>Seven Park Place
2/5
Just had swine flu. What a mare. One minute you’re trotting around, snouting about London and feeling just swill, and the next you’re on the straw squealing like someone out of Defoe. Last Sunday, I had lunch with relatives (my own), troughing away like a pig in proverbial – but went home with a lardy shiver and encroaching dread. Woke up on Monday feeling someone yanking my eyeballs into my brain while cattle-prodding my temples and heaping bar-bells on my belly.
The worst thing about the pigsick is you’re not sure what it might mean. People laugh at it now in that over-hearty, over-loud, phew-that-was-a-close-one way: they’re saying it’s as hyped as, I don’t know, Cheryl Cole – but then you get it and there’s a gnawing, unpalatable sense that you might, er, die. Anyway, I did the sensible thing and barricaded myself in my room, tanked on Tylenol, watching Haneke films for cheer and solace.
The worst of it’s gone now – thanks for asking – but it’s left me with a cough like a Chinese miner and a throat made of razors and a Victorian bellows. And – sorry if this is a bit TMI but it’s the only way we can syncopate into the next bit – it means I hoik up sputum the colour of -
The sofas at Seven Park Place. Horrid. They’re this emphysemal brown, a not-of-the-newest fish dye, stretching across the fabric like fake tan and a facelift. But their hideousness is as nothing to the rest of the room. ‘Busy’ might be your initial handheld adjective – but it’s much, much worse than that: it’s busier than Peter Mandelson. Some ghastly interior designer has frotted and coiffed everything to within an inch of its life. Arriving, and shrieking inwardly at the décor, I nearly turned tail and fled that instant – all things considered, it might have been better if I had.
Seven Park Place is in St James’s, a part of town I know pretty well but in which, oddly enough, I haven’t reviewed a restaurant before. I went with a mate who works nearby, and walked him back to his office after lunch. Shuddering sights. Taut, frozen brows of termagant wives with Hillary hair and horrible dogs. Porty portlies stumbling out of Boodle’s with pocket-squares askew. Ken Clarke. This is an entitled area with a pinstriped froideur: straitened by recession, though the clubbables and hedgies are siring cash again in back-scratching contentment.
The restaurant occupies a space once held by Andaman, Dieter Muller’s cactus-flower place (pretty, prickly and died a quick death) on the ground floor of a lugubrious ‘boutique’ hotel round the back of The Ritz. The chef is William Drabble, who was at Aubergine for many years (I had my 21st there – not my choice), several of them under Uncle Gordon’s tutelage.
Drabble’s food is Croesus- or Creosote-rich: he’s aiming to poach the chaps from clubland’s ‘coffee’ rooms (which are actually dining rooms) and their Alpine ‘smoking’ rooms, so it’s all heavy, heavy… heavy. Almost everything comes with a superfluous dollop of something thick and gooey, as if some smotheringly munificent milkmaid were at the pass. High-end food so often stumbles at this point: that overkill garnish, that gild on the coulis, creates something much less than the sum of its parts.
For example, this amuse:
A disc of tuna spiked and numbed with Szechuan pepper, some flayed and naughty little tomatoes, a shimmer of basil, cucumber leaves for looks and a blob of avo purée. Perfect. But there’s an extra creamy dollop adding nothing – just white superfluous richness, a glob of cloying fat, clottingly, clot-headedly unnecessary.
Similar: langoustine tortellini with roasted cauliflower and truffle butter sauce. (Already sounds subatomically light, no?) It was OK, but underneath it lay this wallpaper paste, this thick pappy swamp of cauliflower purée, as welcome as a sombre vet with a big needle. It’s all, as they say, too much.
There were exceptions. I’ll hymn here an encomium to my grouse, which was the best I’ve had this season (and the last, too) – breasts of blood and earth, in a thunkingly brilliant blackberry sauce, the giblets and legs minced and deep-fried in a breaded puck. But skate wing in black butter was singularly disastrous. Overcooked to rigid repellence and completely underseasoned, it was like chewing on rubbery iron filings, mush and dust in the mouth. My friend sent it back, rightly, and they brought him a good duck confit with orange sauce. Puddings were entirely forgettable, and looked like abstracts you’d buy in Habitat.
In a half-empty restaurant with 30 covers, with aspirations for stars and badges, these pulse-bleeps of triumph and disaster won’t do. There’s altogether too much to criticise at Seven Park Place, too much at fault, too many fundamental errors. At the end, I asked my chum to sum it up. ‘Skate tasted of paper. Loos were quite nice.’
Seven Park Place, St James’s Hotel, London SW1A
Tel. +44 (0)20 7316 1600
See on the Map
Lunch for two, excluding drinks and service, costs £60 – £90
Which is why I love it, of course, and why I welcome the opening – amidst the revamp – of a restaurant in its crypt. That’s a ghoulish word, but the location isn’t. They’ve made superb use of the space, which is airy, bright and high-ceilinged; and the wide windows and split-level, the glass-walled kitchen and the clean, Nordic-ish furniture, bring a cool-in-summer, warm-in-winter aesthetic.
I went with 
A fillet of sea trout was slightly overcooked, though its salad of yellow bean, fennel and verjuice (the condiment du jour, it seems) was inventive, fronded with dill. Tim’s beef fillet tail, too, looked like it had got a bit familiar with the stove, but they didn’t ask how he wanted it cooked, and beef is seldom as rare as you’d like it when the kitchen decides. Nor did they notice they’d cracked the little Kilner jar of horseradish, and that shards of glass were scattered across the plate – though they handled the issue professionally. An Eton mess was bog-standard cream and dust, and an ice cream sandwich OK. At 20 ‘British pounds’ for the three courses, this is value that tends towards the excellent. The Restaurant at St. Paul’s is doing almost everything right, and almost everything better than you’d expect.
The Restaurant at St. Paul’s, St. Paul’s Churchyard, London EC4
‘Gazpacho’ looks like an enthusiastic toddler picked up handfuls of stuff lying around the kitchen and dumped them over the soup. How the hell are you supposed to eat it? Croutons, egg, onions, parsley and worst of all… two bloody great ice cubes melting in the middle. The soup itself, which has too much chilli, is utterly overpowered by bitter onion and grassy parsley. It’s barely an acceptable example of this great dish, and certainly no better than the one I had at 
‘Middlewhite tonnato’ is a porky reworking of the pan-Italian dish of veal with a sauce of what Elizabeth David always called tunny fish. It’s good, with acid little capers and a peppery afro of rocket. Ox heart is like chewing the face off a platypus. The meat has the texture and flavour of a well-used fly-swat. Nor is there any sign of the promised pickled walnuts.
Puddings – thank God – are better, and hold the one delight of the meal. An elderflower jelly is perfect, one of the best things I’ve eaten this year. I’ve always loved the dew-wet, Shropshire scent of the flowers, sealed and settled by jelly. A little whipped cream and some gently poached gooseberries bring lingering, languorous flavours of summer. There’s also a tayberry ripple ice cream, which is a nice idea, although I’ve always found the tayberry the least impressive of Scotland’s soft fruits. Finally, a buttermilk pudding, which resembles a mammary implant and which tastes of gelatine-set bulimia.
My mate Patrick is off to Rwanda. Off as in off. With a rucksack full of chloroquine and naked intent, he’s gone to seek his fortune where the streets are paved with mud. A bit like Cecil Rhodes, but with fewer scruples. Most of my peers plopped from university into the professions like upended jellies. Patrick will be the hero of his own life, and I’m sure you’ll join me in wishing him well.
The keystone, the fish and chips, is good. That coley is fresh, but the oil was slightly too cold, and the batter clings to the fish like an entrant in a wet T-shirt competition. Half the chips are idiotically spiced with cayenne, but the rest are hot and crisp. We also share a dozen or so rock oysters. They’re damp and milky at this time of the year, lacking the thwack of osmazome. A serried puck of prawns is excellent, green and Nordic with dill, and lovely on hot toast. Some shell-ons are juicy, several of them hens with roe-speckled bellies.
Perfectly-cooked bream is slathered in an oversweet chilli sauce. There’s also some lacklustre salads which we barely touch, some abysmal, grease-sodden roast veg, and a horrendous steak pie, with an interior as congealed and tepid as fresh snot. (We ordered it because one of our number had claimed he didn’t like fish. Don’t judge a man by his friends.) For puddings, a benchmark crème brûlée, a dessicated slab of Bakewell, and some decent bought-in ice cream.
Good God, what a name. Gallery Mess. It sounds like a harbinger of Emin’s bedclothes, or a Hoxton installation of upturned bins and fox poo.
Gazpacho comes with cucumber and sun-blushed tomatoes at the bottom of the bowl. Annoyingly, inexplicably, you pour the soup yourself. As you know, this can be a truly great dish, but the version here is just passable. Over-oiled and timidly flavoured, it tastes sort of deflated, with the sun-blushed tomatoes clearly blushing out of embarrassment at their unwelcome acidity. A salad of lamb’s lettuce with duck and watermelon sounded horrendous – which is, naturally, why I ordered it – but proves delicious, with splashes of carmine fruit given body by a south-east-Asiany peanut dressing. It’s possible, though I could be wrong, that the duck was leftover from yesterday. If so, all to the good: such frugal creativity is welcome these days. 
A saddle of lamb is chewily overcooked, though its couscous is intelligently spiced and the dish looks delightful. Salmon poached with sauce vierge is excellent – rosy and tender, bathing in extra virgin and speckled with capers. A knickerbocker glory is bizarrely constructed with peanut brittle and bashed up crème brûlée, though its fruit bleeds juicily within. Rhubarb crumble lacks that gooey glory when fruit has surged into crust – instead, the ’barb lies morosely at the bottom of the dish, and the crumble is dusty and raw.
If ever they come for me in the middle of the night – figures round the bed, door in splinters, torchlights red on sweaty face – I know what I’ll fight them for. I know what’ll get me wriggling and writhing, the thought that’ll fling me out the door, unshod, to curses and flurry. (Admittedly, as this blog continues, the only part of me capable of producing any movement is my bowel, but that’s beside the point.) What is it?
Now London has some decent British restaurants, most of which suckled at the teat of St. John. (Which is not a phrase you’ll read in the Catholic Encyclopaedia.) For the most part, though, our cooking is a stay-at-home girl, shredding her suet by the whisper of the Aga and the fart of the Labrador. Like everything in Britain, the best and most interesting food remains aspiced in class, primly reserved for metropolitan sorts who’ll eat a Mrs King pork pie or pay seven quid for bone marrow and parsley salad. In France, it’s different. There’s self-assured pride – often mistaken for arrogance – in a national granary of dishes, which everybody knows and which you can eat throughout the country. Food remains the bottom-up, bottoms-up bedrock of their culture, and they’re richer for it.
£19.50 gets you three courses. I start with a junipery morteau sausage with lentils, the pig given life by the pulse (droll, that one). It’s rustic in a polished sort of way. Cargy has a stellar pork rillette, the lightest I’ve ever tasted. There’s a lid of set fat which she detaches to limit her lard intake – though I finish it – and some cornichons to bring vital acidity. Rabbit in mustard sauce is faultless – toothsome clumps of bunny falling from spindly bones. A green salad crunches with endive, bitter as Al Gore, and there’s a firm, pearly piece of sea bream, cloyed by a slightly over-rich lobster sauce. For puddings, a haughty île flottante, the whites not dissimilar to candyfloss, in a custard haunted with vanilla. Last, an exquisite apple tatin to share, the pastry flaked with jammy gooeyness, the prim fruit carrying just a little, welcome bite.
Now it’s true that I’ve only been once, for the lunch deal. And if I’d come for a midweek dinner, and spent £18 on lamb navarin with boulangères, I’d have judged the place by different standards. But I ate what I ate here, and I paid what I paid – and on that basis, this was my best London meal so far this year.
When the food arrives, I realise The Salisbury offers the gastronomic equivalent of The Crying Game. It all looks great until… aah. One tapa is a ‘veggy Scotch egg’. Why anyone would conceive of such a thing is completely beyond me. It’s a hardish-boiled egg in breadcrumbs on a puddle of capery oil. (There’s a similar recipe in the most staggeringly pointless 
Chipolatas are bog-standard, their chutney unpleasantly tepid. A salad of pea shoots with feta and balsamic glaze is excellent, though: crisp and green and summery, with fresh cheese, though the vinegar does nothing for it. ‘Pete’s curry’ is tasty, smoothed with coconut milk and smoky with cumin. Gnocchi and smoked chicken are scalding globules with clumps of string. Ten quid says they came straight from the microwave. A side bowl of cabbage is faultless, basking in melted butter and spiked with infant roundels of chive.
Amongst the mains, a pie of pork, apple and cider is good, with a big honk of piggy knuckle, sealed by pastry flaking in filigrees round the edges. Mum has a crab tart with a couple of prawns. It’s steep at £12, and the tart, though well flavoured, is grossly undercooked, leaching onto the plate (an annoying wooden plank) in a slow vomity puddle. Pudding is a deconstructed strawberry cheesecake: a clutch of Elsantas with a bit of cream and some soggy Digestives mixed with butter. It looks like a rat run over by a lawnmower in the snow.
In a breathless preamble to its menu, The Wine Theatre makes much of its ‘philosophy’, the ‘aperitivo’. There’s a great deal of branding puff around ‘aperitivo’, as if it were the most radical gastronomic concept since Theophanu, the tenth century Byzantine Empress, popularised the fork. From what I can gather, ‘aperitivo’ consists of a free nibble with your drink. Hardly the Shock of the New.
Robert’s starter reeks all the way from the kitchen. It’s a noisome dish of pastey sardines and overcooked onions spattered with raisins, like fishy muesli. I have a revolting salad of squid and olives. The squid is pre-frozen and cut into stumpy fag-butts, surrendering all pretence of flavour. The olives are sliced, and straight from a tin. At what point, do you think, does someone decide an olive would taste better sliced? Do these people lie in the bath and say to themselves: ‘Olives are a perfect size to pop in your mouth. Humans have grown them for as long as they’ve grown anything. We have machines nowadays that stone them if you can’t face spitting out the pip or putting your dentures in. So the only way we can improve on this is by cutting them up into meanly astringent little slices, like caustic Polo mints, and steeping them in horrendous vinegar’?
My main course is slightly better. ‘Fettucine with prawns’ turns out to be a clump of coldish pasta with two anaemic prawns on the side. It comes with courgettes (the menu promised rocket) which were cooked ages ago and are bracken-brown and slimey; and some chunks of cat-food tuna. The prawns weren’t prepped properly, and each carries a streak of intestinal waste down its back. Robert has a lasagne which I strangely forget to taste, though it doesn’t look bad. I finish with an amaretto crème brûlée, which had sounded interesting. But rather than spiking it with Amaretto liqueur, which I’d hoped for, they’ve crushed amaretti biscuits into the custard, a terrible idea. The soggy crumbs give it a mouthfeel like a frog spawned in it. I don’t finish it.
As the venerable poet 
We ate more or less everything on the menu. Tortilla chips are crunchy and light, and though the guacamole is overpuréed and slightly underseasoned, the salsa is excellent, particularly for the time of year. Courgette fritters have a crunchy, almost pankoey batter, but are flaccid and slightly slimey. Macaroni cheese – a fine accompaniment to any burger, and I salute those who order it – is magnificent, and infinitely better than the one I had in the overpriced and hateful 
Here’s the beef. A mixture of rump, chuck and brisket, in proportions Tom wouldn’t reveal. All bloody good and bloody bloody, as you can see from that charred and beautifully leaking specimen above. Not overminced, exactly the right size, and pinkly, perkily cooked. I also ordered the signature Byron, which was a mistake. One of the difficulties the chain has is that, while it offers a quality product, it has to cater for people more used to the golden arches. The patties are cooked to medium as standard, but some customers refuse all meat that isn’t grey. The restaurant thus suffers a constant struggle between credibility and appeasement. The Byron sauce turns out to be thousand-island dressing, a catch-all sop to those ignorant consumers. But it’s still a fantastic burger, with a lovely X of bacon and melting, unctuous cheese. Sourcing, incidentally, is careful and clever: Aberdeen Angus, aged for three weeks, a ‘fourth-generation East End baker’ for the buns.
