Bibendum, Michelin House, 81 Fulham Road, London SW3 (020 7581 5817) MEAL
Meal for two, including wine and service, £150
The great French chef Fernand Point of La Pyramide described success as 'the sum of a lot of small things done correctly'. As my dinner at Bibendum proved, failure is equally the sum of a bunch of small things done badly. It wasn't meant to be this way, and neither was this review. Bibendum, which was launched by Terence Conran, the late publishing magnate Paul Hamlyn and its founding chef, the great Simon Hopkinson, on 17 November 1987, has now been trading from its landmark building on London's Fulham Road for 20 years, and I went there to wish it a happy birthday. Two decades is an aeon in the restaurant business, and mere survival deserves to be celebrated.
The problem is that Bibendum wants to do more than survive. It wants to be regarded as the best in its class. Twenty years ago, when it opened, that was a simpler proposition. Back then Bibendum was notable for its nose-bleeding prices. There were other expensive restaurants in London, of course, but generally, if you paid big money you got complexity. Battalions of cooks would do lots of fiddly stuff to your dinner. Bibendum was different because it charged big bucks for simplicity, for a particular brand of high-class dinner-party food. Think snails in garlic butter or steak tartare, oysters on the half shell and fish soup, roast chicken with tarragon, steak au poivre or fish and chips. Anybody who, like me, knows and adores Simon Hopkinson's food writing will recognise the virtues of simplicity represented here. These are classic dishes which, when done well, simply cannot be beaten.
The problem is that, with simplicity, there is nowhere to hide. You have to do everything perfectly, particularly when you are charging - gulp - £10.50 for fish soup, £19.50 for snails, £16.50 for fish and chips, and £24.50 for steak au poivre. Side dishes - ranging from £3.75 to £4.75 - are entirely extra.
Let me, though, talk about the good stuff. During a previous meal I had eaten the snails and they were both the size of babies' fists and served so hot the garlic butter was still bubbling. My starter this time, a tarte fine aux cepes, was a golden square of pastry crisped with Parmesan and laid with a field's worth of mushrooms. It was as good a use for these gorgeous fungi as you are likely to find. The steak au poivre, which has been on the menu since day one and is made to the recipe Hopkinson learnt at La Normandie in Birtle in the Seventies, is an exemplar of the dish, the crust butch and spicy, the jus light but potent.
The room has a pleasing buzz and the stained-glass Michelin-man images and the motoring memorabilia make it clear this is a joint that does not take itself too seriously. You come here to eat, not to worship. There were good olives on the table. We ate them. We did not worship them.
But none of this justifies the £150 bill (including one bottle of Cotes du Rhone from the house list). For example, the room may have a pleasing buzz, but when you sit down you discover this is because too many tables have been crammed into it. They are so close together that when a waiter stood between them, serving our neighbours, and bent over, he all but dipped his arse in our condiments. Olives may have been on the table but bread wasn't. It didn't arrive until after the main courses and was a dry, listless affair which had seen better days, perhaps a few of them. A similar lack of urgency was obvious in the taking of dessert orders, causing me to abandon my original choice - a chocolate pithivier advertised as taking 20 minutes - because there was no longer enough time.
But the real issue was one poor dish, which turned up twice. The fish soup has also been on the menu since the beginning, but I find it impossible to believe it was always like this. A good fish soup should taste, well, of fish. This was dark and thin and had a peculiar, meaty flavour that recalled Bovril. 'If you told me this was oxtail I wouldn't argue,' said my companion, and nor would I. It was not good oxtail, either. There was something rough and intrusive about it. As indeed there was when it - or its near cousin - turned up further reduced and thickened as the 'bouillabaisse' sauce surrounding a fillet of accurately cooked sea trout. Matters weren't helped by a side order of green beans served in a such a miserly portion we wondered if someone hadn't nicked a few on the way to our table. Two lonely and underseasoned grilled field mushrooms for £4.75 looked like nothing less than scalping. The creme in a creme brulee was fine, though the topping was too thick and a little burnt. A rich baked chocolate and ginger mousse cake was better.
But even that could not dislodge the nasty taste in the mouth this meal left. True, Hopkinson has not cooked at Bibendum for a decade, but he keeps an eye on the place, and the brigade is now led by Matthew Harris, who was one of the original cooks. The real problem is there are a bunch of places now doing much more cheaply what Bibendum does so expensively: there's Galvin and Racine and Arbutus and La Petite Maison. Perhaps the place was having an off night. Unfortunately, at £150 for two, you simply aren't allowed one of those, no matter how long you've been open.
