Automat, 33 Dover Street, London W1 (020 7499 3033)
Meal for two, including wine and service, £110
Restaurants which aim to recreate an experience available elsewhere have an advantage: they know what they want to be. They also have a disadvantage: when they don't achieve their goal, it's painfully obvious. Automat, which opened recently in London's Mayfair, wants to be an American brasserie. It wants to make you think about New York. And it did make me think of New York, but only in the sense that it bore absolutely no relation to it.
Yes, the space is nicely designed. There's a snug, woodlined cave at the front, and at the back an area tiled in black and white, with banquettes and an open kitchen, and a funky-looking communal table of brushed steel. I could imagine this restaurant being located somewhere around Union Square in Manhattan.
Until I met the waiters, drank the cocktails and tasted the food. Oh, and paid the bill. It feels like an American restaurant created by people who have only ever read about them in magazines. That isn't good enough, and certainly not at over £50 a head.
Many of us know what this sort of place should be like. I certainly know a meal shouldn't start with a waiter looking at your companion like he's speaking a rare medieval Chinese dialect when he asks for a martini made with Tanqueray gin, served 'very dry and very cold'.
Ask for one of those in New York and the waiter will reward your connoisseurship with a nod of approval. Here, you get the pantomime of the waiter retreating to the bar, to enter into negotiations with the barman before returning to point out what they had on the list. What we got, according to my friend Simon, who has drunk enough martinis in his time to fill a bath, was 'execrable'. The food was bland, second-rate and uninvolving. Yes, there was a lot of crab in the crab cake, but it had the sort of hard crust that Findus technicians fought for in the Seventies. The guacamole that accompanied it was so much mush. There was no garlic punch at all.
A soft-shell crab with lemon and parsley lacked citrus zing. Their burger, while medium-rare as requested, was entirely unmemorable.
Worst of all, symbolic of the sloppiness of this exercise, was the so-called New York sirloin steak. In the US they call this a New York strip, and it comes at least 2in thick so it can be given a fine, charred crust while retaining the pink within. This was a miserable half-incher, a dismal flop of meat which would be thrown in the cells overnight at JFK and violated by the prison guards before being deported if ever it tried to pass itself off as the genuine article in New York. I do not understand how restaurateurs who are setting up an American brasserie can serve such a pathetic cut of meat.
Most depressing was that the place was full - though, as Simon said, most of the Mayfair women looked like the sort who would enjoy their supper now and make sure it was reintroduced to the porcelain before bed. They had that echt bulimic tinge that's so very now in Knightsbridge and the Bromptons.
Or perhaps I'm just trying to understand why so many people would bother to eat in this ersatz palace when the food is so very dull. For the record, if you want a genuine American brasserie in London, go to Joe Allen on Exeter Street. They serve the best Caesar salad in town and the burger is right. Oh, and they know how to mix a martini.
