4-12 Regent Street, London SW1
(020 7499 8558).
Meal for two, including wine and service £110
Stop the presses! Chris Corbin and Jeremy King, London's most consummate restaurateurs, are not infallible. The men who made the Ivy and Caprice feel not simply like restaurants but vital social institutions, who then opened the Wolseley on Piccadilly, and made it feel like it had been there for decades, have opened a new restaurant and it is ... merely OK. Sure, the service is slick - Corbin and King have always run the tightest crews in London - and a lot of the food is nice. But it lacks that whoosh of charisma.
The problem is the concept. At the Ivy and Caprice, and again when they moved on to do the Wolseley, they put together a thoroughly likeable and expansive menu of brasserie comfort food, from which you could have a high-end snack or three courses. Plus there was an element of history. The new site, previously a BBC radio theatre, has none of that. It is called St Alban after the name of a nearby street.
The menu is a conventionally structured, rather familiar Mediterranean job. Not that the design references any of that. Outside, the building glows by night in saturated colours. Inside, the low-ceilinged, brightly lit dining room is set with huge banquettes in various primary shades, and spindly legged soft chairs. British Airways Executive Club card holders would feel very comfortable here.
All of this makes you look more closely at the food, in the way nobody ever did at the Ivy or the Wolseley, and some of what we ate really was good. Pappardelle of duck was made with excellent pasta and a ragu of long-stewed bird. Deep-fried squid with sweet paprika was crisp and fresh, and a beef carpaccio came with a truffle dressing which wasn't just all ketchup for the middle classes (truffle oil) but a good dice of the real thing. All of these were around £10. At the end, three soft white desserts - a panna cotta with a slick of coffee, a white chocolate mousse with oranges and a lemon cream - showed a kitchen that knows what it's doing.
But in between were mediocre mains. Rare sliced beef came with truffled mash stuffed, rather pointlessly, inside hollowed-out bones so you had to drag it all out again. I don't want to work that hard, not at £22.50 a pop. Chargrilled quails for £16.50 were fiddly, and the sauce in a rabbit stew was so strident it completely drowned the bunny.
I should say that they are on a soft opening and therefore charging 50 per cent. But I don't think the things I found underwhelming were related to early teething problems. St Alban already is what it is, and by Corbin and King standards that ain't much. Will any of this affect business? I doubt it. The starry crowds will come and come again, and bring in their wake the multitude. But for now I can't quite imagine why I should be among those crowds fighting for a table.
