Letting a waiter out into the room with grim, lank, greasy hair slicked to his head suggests that nobody in management cares. It is not an aid to the digestion. Then again, at this restaurant, not much is.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
One is not amused
Take one over-ambitious chef, a gloomy dining room and a bizarre approach to classic seafood dishes, and you have a recipe for disaster ... Jay Rayner goes plate crazy
Sunday March 11, 2007
The Observer
Langtry's
21 Pont Street, Knightsbridge, London SW1
Tel: 020 7201 6619
Price: Meal for two including wine and service, £80
There was a funereal air to the deserted entrance hall at Langtry's. When I received my starter, I understood why. The whole place was in mourning for the wasted lives of the Morecambe Bay brown shrimps that had been sacrificed to make it.
Langtry's, part of the Cadogan Hotel, occupies what was once the Knightsbridge home of Lillie Langtry, actress and famed squeeze of Queen Victoria's eldest boy, and uses that as the cue for a menu of British dishes, among them the prawn cocktail. I hadn't had a good one in ages and I'm afraid I still haven't. For this was not any old prawn cocktail. This was 'Langtry's prawn cocktail', the 'signature dish' of their head chef Robert Lyon who, the website tells us, has a passion for creating 'interesting and innovative dishes'. Oh how I wish that he didn't.
What arrived was a highball glass piled with hot battered prawns, their delicate flavour mislaid in the deep-fat fryer. Underneath that was a cloyingly sweet marie rose sauce ice-cream - there are good reasons for not making ice-cream out of mayonnaise and tomato ketchup, not least politeness - then a layer of avocado cream, and finally, a plug of underpowered shellfish jelly. From this I can tell you Langtry's does indeed celebrate British food, but only in the way a murderer might dance upon its victim's grave.
I recognise the pressures that lie upon the shoulders of young chefs employed to make a splash in London's fraught restaurant market. They read about Heston Blumenthal's deconstructions and re-engineerings at the Fat Duck, and they think, 'I can do that too.' But the truth is, few of them can. I beg any young chef to ask themselves two questions before reinterpreting a classic dish: is their version an improvement on what went before? And does it, at the very least, make us look at the traditional version anew? If the answer to either of these is no, and with this prawn cocktail it is 'no' in pink neon letters 10ft high, then Please Don't Do It. (I'm also minded to ban chefs under a certain age from eating at the Fat Duck in case they get ideas they lack the skills to execute.)
The problem at Langtry's is not just lousy concepts, but inconsistency. A starter of beef tea - though we can call it beef consomme, what with it not being 1893 out there no more, guv - had a lovely intense depth of flavour. There was, however, nothing lovely about its toad-in-the-hole. Instead of sausages there was a fillet of pork crusted, for reasons which escape me, in almonds. The Yorkshire pudding was burnt around the edges, and dumped inside was Savoy cabbage with shards of bacon. All it made me think was how nice toad-in-the-hole is, and how nice this wasn't.
A stuffed pheasant leg in my main course was overdone, though slices of the breast and some creamed kale showed they can get other things right. At the end, the filling in a custard tart was pleasingly heavy on the nutmeg - though, because nothing at Langtry's seemed reliable, the pastry was stiff and heavy - and a rhubarb-ripple ice-cream lacked any tooth-sucking tartness.
All in all, a gloomy meal in a gloomy spot. It costs £21 for three courses, which is only good value if you lost your taste buds to a threshing machine. They have retained the original plaster features but painted them battleship grey and surrounded them with the sort of fake Rocco chairs, upholstered in primary colours, that Victoria Beckham might think classy. The surprisingly cheerful staff, given the lack of custom, seem to think that asking you how everything is when you are in mid-conversation is the same as good service. I have been criticised in the past for picking on staff who are, I am told, only doing their job. But I will make one observation. Letting a waiter out into the room with grim, lank, greasy hair slicked to his head suggests that nobody in management cares. It is not an aid to the digestion. Then again, at this restaurant, not much is.
