7 St John Street, London EC1 (020 7253 8786)
Meal for two, including wine and service, £70
My instinct is to tell you nothing about the main courses we were served at Vinoteca or, to put it in more prosaic language, to lie to you. I want you to think as much of the place as I now do and I know that if I mention the small matter of three really lousy platefuls of food - not bad as in, hmm, that was unimpressive, but bad as in, please God don't make me put any more of that in my mouth - you will be hard pushed to believe me. Still, I know you are smart people and that you are not about to be conned by a partial description. So just know this: a restaurant can be far better than its weakest link, and such is the case with Vinoteca.
In truth it is much more than just a restaurant and also, perhaps, a little less. A quarter of the premises is a wine shop. Every bottle - and the stock is extensive and imaginative - carries both tasting notes and two prices. The first is the amount you pay to take that bottle away. The second is what you pay to drink in. This means that, even allowing for the mark-up from wholesale to retail, the restaurant mark-up here is completely naked. And very reasonable. The standard in London is for 300 per cent plus, at the lower reaches of the list. Here, almost everything is simply doubled or less, increasingly so at the top end. Thus a bottle of something big, exclusive and Italian that will cost £90 to take home will here cost £120 to drink in (whereas in many other London places it could easily be flogged at £250).
That fascination - obsession? - with wine is carried across the whole venture. There is a 20-strong changing list of wines by the glass, which starts at £2.95, plus scribbled announcements about specials and mixed cases to buy. Then there is the menu, with a suggested wine pairing with each dish. It indicates this is a wine-led business which happens to do food, rather than the other way round, and the look of Vinoteca backs that up. It is the sort of 'urban rustic' that fits very well here in Smithfield: bare wood floors and tables, high white walls with antique Parisian posters and a big bar.
In these circumstances the food is better than it needs to be, and reasonably priced, too, with starters at £6 and mains at around £11. A five-bird terrine, mined with chunks of silky foie gras, was bold and flavoursome and came with a punchy spiced pear chutney. The tomatoes in the classic Tuscan bread salad, panzanella, were striking for tasting of something, and there was a ripe cure to the thick-cut smoked salmon, only let down by an underdressed but still pleasant shaved fennel and orange salad. The star was a massive mouth-filling coconut and lemongrass soup.
And then to those mains, which arrived like a loud fart at a happy wedding. Slices of bavette steak which should have been medium rare were cooked to the grey of a winter's sky and, in any case, overwhelmed by a medicinal shallot and green peppercorn butter. Ravioli had a chalky, salty filling that tasted only momentarily of the advertised taleggio and ricotta and not at all of the butternut squash. And the pork ribs, that night's special, were over-seasoned and cloying. Best of the lot was my fussy salad of spatchcock quail, spinach, morcilla (Spanish blood sausage) pine nuts and spiced red plums. It is intriguing that a kitchen which produced such great starters (and such great puddings) could also send out such ill-judged mains.
Still, there was an impeccable creme brulee to make up for it, and a moist, dense almond tart and an opaque blackcurrant and port jelly, which was an explosion of dark fruits served with clotted cream and crisp sugared shortbread. Alongside all this we drank, oh, a whole bunch of things. There was a white Austrian which, as the tasting notes promised, was 'light with bags of flavour'. There was a huge Tempranillo, for just £2.95, and something spicy from Corvina. There was a glass of Chateau Fayau, which was sweet, sticky and bright to go with the terrine, a bold 'hand-harvested' rosé to go with my salad and, to finish, a crisp, refreshing Manzanilla. At the end we all agreed we could imagine coming back here a lot and ordering just starters and puddings, or better still, one of the large plates of cheese and then rampaging through the list of big reds to go with it. In short, Vinoteca is such a good idea, and such a nice place, that we were able to forgive it anything, even the cruel incineration of the beef.
