Laurent at Café Royal, 68 Regent Street, London W1B 4DY (020 7406 3310). Meal for two, including drinks and service, £225
We were three forkfuls into what they called a Caesar salad when we started Googling “kale poisoning”. Turns out that, as with any foodstuff, you have to eat absurd amounts before you experience ill effects. That, however, doesn’t deal with the possibility of dying from boredom. The kale Caesar served by Laurent at Café Royal is vast. It didn’t matter how much we forked away; it was all still there. We peered at it. Was it actually increasing in volume? Were the fronds of chopped kale springing up the more we took away? It should also be said that the application of tiny croutons and a bit of anchovy does not a Caesar salad make. It was bitter and sour and relentless. It looked like a salad bowl designed for a ruminant with four stomachs.
The other starter, described as a set savoury custard, looked like it had already been through a ruminant. I cut open the puck’s thin filo shell to reveal something akin to washed-out scrambled egg with bright pink bits of flabby prosciutto, as if someone had accidentally sliced their finger into it and decided not to say a word.
It was not what I was hoping for; this sort of thing never is. The Laurent of the title is the French chef Laurent Tourondel, who made his reputation in New York by noting that if he put the word “Bistro” before his name and then just used his initials, he had “BLT”, a brilliant calling card in America. Because who doesn’t like a BLT? During the noughties he opened a series of restaurants – BLT Steak, BLT Prime, BLT Burger – which prospered and rightly so. They were exactly the kind of buzzy urban brasserie you want from New York. They elevated the basics – the steak, the burger – to a certain decadent greatness, and then accessorised them through sauces. He’s a French chef who knows how to do sauces. He did a lot of them. When people asked me for a mid-range restaurant recommendation in New York I sent them to a BLT. They always came back purring.
Eventually he fell out with his business partner, apparently fearing he was turning too much into a brand. Better that, than turning into a laughing stock. The whole twisted, overworked, underthought proposition at the Café Royal is bizarre. First there’s the space. The main dining room has a back-lit bar, cold marble tables to freeze your forearms on and a mirrored ceiling so you can watch yourself spending ludicrous sums on a terrible night out. Outside the room, there’s another seating area around a first-floor gallery. It’s social Siberia, forever empty. It’s the sort of space arguing couples would slip away into for an uninterrupted row before deciding who gets custody of the cat. If you’re ever unlucky enough to be seated there, you’ll think it’s because they didn’t like the look of your shoes or they spotted that you live in Nuneaton.
Wherever you end up, the weirdness of the menu will make you blink and gawp. On the far left is a list of sushi and sashimi. It reminds me of Moscow, circa 2006, when the oligarchs partied and every restaurant – Italian, French, Greek – had to have a sushi menu, because it meant class and bling. Perhaps that’s what London has become – a Poundland version of Moscow in its kleptocratic pomp. We try the “spicy and crispy” shrimp sushi, six pieces for £16. The battered shrimps, perched atop uramaki rolls of avocado and tuna, are soggy.
After that what you really want is leek and potato soup. Yes, really. Imagine the brainstorming session which came up with that notion: “What we need is a menu proposition that’s part Lower East Side Manhattan Japanese canteen and part garden centre café in Weston-super-Mare.” Alternatively, there’s the pasture land of the kale Caesar or the weirdness of that split cheesy custard. Starters are all in the mid-teens. Head is mostly in hands.
Most of the mains are grilled meat or fish. A 250g sirloin all the way from the American Pacific Northwest is priced at a dizzying £42. Trainspotter moment: that’s £16.80 per 100g, as against £13.33 per 100g for an equivalent USDA steak at the hardly cheap 34 Mayfair restaurant. At the Café Royal, 100g of A4 grade wagyu sirloin is £75. At 34 it’s £42.50 per 100g for the better-quality A5. If you’re going to put stupid prices on your menu, it’s always worth researching the competition.
From the short list of mains comes a slow-cooked wagyu beef short rib for £42. Wagyu is prized for its fat marbling and I’ve always claimed a taste for fat. It’s where the flavour is. Rub me with dripping and call me Alice and so on. This, I could not even begin to finish. In the mouth, the strands of meat dissolved into hot, tongue-coating grease. If it was too much for me, it will be too much for you.
Was anything good? Yes, because something always slips through, doesn’t it? The chips were good, as they should be for a fiver, and so was the spatchcocked poussin “diablo”. It wasn’t especially diabolical; there was no heat or spice but the skin was crisp and salty, and pleasingly sour. That tiny chicken is £26. We could have had much the same food at Nando’s, for less than half the price, and without the side order of self-disgust or the ache of endless eye-rolling.
The most shameful pricing is the £14 for a square of soft meringue, with wild strawberries which are spectacularly ordinary. A milk chocolate and peanut dessert is better. They manage to deaden its pleasures by bringing with the bill chocolate caramel wafers that are spectacularly salty. It stops me looking at the damage for a moment.
Laurent at Café Royal has a wine list that includes two pages of champagnes that no one in their right mind would ever order. The cheapest bottle of wine is £36. One of those and an £11 glass of rosé each and suddenly we’re looking at nearly £250. Once more I find myself scratching my head. What were they thinking? Who is this for? And what would spicy tuna followed by leek and potato soup taste like? Maybe it’s a taste sensation. Or perhaps not. I went because I have a long-term interest in the chef. I can’t for the life of me imagine why anyone else will ever go there.
News bites
The beautiful Art Deco sweep of the Midland Hotel on Morecambe’s seafront was lovingly restored a few years ago. It’s a grand space. Wisely, however, they’ve not overreached with the food offering. The Sun Terrace Restaurant serves a solid, reliable menu of brasserie classics: roast scallops with pea purée or Morecambe Bay shrimps with rye toast, followed by roast rump and braised belly of lamb with a marjoram sauce. Book early enough for the spectacular sunset (englishlakes.co.uk).
It’s all about the chippies in Edinburgh. Roy Brett, chef of the very lovely Ondine on George IV Bridge, recently opened the Fishmarket at Newhaven, with a menu of oysters, chowder and ‘proper fish and chips’. Now the Italian restaurant group Vittoria has announced plans for a 270-cover fish and chip shop inside a former church on Edinburgh’s Victoria Street.
Advance nerdery alert: 16 October sees the publication of the Noma Guide to Fermentation by René Redzepi and David Zilber. According to food science guru Harold McGee it’s a ‘superb introduction to the practicalities and pleasures of cooking with microbes’.
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or follow him on Twitter @jayrayner1
