Avenue, 7–9 St James's Street, London SW1 (020 7321 2111). Meal for two, including drinks and service, £150
St James's Street off London's Piccadilly is home to businesses selling absolutely nothing anybody could ever need. It is a place only of wants. There are shops selling bespoke shoes and hats, guns and fine wines, yachts and Havana cigars. It is now also home to a restaurant that not only does nobody need (for who actively needs a restaurant?), it is a restaurant I can't quite imagine anybody really wanting.
It wasn't always so. Avenue was originally opened in December 1995, by a banker called Chris Bodker. His company, Moving Image Restaurants, had upwards of 120 investors, mostly friends from Bodker's city days, and so Avenue was full of chaps in suits who liked to wander around town talking about the restaurant they owned. Nobody recalls it for the food. (Literally. Though I can find references to a modern British menu, I couldn't find a single person who remembered anything they ever ate there.) Instead it was remembered for its clean, minimalist lines, its shiny-glass glamour and tinkle. It was credited with bringing a bit of Manhattan glitz to St James's.
Now it has been relaunched by current owners D&D London, the successor to Conran restaurants, and they have taken the whole New York thing to its logical conclusion. They've taken the dreary, omnipresent fetish for dirty Americana, wiped its arse, and dressed it up for chaps in shirts by Turnbull & Asser and gals in Manolos. It is, they say, their loving homage to the New York urban brasserie. It's just not an especially good one. Granted it looks the part, but then it already did. There are clots of modern art and big flashy modernist friezes as if they want to pretend they are really the Four Seasons on East 52nd.
Fixed to the ceiling is a massive installation of glasses hanging upside down, chandelier style, over a display of wine bottles so large they must have been at the growth hormones. I imagine the new restaurant manager despaired when they saw it for the first time – God help the poor sap who has to dust it. Avenue is trying to look like the kind of room that, in his novels, Tom Wolfe would have filled with octogenarian dames wearing sunglasses as big as hub caps.
It almost succeeds. And then the food arrives and all of a sudden the new Avenue feels like a seven-year-old girl trying to run in mummy's heels. They have a menu of dishes that New York restaurants do really, really well – and Avenue does not. What's more, many of their customers will be completely aware of this. Arguably, the dirty Americana boom has served an audience which had never tried the real thing. Those drawn to the plethora of relatively cheap joints knocking out burgers and pastrami sandwiches probably don't yet have the financial wherewithal to have visited the US to eat one in its natural habitat. Avenue costs an easy £150 for two – we managed that with one cocktail and one glass of wine each – and if you (or your company) are spending that sort of money it's much more likely that you have already been to New York.
In New York you can go to the glorious oyster bar at Grand Central Station and have a bowl of clam chowder for just under £4.50. At Avenue it is £9.50, and is thoroughly underwhelming. For all the clam meats, it is far more soup than the potato-heavy stew it should be. Mind you, I got the added bonus of a big chunk of shell. Which is nice. And that sums up the experience: a total lack of attention to detail.
A starter of good smoked salmon (as it should be for £12.50) comes with a sweet corn muffin that tastes not at all of the advertised horseradish. A béarnaise sauce to go with a steak arrives with a skin on top, a clear sign it was made and plated a good while before I had thought of eating it. The £27 steak from the famed Creekstone Ranch in the US describes itself as a New York Strip, but would be run out of its home town for being cut far too thin. After it had been run out of town everyone would gather at the city limits to point and laugh at it for having been cooked until there was barely a blush of pink at its centre. It is a long way off the medium rare I ask for. I do like the pastrami butter: butter whipped with smoked beef brisket is a good idea.
A perfectly cooked tranche of stone bass with spiced kale, hazelnuts and hazelnut butter makes an awful lot more sense. It is a sign the kitchen can get it right. But don't worry. There is always the lousy mac and cheese to let the side down again. The sauce is made with so much flour it has coagulated and can be sliced rather than spooned. It is supposed to be made with parmesan and blue cheese, but is a weird shade of orange. (The full David Dickinson, as it's known.) Hillybilly slaw gives no explanation for its name. Call me a sceptic but I somehow doubt the socially excluded communities of the American south ever made their coleslaw with "spice, yogurt and cilantro".
Warm sugared donut "holes" – small, round ones which could fit into the space in the middle – come with cream, raspberry jam and a whisky chocolate sauce made with Hershey bars. At which point I really did despair. Look! We're so American! We've even made a sauce from Hershey bars! What? From the very worst chocolate in the world? The stuff that tastes of sick? That really, really cheap chocolate? Oh, but it's, y'know, American, so it's right. From sea to shining sea and all that. No it isn't right. Hershey is never right.
The wine list majors on American vineyards and is priced for people who aren't paying for it out of their own pockets. The only affordable bottles come from the cheaper corners of France and the arse end of South America, where they brew it in stainless-steel vats like grain silos.
As to the service, my but there's an awful lot of it. Managers circulate around the room like basking sharks in a giant aquarium. Round and round they go, delivering clam chowder with lumps of shell in it, and nodding at the expense accounts. A lot of customers may well return for the buzz and clatter and proximity. I won't. You have a good day now.
Jay's news bites
If you crave American beef in more reliable surroundings, try 34, the restaurant off London's Grosvenor Square from the team behind the Ivy and Caprice. These people know how to grill a steak. Only Russian oligarchs would describe it as cheap, but you get your money's worth. There's a solid brasserie menu, including some of the smartest desserts in town, great cocktails and a little live jazz (34-restaurant.co.uk).
Marco Pierre-White, who looks nothing like me, has signed a deal to put his name to 50 new restaurants over the next five years. The deal, with the hotel development company Sanguine Hospitality – and they'll probably have to be - will start in Manchester next year. It's not clear why Manchester deserves this.
The great Northcote Manor in Lancashire opens a cookery school next month in a swish space separated by a glass wall from their recently renovated kitchens. It will be run by chef Michael Vanhese, formerly of Betty's, with some courses led by chef proprietor Nigel Howarth and his head chef Lisa Allen (northcote.com)
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or follow him on Twitter @jayrayner1
