Smashed #58: Review of the restaurant reviews

The UK restaurant scene digested

David Ellis, Evening Standard
Joséphine Bistro, London (2 stars)

Giles Coren, The Times
Joséphine Bistro, London (8.33)

There is a surprising disparity between the two reviews published last week of the new Marylebone branch of Claude and Lucy Bosi’s Joséphine Bistro. How can the same restaurant be rated 2 out of 5 stars, or below average, by one critic (Ellis) and 8.33, not far off perfect, by another (Coren)? Is it purely down to the critic’s personal preferences? Is it simply that their subjective opinions are just wildly different? Or is the restaurant really that inconsistent? Are there other factors at play? There’s only one way to find out.

Ellis and Coren agreed about the original Joséphine Bouchon in Chelsea (now apparently renamed Joséphine Bistro in anticipation of what both critics believe to be an imminent roll-out of the concept as a chain). Ellis called it a ‘poignant eulogy from Bosi to his grandmother, a remembrance of her and his childhood formed as a Lyonnaise bouchon’, and in his review last year, Coren said it is ‘a seriously wonderful neighbourhood restaurant’.

In other recent reviews, the two critics were also in accord about AngloThai (Coren: 8.5, Ellis: 4 stars), Canteen (Coren: 8.77, Ellis: 5 stars) and Fonda (Coren: 7.67, Ellis: 4 stars). Admittedly, they disagreed over Don’t Tell Dad. Coren said, ‘It’s run by a lovely local guy called Daniel Land . . . . whom I met and adored’ and awarded it 7.67/10. Ellis said, ‘Things are just not quite right . . . . The sense is an offering out of time, a restaurant of ideas once fresh but now beginning to stale’ and gave it two stars. However, it is fair to say that they appear to be roughly on the same page.

So did our battling critics agree about Joséphine Bistro’s interior? From the press release images, it looks gorgeous. Coren agreed, saying that it’s ‘a penumbrous, tile-floored, mirror-walled, lamplit, linen-clothed, bustling, chatty, sexy spot’. Ellis had a slightly different take, pronouncing it ‘picture-perfect, with its hand-painted ceiling and abundance of brass, with mirrors everywhere and art in all different sizes. It is almost eerily exemplary: a bit unreal, a movie set bistro. Chelsea, Marylebone… Disneyland?’

Maybe the differing scores for Joséphine Bistro are due to what Coren and Ellis ate. Coren ordered white asparagus with sauce mousseline, steak tartare, Dorset escargots à l’ail, caillettes de porcs, gratin dauphinois, poulet des landes aux morilles, frites and haricots verts, fraisier crème diplomate, crème caramel and a banana split. He didn’t have a bad word to say about any of it.

Not so Ellis, who tried the french onion soup (‘a cheese top like a trampoline was too sweet, jammy, as though someone had tipped sugar in with the beef stock’), camembert soufflé (‘enough salt in it to de-ice a road’) and caillettes de porcs (‘Marengo sauce, usually reserved for chicken, here smothered an inelegant lump of a pork and spinach faggot. Not bad just — okay’). However, the pâté de champagne was ‘perfect’, pommes purée ‘masterful’, and he approved of the ‘crisp bread coated in more garlic than might be advised in a week’ that accompanied the steak tartare, although he found the tartare nearly as salty as the soufflé and ‘brain-pink’.

Could service have been the defining factor? Coren appreciated the ‘genuine hustle’ on the night he dined which happened to be his wife’s birthday, with ‘sweat on the waiters’ brows, a sommelier d’un certain âge literally sprinting from bottle to bottle . . . . and at one point, of course, owner Claude Bosi himself, like a Gaulish chef drawn by Albert Uderzo, taking time out from his other operations to do the rounds.’ Ellis says virtually nothing about service, other than disclosing that Claude Bosi sent over two flutes of Champagne. Coren got the better deal; that banana split was a freebie ‘with a chocolate “Happy birthday” sign on top, delivered by a wait staff in full song, along with half the restaurant.’ That’s got to be worth 8.33 alone, hasn’t it?

But it was perhaps the looming shadow of the prospect of Joséphine Bistro as a proper chain restaurant that divided the two critics the most. For Ellis, the Marleybone branch lacked the ‘heart that marks the Chelsea place. Chasing the mass market has corrupted the original’s charm. Are accountants to blame? Probably. It looks good, but it’s light on feeling; Café Rouge with a bit of lippy on.’ However, the restaurant struck Coren very differently. He reveals in the review that, back in the early 90s, he worked in the Dôme café bar in Hampstead, which was later converted in a Café Rouge. In his opinion, Joséphine Bistro ‘is everything that the Dôme was not: great cooking, serious staff, top-class looks and real personality. Which is why it is going to be such a terrific chain, possibly the best we have ever had.’

Who do you think got it right? Is carrying out an objective review possible when you’re at a table with your wife and her sister, who are ‘whooping it up loudly’ on what happens to be your wife’s birthday? Does your opinion get skewed, even just a little, by that comp’d banana split with its chocolate “Happy birthday” sign and singing wait staff? We know Coren was in a good mood when he left Joséphine Bistro, but what about Ellis? Could he have gone on another night when the soup and tartare weren’t so salty, when he had the good sense not to order faggots with mango sauce, when he had something to celebrate and the restaurant knew about it, as it appears to have been the case with Coren. Could he have then found the feeling that he thought missing? We’ll never know. The stars have been allotted, now it’s time to move on to the next place.

Best line (Ellis): ‘a year after conquering Chelsea, Bosi is in Marylebone. I think they put Ozempic in the water here. This is a part of town off-limits to ogres and uglies; this is for people who stage their lives, who curate things rather than just doing them’
Worst line (Ellis): ‘This was a night of oddities, of a cock-up with the wine too boring to go into here.’ That’s the sort of thing we want to know about, just make it quick.
Did Ellis’s review make me want to book a table: I’m back at the Chelsea branch in June and would love to try the Marylebone version before there are so many of them it doesn’t matter which one you go to.

Best line (Coren) : Talking about his time at Dôme: ‘it was all a lie. The croques, the cassoulet, even the omelettes aux fines herbes, came in frozen, to be microwaved in the tiny kitchen by a face-pierced Russian punk in a leather cap’
Worst line (Coren): N/A
Did Coren’s review make me want to book a table: see above.

William Sitwell, The Telegraph
Tom Brown at The Capital, London (2 stars)

Another two-star review this week? What could possibly have put Reform Party Gruppenführer Sitwell’s nose out of joint? You’d think he’d be in a good mood in light of the news of the continued far-right infiltration of his party. But maybe someone whom he suspected of coming to this county in a small boat served him his dinner? It can’t have been that, there was ‘a cluster of obliging staff’. No, it was Michelin-starred chef Tom Brown’s fish charcuterie: ‘horrid cod mortadella; equally rank bresaola of salmon – it might be a way to age beef, but it simply tired this fish; and their salami – three slices of orange fishy mush which looked like squashed goldfish and smelt like the stuff you feed them with.’ Harsh.