89 Turnmill Street, London EC1 (020 7065 6800). Meal for two, including drinks and service, £120
Good restaurants leave you with memories. Bad ones make you fall back on the memories of the good ones. And so it is that I sit in Redhook in Clerkenwell, recalling what a great steak and seafood restaurant should be, and knowing deep in my bowels – where tonight's meal is not headed anywhere like quickly enough – that this isn't one of them. It looks right, in a solid Manhattan Meatpacking District sort of way: bare brick walls, booths with dark leather benches, high ceilings and low lights. It would also be a lurch into hyperbole to describe most of the food as actively bad. But it isn't what it claims to be. If there was a piece of technology of the sort used in The X Factor to make flat singers pitch perfect, which could be applied to restaurants, Redhook would be an ideal subject. The cooking here is a blurred approximation of the real thing.
Take Oysters Rockefeller, the rocks topped with a mixture of spinach, cheese and breadcrumbs. The topping needs to have texture, the individual ingredients not overly ground down, or it becomes, as here, a salty slurry. Giant grilled prawns had been split down the back to remove the gut, but the job was unfinished, so there was still a black line of what the prawns last had for dinner. Three scallops had not been seared properly, though the cubes of pork belly were certainly crisp enough.
It was the steaks that were the real problem. If you are going to run a steak house, serve proper bloody steaks cut to proper sizes. The 300gm ribeye was a nice enough piece of meat but cut far too thin. And it would have helped if they'd brought the shallot and garlic butter I'd ordered rather than the claggy peppercorn sauce I didn't. More depressing still was the New York strip which should be, as the name suggests, a 2in-thick strip of meat. This was just a small, flat sirloin. The New York strip comes from the sirloin, but it is not the same thing.
Presumably the team behind Redhook has eaten in the New York version of what they are trying to do. So why have they got it so wrong? Desserts were actively awful, the low point being a banana tarte tatin of floppy, undercooked pastry that tasted only of burnt sugar. It should have gone straight from kitchen to bin without troubling us.
Service by our sweet, enthusiastic waitress was without fault. It was when the bill was handed over to a male member of staff that things fell apart. Generally when people have problems with the bill, it is about getting things taken off that they didn't have; with me it was about getting things put on that I did – a blatant attempt to make the place look cheaper than it actually is. I had to send the bill back three times. Clumsy, unnecessary, and a waste of my time. Much like Redhook itself.
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or visit theguardian.com/profile/jayrayner for all his reviews in one place
