I confess I have reviewed restaurants (redcogs look away now).....
I should start with an apology. A good cyclist goes for a ride on Sundays. On this Sunday I rode to the our meeting point only to apologise. Mrs L3 is 46 er younger than ever, and my duty is clear - to amuse and to divert. So we went to Tate Britain (of which more later), then to her favourite shop (which was closed - thankyou God) and then to the Oxo Bar and Brasserie for lunch.
For those of you who don't know it, the Oxo Tower is on the South Bank a little to the east of the National Film Theatre. The ground and first floors are given over to shops and galleries and a hairdresser. Above these there are six floors of flats which are owned by a Housing Association - and on the eighth floor there is a restaurant and the so-called Bar and Brasserie. Except that the Bar is divided from the Brasserie. The views from the Bar are good, especially at night, but the views from the Brasserie are better. And, as we shall see, more expensive.
I go to the bar from time to time. I might meet my youngest there, and have a cocktail. I can make a cocktail last a long time, which is good, because at £7.50 a go they are no mean indulgence. The Brasserie has the reputation of serving the same grub as the Restaurant, but in less formal surroundings and for half the price...
We were taken to a small table. By small I mean really small. The chairs were small, and very close to other chairs. The view was big. The best.
I order osso buco with gnocchi. Mrs L3 orders prawns. The osso buco is really first rate, melting in a stock which has just the right amount of gelatin, and the gnocchi are superb - neither floury nor pasty - and quite definitely made with potato. I'm told that the prawns were excellent. There were three of them.
Mrs L3 orders chick pea falafel. I go for the steak. The menu shows '8oz ribeye steak sandwich with potato wedges'. For seventeen quid. The view is tremendous. I ask for the steak without the sandwich, and without the wedges, and for chips, please (or steak-frites, s'il vous plait). I ask for it to be rare. This is deemed acceptable. Don't take this for granted. The smarter the restaurant the less likely that you will get your chosen potato option. I once asked for mash in an oyster restaurant in Whitstable, and was told that they didn't do mash. I asked, on Little Miss's behalf, for chips seulement in St. John when Tripe and Chips were on the menu, and was told that the Chips came with Tripe, or not at all. So I had her Tripe as a starter.
So I was made up when they said - yes, rare steak with chips is fine and dandy. Less pleased when the steak arrived in the sandwich with the wedges. Less pleased still, when the hasty removal of the sandwich revealed a steak well done, and the chips, when they arrived, had the look of McDonalds about them. On these occasions you have a choice - you can stick out for what you want, which means you don't eat for a while, or you can get on with it. I got on with it, and livened up the charred meat with tomato ketchup, supplied willingly, in response to my request, but in a little white dishette, if you please, and not in a bottle marked Heinz.
I could see that the falafel were ordinary, so I didn't enquire. The steak was good, if you like your steak well done. I confess I like my steak to have a bit of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre about it, and had havered between rare and blue, but, even so, it was meaty and parted easily.
Dessert. Mrs L3 went for the sticky toffee pudding. I ordered what I thought was going to be a vanilla and rhubarb brulee. Now, I like a brulee, and I'm not hard to please. I have a friend, Graham, a man who has cycled round the world and he does not stand for any failure in the brulee department. He has stood up in the middle of a restaurant and denounced a brulee that did not meet with his approval. The waiter, and then the manager, were sent away to think about things. Had Graham been with us today I'm afraid that the wrath of Osama would have rained down on the Oxo Tower, which would have been reduced to the Oxo Bungalow. The brulee, which was fifteen minutes in coming was a cold mousse with a crusty bit on top - also cold. As it was Mrs L3's birthday I shovelled it down, and took comfort from the espresso.
The bill for lunch (and the view) came to a fraction over 100 sovs - which included about £28 for four glasses of Gavi that were OKish. As we left we were asked if we had enjoyed our meal. Mrs L3 said that the steak, which was supposed to be rare, had been well done. We received an apology, and, in the lift to the ground floor, a fellow diner said that he too had been given a well done steak when he had asked for it to be rare.
The fault is with the management, and it's not difficult to see how this has come about. The Oxo has a sort of electronic ordering system. You give the order, the waiter punches it into the keyboard and any variation is pretty much down to guesswork. Thus has waiting become Taylorized. A brasserie in Lille is a place where you go in, you give an order across the counter, somebody makes a mark on paper, and you get what you order form the person who takes the order. At the Oxo there is no continuity - the food comes out of the kitchen with a number which is punched into the database, which tells the waiter which table it is destined for. The staff rush around as if prompted by an invisible cattle prod. It's not as bad as Carluccios, but it doesn't make happy watching.
So...if you don't care what it costs, and you want to make an impression then it's not bad. It's not as expensive as the Tower 42 restaurant which has better views still, but it's not really a hundred quid gaff. Sixty would be pushing it. If you want to spend that kind of money and you think that your partner is less interested in the view than in really great food and great service then go to St. John, although the vastly superior wine list can get you in to trouble. If you want good steak-frites then Chez Gerard, chain though it might be, would be a better bet. But the view...the view is very, very good.
