4 Sydney Street, London SW3 (020 7352 1712). Meal for two, with drinks and service: £140
Gosh but coming up with ideas for a new restaurant must be exhausting: all that hunting around for cracks in the zeitgeist; all that salami slicing of trends until you have found a plot of gastronomic real estate you can call your own. Spend too long circling the plughole of the internet looking at the endless promotional drivel for each new venture and you begin to understand how a group of otherwise sensible people might commit to their “Franco-Peruvian, Korean-sauced steamed-bun-sharing plate, family-style, no reservation, Cantina-tavern concept which is reinventing the dining experience by doing away with chairs to turn dinner into a socially ground-breaking promenade performance”.
And all you wanted was dinner.
A little over a decade ago I was introduced to the chef Henry Harris, who was coming out of a less-than-happy experience at Hush. He was about to open a restaurant called Racine on the Brompton Road, west London. I rather grandly asked him what his plan was, expecting a lecture on contemporary dining trends. “My plan,” he said pointedly, “is never to sear a piece of tuna or cook with lemongrass ever again.”
It was a noble ambition and he has kept his word. Racine is a gloriously classic bourgeois French brasserie. The menu is packed full of dishes you will have heard of and probably already eaten. He does steak tartare and rabbit in mustard sauce and calves’ brains in burnt butter with capers. He does confit de canard and tête de veau. He does these things very well indeed.
If ever the world is getting to me, I Google the Racine menu. I regard it as a place of safety. I should also say I regard it as an act of bravery. Inventing a bunch of dishes no one has ever heard of before is far less challenging than cooking ones that have been fully codified. A menu like the one served at Racine doesn’t just have to be liked. It also has to be right, or its whole point – should I say, its raison d’être – disappears.
Likewise with Brasserie Gustave, not far away from Racine in South Kensington. It offers nothing original. It cleaves to the classic French repertoire like a puppy to its mother’s teat. It will not shock or surprise or divert. It should be applauded for its obstinacy. The head chef, Laurence Glayzer, began his cooking career at the Savoy when it was a citadel of French classicism, and it seems he hasn’t been diverted by the siren call of lemongrass or chipotle since. The walls are yellow and plastered with vintage French posters bought by the yard. There are red-leather banquettes and clothless tables. It’s all very elbows on the table, shoulders down.
I order snails because not to do so in a place like this would be an act of bloody mindedness. I mourn slightly that they do not come in their shells, for I have always enjoyed the accessorising: the spring-loaded tongs which demand you relax rather than strengthen your grip, the opportunities for poking your tongue about in nooks and crannies to get at the crusted garlicky persillade. These are served in a dimpled ceramic dish, but that does at least allow each one to be topped by a still-hot, freshly fried crouton.
Three fat scallops, seared without, pearly within, lie on teardrop curls of a cauliflower purée that has been passed and passed again, the whole dressed with a raisin vinaigrette so that there is salt and sweet and earthiness. It is three things, carefully introduced to each other. Main courses are almost brash in their desire not to shock: the menu lists a salade niçoise, and sea bass with fennel; there is roast rack of lamb for two with ratatouille, plaice grilled on the bone and duck breast. There is also rognon de veau which, to a man who has been known to flick through the pages of the old-school Larousse between meals, just sounds like civilisation formed from calories.
It certainly sounds a whole lot sexier than veal kidneys, which is what it is. Here they come, pert and rounded in a mustard-grain sauce, and all is right with the world. They are perfectly cooked, with just enough pink at the eye. Onglet, that chewy beef cut which will either satisfy you or remind you to make an appointment at the dentist, is served very much on the rare side of medium and comes with a slightly overwhelming blanket of shallots. We ask for Dijon mustard to mitigate the feral sweetness of the onions. We have crême brûlée, because it is governed by the same statutes as that covering the snails, and a plate of fresh figs roasted with a little caramel.
The wine list has five pages of wines from France and one page entitled “the rest of the world”, which is about as good an expression of Gallic disdain as you are likely to find. There is a list by the glass, though the general manager, who is as knowingly French as the menu he serves, does not necessarily abide by it, opening things as he sees fit and offering up a dribble here or there to try. “I do like being led on the wines,” my companion says as he wanders away. “I do not lead,” he replies from the other end of the room, listening in. “I guide.” Well yes, of course you do.
And so, as you can see, everything here at Brasserie Gustave is very much cordiale and full of generous entente. There is only one problem: the postcode. This restaurant is in SW3 and that, my friends, is another country where casual neighbourhood places are priced like destination restaurants elsewhere. The scallop dish is £15, the dozen snails £13.50. Our two mains are some of the cheapest on the list and they’re in the high teens. The plaice is £22, the sea bass 50p more than that. And all of a sudden this gentle, relaxed lunch in the sweet, warm embrace is less “comme il faut” than “you bloody what?”
Watch as the bill pirouettes beyond the ton with barely a look back over its shoulder. And so, yes, I admire the instincts that have led to the opening of such a devoutly untrendy restaurant because at heart I am deeply untrendy myself. I can certainly recommend the cooking. But whether you ever eat there is between you and your bank manager. Next week: I’m going for a bowl of noodles. Or three.
Jay’s news bites
■ There are many other places, like Racine, offering the full French. Prime among them is the 65-year-old Mon Plaisir in London’s Covent Garden, which also claims, convincingly, to be the capital’s oldest French restaurant. It continues to do the thing: go for escargot, coq au vin and tarte tatin from a menu which attends to tradition without being its prisoner. The various rooms are also damn cosy (monplaisir.co.uk).
■ Restaurant bill-payment app company Velocity has conducted a survey of British restaurantgoers’ dining experiences and found that on average we spend a month of our lives waiting for the bill to arrive. Or in my case, three years. It also found that 74% of diners found waiting too long for the bill a major irritation. The other 26% clearly have too much time on their hands (paywithvelocity.com).
■ Congratulations to the undoubtedly lovely Midsummer House in Cambridge, voted the second-best restaurant in the whole wide world by contributors to TripAdvisor. This is either proof of the restaurant’s brilliance or of TripAdvisor’s stupidity (midsummerhouse.co.uk)
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk. Follow Jay on Twitter @jayrayner1
