The Philip Owens Dining Room upstairs at the Corney & Barrow wine bar in London's West End talks a good game. Normally I avoid these sorts of places. They're always full of overstressed office workers plotting to have raucous sex at orgies to which I will never be invited. But the new restaurant's promotional literature was enticing. Philip Owens, a chef who has been around the London jumps, has been brought in to upgrade the catering side of the old wine merchants' retail business, and he claims to be doing so through a menu built on organic ingredients, British classics and slow-cooked food. It is the kind of thing I - and to be a touch schoolmarmish for a moment - you should be interested in.
But there's no point getting excited about your ingredients if you are then going to bugger them up and overcharge for them. On a Friday night the noise from the bacchanalia in the wine bar below filled the sleek, downlit dining room like a bad smell. You couldn't escape it. Initially we were offered the two nastiest tables in the room, but managed to bag ourselves something a bit better by the windows. The menu is short and only classically British in the way Sven Goran Eriksson is classically British, which is to say not at all.
For her starter my long-suffering wife Pat chose seared scallops with air-dried Woodhall ham. It was an awful lot of very salty ham and not much scallop for £9.50. Indeed, the four or five scallops were so slender they looked as if they were just two fat scallops, each of which had been sliced in two. I began with gravlax, which came with what was described as a spring-onion pancake. The salmon was very good: a strong, deep cure and not too cold. But the pancake, of the thick, spongy potato variety, tasted as if it had come from a packet, and not recently, which must be difficult to achieve in a restaurant kitchen. It was also completely superfluous.
Pat's main course was a disaster: a chicken breast stuffed with mint, a flavour combination which should go in the file marked Very Very Bad Ideas. It didn't help that the chicken was overcooked. Or that it was served with a dense red-wine reduction which she said 'tasted of Marmite'. This was bad cooking of the first order. My pot-roasted shoulder of lamb hadn't stayed in the pot long enough. Save a pillow of mash on her plate and a (pretty good) celeriac dauphinoise on mine, there were no vegetables. We had not been told they had to be ordered separately. At £3.50 each for green beans and courgette fritters, it brought the price of these dismal main courses to £17 for the chicken and £16 for the lamb. And, of course, the vegetables arrived late.
As did the wine. One of the good things about Corney & Barrow is that they serve 60 wines by the glass. One of the bad things is that the waitress forgot to bring me the glass of Crozes Hermitage I had ordered to go with the lamb, despite much pleading, until halfway through the main course. Then she announced it was something else entirely.
Finally, we shared a bread-and-butter pudding, which had a caramelised surface but was cold in the middle. It gave the impression of having been plated up way in advance and then heated by the application of a blow torch. And the bill for this risible meal, including just two large glasses of wine and a glass of port for me: a shade under £90. And restaurateurs wonder why the punters think eating out is overpriced.
