Michael Caines at ABode, High Street, Canterbury, Kent (01227 766 266)
Dinner for two, including wine and service, £120
Before visiting Michael Caines's new restaurant in Canterbury, I assumed the chef, who holds two Michelin stars at Gidleigh Park Hotel in Devon, had chosen the city because of its similarities to Exeter, where he made his first move into the brasserie market. Having eaten there, I detect a greater advantage: it is so far from Exeter that his core audience in the south west might not find out what a shoddy over-priced little business he is capable of putting his name to. Although obviously not if I have anything to do with it.
There is no great secret to the running of a good restaurant. It is about getting a myriad tiny things right. Or, to put it another way, it is about attention to detail. Here nobody seems to be paying any attention at all. Oh sure, they are all here, in their crisp white shirts and hard-pressed trousers and shiny grins. God knows what they are thinking about, though, because it can't be the £60-a-head experience they are there to sell. The restaurant, which is part of the new, sleek ABode hotel in Canterbury, a growing chain with which Caines is allied, looks nice enough: chairs in two shades of chocolate, fat leather banquettes, stylised paintings of the city at the restaurant's door.
But after that first impression, the irritations pile up: there's the man on the front desk who doesn't bother to look up from his paperwork when you arrive and then says he's forgotten the name you gave him when he does; there are the dribbles of cold sauce on the menu; there's the one starter that is already finished at 12.45pm and the other two which we are warned are almost finished, and this out of just seven choices; there's the grubby stain down the side of the cup in which a taster of pumpkin soup is served; there's the basket of stale bread, one slice particularly hard because it has come from the cut end of a loaf that has clearly been loitering in the kitchen for hours; the lattes brought to us when we asked for espressos, and the fat smudges of coffee down the side of the cup when the espressos finally arrive ...
All of this would not matter, or would matter less, if the food hit the mark - but it doesn't. Like the restaurant, it looks all right: lots of big vivid colours on interesting-shaped pieces of white porcelain by Villeroy & Boch, and I accept that's often enough to convince some sections of the smug middle classes that what they're getting is good, but it isn't. When the bread basket was offered, we were told that one of the rolls was Michael Caines's 'signature bread', the kind of term that is meant to sing of exclusivity and specialness.
My companion, who knows his bread, chewed. And chewed. 'I wouldn't sign it,' he said. It was dry, old, lifeless. That taster of pumpkin soup was a cream-heavy slick of something pale and uninteresting. The cheapest starter, a white bean soup at an outrageous £8 (don't even think about the mark-up), was equally unexceptional: no texture, no depth of flavour, just the bullying hit of smoked bacon. The waitress told us proudly that it came with a slice of wild truffle, another sign that nobody bothers here with details like training the waiters. Almost all truffles are wild (though this, a slice of preserved summer truffle, was tasteless for all that).
A raviolo of lobster, one of the starters about to run out (and I wish it had), boasted less than sparklingly fresh meat and lay on a bed of over-salted Savoy cabbage. That heavy hand with the seasoning was most obvious in a grim main course of monkfish wrapped in pancetta on a saffron sauce. Everything was so salty that the only note from the saffron to come through was a pronounced soapiness. The best of what we ate was my roasted saddle of hare, a meat that, ironically, is hard to cook well. They managed it, both maintaining the gaminess and keeping it tender. Sadly, it was overwhelmed by over-seasoned fennel.
Like everything else, the puddings looked pretty - an apple mousse for him, a 'raspberry ripple' souffle for me - but neither sang, let alone shouted of their advertised ingredients. Tasted blind, I do not believe I would have been able to identify what they were, save something to do with fruit. I am also profoundly irritated by something called raspberry ripple souffle which has no ripple at all. If you can't deliver it, don't put it on the menu.
Michael Caines at ABode hotel sums up to me so much about what is wrong in British restaurants today: a celebrated chef decides to reinvent himself as a brand. He thinks hard about what values that brand should have and apparently concludes it must have something to do with tablecloths, stripped-wood floors and a truckload of geometric crockery. And in doing so, he forgets the one thing that really matters: good food at reasonable prices. Is it really so much to ask?
