Our waitress, an escapee from Hawksmoor, is lovely – efficient, charming and utterly wasted here. She has been sent out on to the floor in a jacket she admits is about three sizes too large for her and is already stained. Either the management gives a damn about the dignity of its staff or it really doesn’t. Still, she speaks fluent Smith & Wollensky, intoning the oft-repeated figure that theirs are the best 2% of all USDA steaks. God help the other 98%. We try to love it, really we do, but we just can’t. Clearly the poor animal died twice: once in the slaughter house, once on the grill. We give up and hope she doesn’t look too distraught. Curiously, the menu announces in small print that items “may” be cooked to order. May? Only may? Don’t put yourself out, guys.
Sunday, July 12, 2015
BOLLOCKS: Longtime ALOTT5MA Fave Jay Rayner does not care for London's new Smith & Wollensky:
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Despite the random sneer at the American preference for tender meat that doesn't taste like heated beef jerky, this is still great and makes it sound like whomever tried to translate a steakhouse to London got it hilariously wrong. (And at $100 a steak, you better damn well get it right.)
ReplyDeleteI find steak to be extremely easy to cook "well." Rare takes a bit of luck and timing. (Take it off the heat before you think it's ready, take it off the heat before you think it's ready, take it off the heat before you think it's ready, &c.)
ReplyDeleteWorth reading the review to the end, where Rayner tees off on dessert:
ReplyDeleteWe finish with the “Gigantic chocolate cake” which costs £15. It comes with a mini milk urn full of chilled lightly whipped and sweetened cream. That cream is by far the best thing we eat all night. The cake is an obscenity, a foul, brusque monolith of heavy sponge and cack-handed mousse almost a foot high. It tastes of fat and sugar and disdain. It eats like those showpiece cakes that have sat for years in coffee shop windows look. We are told there is an option to take left-overs home. We choose not to.
Rayner's reviews are my favorite thing to read on Sunday mornings. This one was particularly classic as is his review of Beast ("...you should accept Beast as the most unintentionally funny restaurant to open in London in a very long time...)
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