Bord'eaux
Grosvenor House hotel, Park Lane, London W1 (020 7399 8460)
Meal for two, including wine and service, £120
I wish I had been at the meeting where they decided the name for this restaurant, if only so I could go around slapping people, shouting: 'Oi! No!' It's such a small thing, isn't it, that apostrophe between the 'Bord' and the 'eaux'. Apparently it is meant to suggest a balance between land and sea, or some such other rubbish. All it makes me think is that somebody has been seriously overthinking this. Bord'eaux - and that's the only time I will deign to type the name - is meant to be a Parisian-style brasserie serving rustic food. The problem is it's a Parisian-style brasserie serving rustic food in a glossy hotel on London's Park Lane, and it just doesn't pass. It's a transvestite with a heavy five o'clock shadow. It's William Hague in a baseball cap at the Notting Hill Carnival. It's just plain wrong.
Not that this is exactly surprising. 'Characterful' restaurants in bland hotel spaces can't help looking like a theme-park version of themselves, and that's what's happened here. Oh, they've got the stuff, all right. No expense has been spared to get the stuff: the slabs of ornate wood panelling, the antique tiled floor clearly shipped in from somewhere else, the engraved glass panelling and the brass rails. But the space is so vast, so echoey, that it ends up looking flat-pack and false. Once upon a time this was another restaurant entirely. (Nico Ladenis's dining room, as it happens). Some time in the future it will be another restaurant entirely again. And there's the irony. The Parisian brasserie is meant to stink of tradition and history, is meant to have deep roots that burrow down into the culinary soil. And yet this one looks like it's waiting to be blown away by whatever great idea the food and beverage manager of the Grosvenor House has next.
The only thing that's not wrong with it? The food. I ate a great lunch, just in the wrong room and at the wrong price. It's no surprise that everything was as it should be on the plate. Chef Ollie Couillaud has form, even if he does shift around a bit, from La Trompette to the Dorchester Grill to Tom's Kitchen and now to here. He knows what he's doing, and here it all is: fruits de mer, from £30 for two up to £70. Escargot and lobster mayonnaise, fish soup and chèvre salad, onglet and duck confit, and cassoulet and so on.
We shared a mid-range fruits de mer, at a very Park Lane £45. At that sort of price you want the dressed crab to be properly dressed, as in black tie, white gloves and a tiara. No such luck. Effort had gone into its preparation, though. The langoustine were of a reasonable size, and we appreciated the whelks and winkles and the pot of their own mayonnaise. Stare at the fruits de mer with tunnel vision and you might almost imagine you weren't in a bland hotel room on Park Lane. But you are.
It was with the main courses that the incongruity became most obvious. We were both big boys with dirty tastes so we ordered the offal. For him it was brochettes of duck heart and liver, which were cooked by someone who clearly knows that the inner, wobbly bits of animals need a delicate hand. No rubberiness here. I had the andouillette, that fabulous earthy sausage which tastes like a farmyard smells: all dung and livestock and slaughter. It's appalling and wonderful at the same time. This came with a powerful grain-mustard sauce, a pile of watercress and rough-cut chips. So here we were, eating peasant food, only doing so on a road lined with Ferrari showrooms. Both were £12.50. Don't even think about the mark-up.
The one down element of the meal was a gâteau Basque, a heavy pastry-clad flat pie enclosing a filling of cream and ground almonds. It looked like it was made by somebody's grandmother who everybody loves so much they haven't quite got the heart to tell her to stop. Much better was leche frita, squares of lemon custard fried so they are crisp on the outside, with a scoop of ice cream and a not oversweet hot chocolate sauce. It tasted illegal. If eating this meant being arrested, I would go quietly.
And that's the point. A nice-reading menu which translates well on to the plate. The problem is the table the plate is sitting on, the floor beneath the table and the ceiling above it and the view outside. Unlike that damned apostrophe, none of these are small things.
