Smashed #21

The UK restaurant scene digested

Photo by Itai Aarons on Unsplash

In the rollercoaster world of London restaurants, there’s been some big ups and downs this week. I was sad to hear of the imminent closure after 18 years of Galvin at Windows. It was a landmark restaurant that combined a tourist-friendly location on the 28th floor of the Hilton Park Lane with views into the King’s back garden at Buck House (and across London) with some seriously good cooking. Head chefs included the super talented Andre Garret, Joo Won, and Marc Hardiman who will see the restaurant through to its final service later this month, all guided by industry legend Chris Galvin. The restaurant dining room was also of course presided over for its first 13 years by Fred Sirieix. You may have heard of him.

With the closure of Michel Roux Jr’s Le Gavroche, Marcus Wareing’s Marcus at The Berkeley and the imminent shuttering of Jason Atherton’s Pollen Street Social, it’s tempting to see all this as the end of an era for the old guard, especially in the context of the opening next week of the Roe, the mammoth new restaurant from the young team behind the hugely successful Fallow.

But Roux has just announced that Chez Roux will open in May at The Langham Hotel and Atherton will open two new restaurants this year including the high-end Row on 5 (and it seems the Pollen Street site will simply change name and concept rather than completely close although that is to be confirmed). Wareing told The Caterer last year that, ‘I am not retiring quite yet, though - not at all. I'm ready for a new and exciting chapter to begin. I will update on our plans for 2024 in due course.’ As for the Galvins, their remaining restaurants La Chapelle, Galvin Bistro and Bar and The Green Man Pub (in Essex) have been recently refurbished and while there has been no announcement about new projects, I wouldn’t bet against it given Chris and Jeff Galvin’s track record of new openings since launching their business in 2005 with the much missed Galvin Bistrot Deluxe.

But it’s inevitable and quite correct that the old gits should eventually make way for the new guard and Fallow chefs Jack Croft and William Murray, along with their business partner James Robson, are arguably it, or at least part of it. They have so far scored two huge hits. Fallow, serving a menu of sustainable ‘conscious gastronomy’ including smoked cod’s head that would otherwise have ended up in the bin with homemade sriracha for £28 a pop, and Fowl, an upmarket chicken shop that launched with attention grabbing guest chef collaborations with the likes of Pierre Koffmann and Jessie and Lennie Ware of the popular Table Manners podcast. Fowl appears ripe for a nation-wide roll out, although nothing has been announced as yet.

Roe is an entirely different beast however. According to the Evening Standard, the restaurant has ‘room for 500 over three floors, which includes both a 10-seat chef’s table downstairs and a waterside terrace that can take 250’. London hasn’t seen the like since the late Sir Terence Conran opened the 700 seat Mezzo in Wardour Street in the mid-90s. Mezzo is something of a warning from history. A review in 2002 described the once buzzing and difficult to book restaurant as ‘sparsely populated’ with ‘much of the drama . . . .leached from the space’. By 2004, Mezzo rebranded as Meza and given a Spanish theme, then it became Floridita and finally 100 Wardour Street, which is still trading.

Roe has cost a reported £6 million to open. It’s not in Soho, or like Fallow and Fowl, located between Piccadilly Circus and Leicester Square, but in Canary Wharf. Gulp. In a remarkably candid YouTube video trailing Roe titled ‘We Are Risking Everything To Open A New Restaurant’, Robson admits, ‘We’ve got a very successful business and if this doesn’t go correctly we’ve just wasted five years of our time’. Murray replies, ‘That’s pretty terrifying.’ They can look to another Conran venture for some reassurance. In 1981, he bought Butlers Wharf and by the early 90s had transformed it from a no-go area into a ‘Gastrodrome’ with a string of restaurants and food shops that included Le Pont de la Tour and the The Butler’s Wharf Chop House that are still open today.

Unlike Conran, who started from scratch with a group of derelict buildings, Croft, Murray and Robson at least have the advantage of moving into a developed area already populated with recognisable brands including Hawksmoor and Dishoom. With the Jubilee and Elizabeth Lines nearby, Roe will be 15 minutes from the West End. The restaurant looks spectacular and I’m sure the terrace overlooking the water will be a hot spot come the warmer weather. But Canary Wharf remains a rather soulless place. Will the promise of Snail vindaloo flatbread, Venison & dairy cow burger and Maitake Cornish pasty with walnut ketchup be enough to tempt the masses to dine among the glass and steel towers? As a confirmed Fallow fan, I sincerely hope so. It could be the launch pad for a Conran-sized restaurant empire, or, as they have acknowledged, it could put a very serious kink in their future plans. Only time will tell.

The Reviews

Adam Kay, The Sunday Times
Opheem, Birmingham

Charlotte Ivers is away so, joy of joys, we are treated to a ‘celebrity’ stand in. Editors seem to think this sort of thing is a tremendous idea, but we have guest spots from Gary Barlow (‘My steak did what it said on the tin, and came with three types of mustard, as is correct; why is it that, too often, a man has to ask?’) and Andrew Lloyd Webber (I couldn’t track one of his reviews down online. I may have a print copy squirrelled away somewhere. If I manage to dig it out I will report back in a future edition of Smashed), as proof positive that it really fucking isn’t.

At least Adam Kay is a writer (and comedian), best known for This Is Going To Hurt. Sadly, he’s also a lifelong vegetarian. I’ve got nothing against vegetarians of course, especially if they are reviewing restaurants for Vegetarian and Vegan Bastards Who Look Down On The Rest of Humanity monthly. But this is The Sunday Times, the readership of which no doubt conforms roughly to the national split of carnivores (87 per cent), vegetarian (7 per cent) and vegan (2 per cent). Who is this review for then? Not me, but I read it anyway.

On top of being a vegetarian, Kay rather predictably doesn’t like tasting menus. ‘I’d prefer a dinner that’s quicker than the Dune franchise.’ It’s going well so far. A funny thing happened to Kay on the way to the restaurant. Literally no one cares. Anecdotes about getting to the restaurant are the critic’s equivalent of a rock band writing songs about being on the road. It’s the Smoke On The Water of food writing. That comparison doesn’t quite work because SOTW is of course a great song, but it does nevertheless represent the bankruptcy of imagination that eventually befalls many rock acts. But that usually happens are years of churning songs out. What’s Kay’s excuse?

As a tasting menu-hating vegetarian, Kay is surprisingly enthusiastic about the two Michelin-starred, tasting menu-only Opheem (there is a lunchtime a la carte at £75 for three courses but it’s only available when Mercury is in retrograde). He declares it ‘sensational’ and we all throw our trilbies in the air and shout ‘huzzah!’. There is an extremely detailed dissection of a potato dish, staff are ‘on point’, and Kay states that the ‘Tamil-influenced coconut and peppercorn sauce was a combination I’m keen to repeat.’ I’m sure he didn’t have to wait long until it did. In a decent culinary gag, after 10 courses plus extra freebies, petit fours become ‘petit fifteens’ and then he pays a bill of £410.62 for two people. Now you know how much a decent curry in Birmingham costs.

Best line: ‘My vodka martini, I am informed, is served at -18C, which is just as well because it makes me so angry when my martinis are at -17C.’
Worst line: ‘the smokiness of some barbecued lettuce hacking straight through the sweetness of a tamarind chutney’ - you can’t fool me, that’s ‘cuts through the richness’ by stealth.
Did the review make me want to book a table: Put it this way, I’m in Birmingham in a couple of weeks and I’m not going.

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