If only some restaurant conceptualists gave the same amount of thought to their restaurants as they do to their lavatories, eating out would be a vastly more entertaining and enjoyable experience.
Tuscan Steak is the second dining experience to be had at American wunder hotel showman Ian Schrager's newish gaff, St Martin's Lane. I reviewed the other, Asia di Cuba, some months back with a mixture of wonderment (at the prices) and pleasure (at the Philippe Starck froufrou folie de thétre design and the fact that the food wasn't as bad as I had expected). You might think that I was tempting fate to come back for a second bite at the St Martin's cherry, as it were. Indeed, it was tempting fate. And, do you know, fate just couldn't resist.
Back to the lavvies for a moment. I'm not sure about the ladies, but the gents was a pleasure to visit - suave, smooth, soothing to the eye, and seductively utilitarian, a wonderful example of the unity of form and function. The dining room, meanwhile, certainly had the function part sorted, but is sadly lacking in the suave, smooth, soothing and pleasing to the eye business. It had more of the stripped-down sternness of the canteen of one of our more successful architectural practices about it - which, I suppose, makes a kind of sense by way of contrast with the camp froth of Asia di Cuba.
The thing about canteens, however, as I understand them, is that the food is subsidised for the benefit of the consumers. Tuscan Steak seems to operate on the opposite principle. This may be because the workers lunching there that day seemed to have been taken exclusively from the stripped-down, modish Stakhavonites of advertising and associated meejah. Whatever the reason, it was the first time that I, or indeed Porthos, Aramis or Athos - all of whom have degrees with honours in eating - had ever seen steak on the menu at £65 a helping. As Athos said, "You can buy a cow for that in Wales." Come to that, it's also a long time since I came across a wine list with no wines for less than £20, aside from those in the wine-by-the-glass section.
As we were digesting the financial implications of the £65 steak, our charming waiter - who bore an uncanny and disturbing resemblance to the young AA Gill, a man of Dorian Gray-like youthfulness himself and the restaurant and TV critic of the Sunday Times - explained that the servings were intended for one and a half people, were served in the order that the kitchen thought that they were ready and that we shouldn't order too much.
As Porthos is the size of one and half men, this instruction caused a raised eyebrow. It raised rather more than that as we struggled to order. Did you ever have to do those questions in maths exams that went along the lines of: "If eight men can dig a trench five metres long by three metres wide by two metres deep in two hours, how long will it take six and a half men to dig one eight metres long by two metres wide by four deep?" Well, that's child's play compared to working out how to divide one and a half among four - or four and a half, to count Porthos properly. Or should it be two? Or how about one? That is assuming, of course, that one and a half people want to eat the same dish. Which we didn't. Have you ever heard of anything so richly, ripely, transparently bonkers? It will lead to broken friendships and blood on the carpet, mark my words.
Rather than fall out over anything so silly, we did what every right-thinking person would do under the circumstances, and ordered for ourselves. So we ended up with, to start, the "Tuscan Steak antipasto plate", Friuli basil soup, Parma ham with figs and marinated silver anchovies, linguini with white clam sauce, and then the cheaper of the two T-bones on offer (sadly, the £65 blockbuster - "American USDA Prime" - was not available because they hadn't yet been licensed to import it, or so the AA Gill doppelgänger told us), a veal chop with porcini and Marsala sauce, grilled fillet steak with a Gorgonzola topping and "Tuscan house salad".
This sequence comprises a restaurant reviewer's dream. To list the inadequacies of each dish would take up all of this week's space, and next week's as well. The antipasti were Arctic from the chiller cabinet and reminded me irresistibly of the buffet section during Italian Week at the Grand Hotel, Leeds, circa 1970. It included salami of that iridescent pink favoured by the Germans, rather than the more natural, darker burgundy of, say, Milanese salami. The soup appeared to have been made with industrial stock. The linguini had that dry, dense, rubbery quality that comes from reheating. The inclusion of anchovies with the prosciutto produced one of the most memorably mismatched combinations that I have ever encountered. The fillet steak was tough, which is something of an achievement, and came capped with a thatch the same colour, consistency and flavour as Astroturf. The house salad featured many of the ingredients in the antipasto plate, but with the addition of limp green bits.
The two marginally acceptable dishes in terms of edibility were the steak (Aberdeen Angus, hung for 28 days, said the menu) and the veal chop. Neither exactly lit up the universe, and what little charm they did possess was rather dished by the extravagance of their pricing - £40 in the case of the steak, £22.50 for the veal - and by the fact that the steak was almost gelid in its lack of heat. We had a rocket salad and a helping of spinach, too.
The injunction not to over-order proved absolutely correct - but not on the grounds originally suggested. We simply couldn't face finishing most of the dishes in the interests of sanity. We drank two bottles of red wine, which came to a total of £60, some water and a coffee apiece. The bill was £253, including service. I'll leave you to guess what I thought of that.
The portion control is cock-eyed, condescending and appears to have been devised to cause maximum confusion to would-be diners. The food is a kind of dumb show version of Italian food, with the emphasis on the dumb. The quality of the food preparation was desultory to the point of constituting dereliction of duty. The pricing is so predatory as to amount to brigandage. It's difficult to know what the point of Tuscan Steak actually is, except to part people from their money as expeditiously as possible.
