Telephone: 020 7928 5533
Address: Neat Brasserie, Second Floor, Oxo Tower Wharf, Bargehouse Street, London SE1.
Lunch for two, including wine and service, £90.
At low tide the grey, silted banks of the River Thames can look like the kind of place where you would expect to find a corpse. Occasionally they are. All rivers give up their secrets given time, and London's river is no exception. If ever a dead body should happen to wash up on to the stretch of shore just below the windows of Neat Brasserie, I doubt very much whether the diners would notice. They would be too absorbed by the rather fabulous food on their plates.
Neat Brasserie is one half of a major enterprise by Richard Neat, who, last year, became the first British chef to win a Michelin star working in France at his restaurant in Cannes. His new place, which occupies the second floor of the Oxo Tower on London's South Bank, is therefore something of a homecoming. Certainly, Neat has shown no desire to slip back into London quietly, because this is a thoroughly ambitious project. As well as the brasserie, which can seat 140, there is a gastronomic restaurant seating 100.
I have already eaten in the restaurant and it is, as I expected it would be, exceptionally good in a no-holds-barred, full-on, rich French way. Flavours are intense. Combinations are complex. Presentation is ornate. Neat, who was once the youngest chef in Britain to hold two Michelin stars, can cook.
I was sceptical, however, as to whether he could really pull off a large brasserie. To do it well, you have to believe in the idea and understand it rather than simply see it as an add-on. Up to now almost the entirety of Neat's career has been spent in gastronomic restaurants with relatively small numbers of covers. In an interview for this magazine earlier this year, he proclaimed that, as becomes a talented chef, he is not interested in simplicity. 'I want to do intricate food,' he said. At the same time he professed a desire for the brasserie to be a rough-and-ready place where mates could settle down for good grub, solidly cooked.
There is no doubting the quality of the cooking. It is extremely assured. But in the battle between intricate and rough and ready, I think it is Neat's tendency towards the former which has won out, both in terms of complexity and pricing. There is space here for a loosening of the corsets to set up a greater distinction between what is happening on the two sides of the Neat operation. It may also help to up the numbers. While the restaurant has been full to capacity since the reviews started coming in, the brasserie - a light and elegant space of blond-wood floors, rust-coloured walls and purple-leather banquettes with lovely views of the water - was hardly bulging at the seams the lunchtime we were there.
The lack of difference between the two sides was best summed up by the starter ordered by my companion Allan. He had deep-fried oysters in a disgracefully crisp batter laid over petal-shaped puddles of a pungent rouille and a red wine sauce. It is an extremely accomplished dish, so much so that a smaller version is served next door in the restaurant as an amuse-gueules. My starter, a duck Caesar salad with a sardine vinaigrette, was a smart piece of assembly. The slices of perfectly rendered duck were particularly tender.
For his main course, Allan continued with fish and had what was described as a calamari tower with sauce gribiche. Rather than mingy rings, these were chunks of squid in a terrifically light batter. The fish was tender from end to end. I went for that great Alsatian dish, choucroute - sauerkraut with cuts of ham hock, belly pork and sausage - which I have never eaten outside France because, frankly, I have never trusted a non-French kitchen to get it right. This was perfect: the cabbage was sharp and crisp; the meat was salty and lush. Neither of us could manage pudding, though we did admire the return of that old 70s favourite, the sweet trolley, which is packed full of wonderful old stagers like apple flan and lemon meringue tart.
Although what we ate really was very good indeed, the menu could do with a bit more of the no-frills approach of that sweet trolley. There is very little of the utilitarian simplicity that you would find on the menu in one of the great Parisian brasseries such as La Coupole or Bofinger. There, as well as the more hefty dishes, you can always get the simple soups, salads and grills that hold down a brasserie menu and define its informality.
And then there is the curious question of price. At present it costs just as much (if not a little more) to eat three courses from the carte in the brasserie as it does to eat lunch in the gastronomic restaurant next door, where three courses at lunchtime is priced at a very reasonable £29.
If you are into Neat's brand of very classy food, that is, without doubt, the better deal right now. (In the evening the restaurant menu rises to £49.) Starters in the brasserie cost between £7.50 and £10. Main courses are between £13.50 and £21. Those prices could, like your critic, do with losing a little weight. That said, there is a set menu in the brasserie, with two choices at each course, priced at £16.95 for two courses and £19.95 for three. That really is not very much for cooking of this calibre.
Contact Jay Rayner on jay.rayner@observer.co.uk.
