Savini at Criterion, 224 Piccadilly, London W1J 9HP (020 7930 1459). Meal for two, including drinks and service: £200
The Criterion on London’s Piccadilly Circus is a space in search of a decent restaurant. Until recently it was owned by a bunch of Georgian businessmen who insisted not long ago that I correct my assertion on this page that it had gone out of business, until suddenly it was no longer trading. The kitchen burned sauces and served langoustine without first scooping out the poo. Before that Marco Pierre White had it, and did his thrillingly mediocre take on chicken Kiev.
For me its glory days were in the late 1980s when it was a wine bar, with awful bottles at a fiver a pop. I was newly returned to London from university and could sit beneath Thomas Verity’s glorious neo-Byzantine gold tiled ceiling, first revealed in 1874, getting off my gourd on wine so rough it could take the top layer off the paintwork of a Mondeo. Happy days.
And now? It has been taken over by Savini of Milan, one of the grandest names in Italian grand café dining. At the end of the meal, as I stared back down the long, sparsely populated dining room, the thrum of Kind of Blue echoing off the marble – they play it on a loop – I didn’t feel angry about the outbreaks of clumsy cooking or the ludicrous prices. I felt wistful about an opportunity lost. The idea of a classic bit of Milan, here on this site in London, doing classic Italian things, is very attractive indeed. But too much of this operation just isn’t attractive at all. They make the junior waiters wear name badges, like they’re doing the breakfast service at a Premier Inn.
I’m not stupid. Given what’s happened to London’s economy, the rents here must be high enough to cause nose bleeds. Whoever had taken it on, it was always bound to be a pricey restaurant. But having a wine list with nothing below £35 a bottle is shameless. I asked our waiter about it, one of the senior ones without a name tag. He shrugged. This tells you all you need to know, but I’m tireless so I’ll tell you the rest.
From its days of marble flooring the whole place has now been carpeted, gutter to gutter as Dean Martin used to say. There are moody black and white photographs on the walls, including of Rome, where Savini isn’t located. At the front is a retail section flogging Savini-branded goods. Beyond that is a bar area, possibly its greatest contribution to London life, and then after that the first seating area. It includes booths which don’t work, which is to say the over-stuffed, cushion-strewn benches are too far apart. I am a tall man and I had to perch on the edge of my seat to reach the table. These things baffle me. Didn’t anybody involved with the restaurant simply try sitting down at the tables to see if they function?
The bread rolls are dry and tired. The butter is cold and hard. The mineral water is £5.25 a bottle. Some of the menu translations are a little odd. Does the steak tartare really come with “ancient” mustard? The best dishes are the pastas. The special, at a very special price of £22.95 which is never announced to us, is linguine with plump, bouncy prawns riding on the coat tails of fresh cherry tomatoes. It is precisely the kind of thing you hope a place like this will do well, all slurp and lipsmack and ahhh. Macaroni with crumbled sausage and cubes of potato is the denim-on-denim of the pasta world, a sustaining bowl of carbs squared. It’s a heavy-browed dish; comfort food for people who will never be discomfited by looking at the bill.
Two fillets of turbot are just overcooked, and come on a lonely dry plate with lumps of dry roasted purple potatoes, looking like pebbles, and chewy, trimmed artichoke hearts filled with ricotta. It needs some sort of sauce to introduce these lonely ingredients to each other. We have to ask for lemon. Savini’s take on osso bucco, served in the traditional manner with risotto Milanese, should be the one by which the rest of London’s Italian restaurants benchmark themselves. This is a great Milanese restaurant doing a great Milanese dish, at £34 a pop.
But it is only fine. The cut of veal shin should be right through the bone, so you can knock the soft jewel of marrow back into your risotto. This was cut from the end, so it is a meagre scoop of marrow. The endless sea of risotto is, in the end, merely cloying rather than luscious. Buttered spinach is good; it had clearly only been given the briefest of nods to a hot pan. Scalloped potatoes are clumsy and too thick. Pan-fried mushrooms take me back to the breakfast buffet at that Premier Inn.
And then dessert. The floridly described mango ricotta mousse in crispy orange waffle is a tuile boat back-filled with sweetened cream. It looks like the kind of thing served at an expensive wedding where most of the guests are a Pantone shade of self-tan orange. It is ostentatious without being thrilling. The price tag on the orange flambéed crêpes is so large, at £16.75, that we ask whether it is for two. No, just for one. Fair enough. That must mean a bit of table-side theatrics, with the clatter of shiny spoons and the leap of alcohol-boosted flames. I love that stuff.
Nope. A plate is slapped down. It carries leathery folded pancakes under a quickly solidifying orange syrup gloop, with the sheen of KY Jelly. We’ll just have to take their word for it on the whole flambé thing. Given the cost of pancake batter it is, I think, a contender for both worst and most overpriced dessert in London. Mournfully, I wander off to find the loos. Instead, I find another whole section of the restaurant with at least 40 covers, completely deserted, like some dusty forgotten extension to a now under-populated but once grand hotel.
And that’s the thing. It’s depressing. It’s unnecessary. They could be doing the thing. They could be filling the space with glamour and joy and thoughts of Sophia Loren. It could be a place in which to utter the words: “What the hell; hang the expense. It’s good.” Instead, they’re filling it with the words, “Will this do?” We drink two glasses of wine at £9 each, the cheapest possible, and run up a bill of £203.21. The Criterion is still in search of the restaurant it deserves.
Jay’s news bites
■ And so the go-to place in London for comforting but classy Italian food which will punish the wallet but do the thing remains Sartoria, with Francesco Mazzei at the stoves. His fregola, a toasted grain in a deep, soupy stew, with the very best seafood, is one of those dishes that will just make you sigh and sink back into the over-stuffed banquettes (sartoria-restaurant.co.uk).
■ The terrific Martin Blunos, much loved at Lettonie in Bath, has landed a new gig as head chef at the Talbot Inn, at Ripley, Surrey. His presence will be a boon to a county whose restaurants suffer more than most from the ‘London effect’ dragging diners up to the capital (thetalbotripley.com).
■ Interesting times in the fast-food business. In Washington DC a man broke into a branch of Five Guys, cooked himself a cheeseburger and left. In Minnesota, a prank caller convinced Burger King staff to smash all the windows at their restaurant because of a ‘dangerous build-up of gas’, and in Florida a man threw a live alligator into a branch of Wendy’s.
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or follow him on Twitter @jayrayner1
