Museum Street, York (01904 619208). Meal for two, including drinks and service: £120
We all of us have stupid ideas from time to time. We all of us get it wrong. What matters is whether we spot the mistake and make amends. Which is what I told the judge, not that he seemed convinced. Where’s mercy when you need it, eh? Happily, I am less ruthless. I’m quick to give credit where it’s due. I note, for example, that a restaurant I once reviewed (I say reviewed – I mean butchered, skewered and turned slowly on a spit over guttering flames) has stopped putting peanut butter in with the chicken livers and Marmite in with the potatoes. They have seen the error of their ways. Or at least some of them. Good for them.
Not so, I’m afraid, the Star Inn The City, the £60-a-head York spin-off of chef Andrew Pern’s much-lauded Star Inn at Harome in North Yorkshire. When it opened a year ago, so-called rivals in the restaurant-reviewing lark mentioned things about the place that made me flinch and rock to and fro with my eyes closed while calling for Nursie. Knowing I already had negative thoughts without having even been there, I concluded it was better not to review. But then a year passed and I found myself in York with an evening to spare. I feel I should apologise to the restaurant for their bad luck in this regard.
For here it comes, the selection of breads – served in a flat cap, ’cos it’s a Yorkshire restaurant, right? And in Yorkshire everything with a pulse wears a flat cap. Always and forever. Yorkshire people slip out of the womb wearing them. Did they buy new flat caps for the purpose? Or were they secondhand? I search the rim for a greasy tide mark. And once you’ve had the thought you can’t help but wonder whose head might have been in your bread basket. It was an absurd and rather unpleasant idea when the restaurant opened – as a number of people said – and it remains so now.
As is a side dish listed as the “salad o’t day”. Look, I enjoy a joke as much as the next anxiety-ridden, sweaty, varicose, misanthropic bastard, but dialect gags like that aren’t funny. They’re a replacement for things that are funny, made by people who couldn’t think of something genuinely funny, and so strained at it like a chap who’s been on a low-fibre, high-animal-protein diet for a month.
These two small details – along with the aching wordplay of the establishment’s name – go towards making the greater case: that the Star Inn The City is, unfortunately, a really annoying restaurant. It’s a crying shame, because God knows York needs reasonable choices. Since the admirable J Baker’s closed, it has been perilously short of them. The conversion of the site, a wide and airy glass vault added to the side of one of York’s fine, hulking, ancient buildings, is attractive. And the notion of a good-food pub, coming in out of the countryside like this to the town, is admirable. There’s a repertoire of big-knuckled, earthy British-rustic dishes they could have called upon and sometimes they do – but only in name. Then they work them and overwork them, again and again.
Alarm bells start ringing with the menu. It’s one of those furiously busy wipe-clean affairs of the sort you’d find in a Brewers Fayre. It has punning section headings complete with exclamation marks, because otherwise you wouldn’t know they were being funny. Geddit? So there’s “Good Game, Good Game!” for the game section, because Bruce Forsyth was… em, er – no, not a clue. And there’s “On the sauce!” for the list of sauces. I think it’s a joke about being drunk. I wish I had been. Plus, it lists every single ingredient, who produced them, where, which direction the wind was blowing from on the day they were harvested. So you get “Cassoulet of Hodgson’s of Hartlepool natural smoked haddock”, or “risotto of local estate shot red-legged partridge”. From now on I want to know how every animal on my plate died: “belly of electrically stunned, throat-slit pork…”
The dishes themselves reach for greatness and trip over while doing so. That partridge risotto also contains Wensleydale cheese, chestnuts and kale, but the overwhelming flavour is of truffle oil and demi-glace, that mixture of thickly reduced veal stock with espagnole sauce which makes your lips stick together. If someone had knocked it up from a bit of leftover partridge and a few chestnuts at the back of the fridge you’d be impressed; less so for £10.
Another starter of corned beef is equally disappointing. In recent years corned beef has been saved from the ignominy thrust upon it by Fray Bentos; the modern version can be a beautifully thick, fibrous thing which still resembles a bit of an animal. Here, it arrives in a jelly-topped rectangle with artfully placed pickled silverskin onions scattered hither and yon. None of this can disguise its dull, mushy texture.
A main course of otherwise good roast duck breast is let down by a citrus sausage roll. The filling is too dense, the hit of citrus overwhelming, the pastry undercooked at its heart. But the biggest let-down is the fried fillet of Scarborough woof (Atlantic wolffish), with chip-shop chips and a duck-egg sauce gribiche. If you’re going to gussy up what is essentially fish and chips you have to make it better than the original. You have to be playful. This is dense and heavy. I won’t call the woof a bit of a dog, even though it is. The fish is dry and fibrous. The chips are the size of my clunking thumbs, and though they taste pleasingly of dripping, are too much claggy potato. Serve these in a chip shop and there would be a riot. At least the sauce gribiche, here essentially a tartar, is a beautiful thing.
Only dessert truly saves honour: a slightly loose but sprightly lemon posset topped with a berry compôte, and a steamed ale cake with a killer butterscotch sauce. Service is fine, if brought to a halt by an attempt to send two other starters we didn’t order, compliments of the kitchen, which slowed down the main courses. They were declined. (Note to kitchens: don’t do it. Yeah, I know. That we should all have such problems.) Star Inn the City wants to be a culinary guiding light; right now I’m afraid it’s slipping towards being a bit of a black hole.
Jay’s news bites
■ The Newman Street Tavern, north of London’s Oxford Street, manages to be what the Star Inn The City isn’t: a country pub in the middle of town. Go for their own hot-water-crust pork pies, for roasted leg of mutton with cepes, or faggots, mash and onion gravy. Make sure you leave room for their sticky toffee pudding (newmanstreet tavern.co.uk).
■ From the “I told you so” department: in August 2013 I concluded a rather negative review of the Blue Boar Smokehouse at the Inter-continental London Westminster – bad doesn’t quite cover it – with a prediction that it would soon be rebranded. Since then the faux Americana of shocking southern-fried chicken and lousy ribs has been quietly shuffled off the menu. Now they’re changing the name, too. Apparently the reference to pig didn’t play well with their Middle Eastern clientele. The new name is yet to be announced.
■ This month, leading haggis makers Macsween launch three new flavours: wild boar, Moroccan spiced and, er, chocolate and chilli. I am merely the messenger (macsween.co.uk).
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk. Follow Jay on Twitter @jayrayner1.
Jay Rayner’s novel, The Apologist, is available as an eBook from Amazon now, price £2.99
