What the critics say: Goodman, Terroirs…

12th January 2009, 11:04am

A round-up of the latest reviews

Bob Bob Ricard, Upper James Street, London

AA Gill, The Sunday Times, 11 January

"The room is supposed to be reminiscent of an Edwardian railway carriage. It's more like Liberace's bathroom dropped into a Texan diner. It's been put together by David Collins, who I respect professionally and am fond of personally, but the only explanation for this room can be a bet, a dare, or a deranged marbler and paint-finisher who's holding his family hostage."

"I think it's trying to do what the Wolseley does: serve four meals a day. But it's difficult to tell. The dishes are bizarrely random, like the reverie of starving prisoners of war. We started with a langoustine cocktail, egg mayonnaise, caviar blinis and smoked salmon that had a name. I asked whose name it was, and the waitress said the man who delivered it, which was weird, but rather endearing. All of it tasted of the 1950s, and not in a nostalgically nice way. Most of it looked like it was made in the 1950s, and had an emetic, parsimonious shudder. Pork rillettes were served in a sealed Kilner jar and smelt strongly of bottom. There is no other way of putting this: fatty bloke's blind starfish. I had a burger. I wasn't asked how I wanted it. If I'd said, 'I want it to be grey, tasteless, flaccid and wholly unremarkable in every particular', then the kitchen would have got it to a T. A lobster thermidor was a shrimp on steroids, drowning in the sauce that poisoned the reputation of English food for a generation."

Bocca di Lupo, Archer Street, London
Giles Coren, The Times, 10 January

"Bocca looks like a lot of funky new restaurants tend to look now, with a long eating bar at the front to give depth and zoom and a bit of hard yakka to the space (shades of Moro there, where Jacob Kennedy, the aforementioned young chef, used to work), and then an urgent cluster of hard eating tables, in this case with a lot of reclaimed wood and quite a lot of wobbles, as if to show that very little time has been wasted mucking about with ornamentation (move along, Ilse, there's nothing for you here) because all the energy and spirit and originality and industry have been channelled into the food."

"The dishes are rustic, regional, absolutely untranslated, utterly authentic, unbelievably winning. From the Crudi e Salumi section we had a tuna tartare with orange zest, capers and pine nuts (Sicilia), whose colour and clarity could almost make you cry. The cubes of translucent ruby fish glimmered in their plump little stack-like jellies. The first taste in my mouth was light and breezy and young, and then the fats came down and coated my tongue and lingered and lingered."

Goodman, Maddox Street, London
Terry Durack, The Independent, 11 January

"Everything about Goodman feels familiar. There is the All Bar One/Hard Rock Café décor; the dark-brown wooden tables, the leather banquettes, the suspended lampshades, and the long, bottle-lined bar.

"There are starters, but nothing to get excited about: beef carpaccio, beef tartare, Caesar salad. A platter of sweet/salty Russian herring fillets (£7.50) sounds hopeful, but the herrings are small, the potatoes bitsy, and the marinated beetroot raw and chewy. A shot of Russian Standard vodka is kindly offered, and gratefully accepted, to help the beetroot go down. A salmon carpaccio teamed with tomato seeds and passionfruit (£7.50) sounds bizarre, but tastes just like your average salmon carpaccio.

"So it is all down to the steaks to save the day, the various cuts dramatically presented to each table on a tray. There is much talk about dry-aging, in which the meat is hung on the bone to break down the fibres, and concentrate the flavour; a more expensive process for the providore, as it can lose as much as 20 per cent of its weight in the process. Yet all but one of the cuts available are 'wet-aged', which sounds more like a euphemism for 'packaged in Cryovac for longer shelf life and shipped across the world'."

Bob Bob Ricard, Upper James Street, London
Terry Durack, the Independent, 10 January

"Wearing their outlandish costumes with some dignity, the waiting staff are clearly a cut above the norm, raising hopes that the food may be as important to the concept as the design. And so it proved. The dishes we tried were uniformly good: simple, well-conceived and pleasingly enhanced with characterful tracklements. Potted middle- white pork, served in its own mini Mason jar, was rich without being over-fatty, paired with a delicate perry jelly and fingers of thyme-dusted Melba toast. Spiced parsnip soup, with a ramekin of parsnip crisps to sprinkle on top, struck just the right balance of sweetness and spiced warmth."

"The core menu of standard brasserie dishes is supplemented by interesting daily specials, which included roast partridge and lobster thermidor (£38). I tried the fish special, a tranche of wild halibut (£19.75), lightly cooked under a golden crust, served with a tangle of garlicky wild mushrooms. Chicken curry was very much of the Anglo-Indian school, featuring generous chunks of meat in a sweet, korma-like sauce, garnished with fresh banana and pineapple pickle; sounds awful, I know, but very enjoyable."

Terroirs, Charing Cross, London
Mark Bolland, Evening Standard, 12 January

"Terroirs' menu is small and wellsourced. There's a good selection of charcuterie and cheeses as well as plats du jour, but the small plates were the most tempting. We began with a whole small Dorset crab with mayonnaise, which drew admiring sighs from the couple sitting beside us at the bar. You would have sighed, too. We scraped every bit of meat from its shell. Next came a small flotilla of snails – dark, plump and gleaming as they adorned sourdough toast alongside sizzling slices of bacon. Faultless."

"The atmosphere was warm and cosy and the room was bustling with tourists, Europhiles and locals, but we noticed plenty of affluent-looking bankers, too. I'm not surprised; the wine list is droolinducing: less of a list and more of a guide – with a contents page and 25 pages peppered with information, quotes and (dreadful) puns. The Peter Sellers sound-alike will advise you and the stopped clock on the wall might lure you into whiling away a whole afternoon, but we stuck to our guns and a single glass of garnet-coloured Kir."

Goodman, Maddox Street, London
David Sexton, Evening Standard, 7 January

"There is an absolute concentration here on the steaks themselves, outdoing even rivals like Gaucho or Sophie's. The meat is very carefully sourced and handled. They offer Australian beef that has been grain-fed for 110 days, and American beef that has been grain-fed for 120 days: 'USDA (US Department of Agriculture) Prime', this being the top, most marbled category, awarded to only two per cent of American beef (the lesser grades being, incidentally, Choice, Select, Standard, Commercial, Utility, Cutter and Canner — ratings that one feels might just come in useful in other areas of life)."

"Presented raw on a platter for our inspection, these continent-crossing steaks looked remarkably different — the Australian cuts lean and healthy, as if from cattle that had been virtuously working out, the American ones thickly veined with fat, as though the beasts had spent their days stuffing themselves in a La-Z-Boy recliner.
But we chose a third alternative: UK Angus, grass-fed and dry-aged for 28 days, the 250g fillet costing £23 (for the steak alone), the 800g rib-eye £35. All these cuts are aged in-house, Goodman being perhaps the only restaurant in London to boast this facility."

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