The Gaucho Grill
Telephone: 020-7734 4040
Address: 19 Swallow Street, London W1
Open: Mon-Sat, 12 noon-11.30pm; Sun, 12 noon-10.30pm.
Guide price: £110 for two (with wine)
Wheelchair access.
Despite what you may think, this restaurant reviewing lark is not all cakes and ale. To do the job, you first have to be bone idle. Then you must learn to disguise the pitiable gaps in your gastronomic knowledge by the plentiful use of cheap wisecracks and gratuitous insults. You also run the risk of serious physical damage as you pursue your calling. It's rumoured that one restaurant critic even went missing for a couple of months to have dental implants fitted, her own teeth having been worn away by excessive mastication, as with camels in the desert. I know the feeling, because I once almost ate my own tongue at the excellent Chez Gérard on Charlotte Street, London. Well, they do an excellent chateaubriand, and I got carried away.
Being a lover of good meat (my standing order to waiters is, "I'll have a rare steak and I mean rare - just knock off its horns, wipe its arse and bung it on the plate"), I recently ventured into the Gaucho Grill, just off Piccadilly. A small chain of these Argentinian restaurants has sprung up across London (and one in Manchester), but I went to the link that's reputedly the best, and spitting distance from the Stork Room where well-dressed dancers with little ballroom once used to sashay to the mambos of Edmundo Ros. The last time I'd eaten Argentinian was in the Loews Hotel in Miami, in the wood-panelled Gaucho Room, and it was a memorable experience. The beer was ice-cold, the prime aged Argentinian Bife de Lomo sublime, and an agreeable haze of woodsmoke filled the air, so I was hoping for more of the same.
Instead, I descended a wrought iron staircase into what used to be the wine cellar of the Mexican ambassador, but now resembles a submarine crossed with a satanic nightclub. Instead of a subtle Piazzolla tango, 1,000 decibels of drum and bass performed the Heimlich manoeuvre on my ears and, although the place was only 50% full, the noise made it seem more like 150%. This certainly isn't a place to go for an intimate tête-à-tête, not least because the odd shape of the rooms lends a peculiar acoustic to speech (like a whispering gallery); but, anyway, conversation was almost impossible in this miserable bunker, the sort of place you'd be glad to enter only if there had just been a nuclear attack on London. And after such a cataclysmic event, you might even be glad to swallow the food.
This place prides itself on its meat ("Argentinian ... from grass-fed cattle raised on the pampas"), so why did the steaks ordered by my guest (who wishes to be known here as Dylan Tarragon) and I taste as though the cows had been raised on a diet of Pampers? Both were suspiciously symmetrical, with carbonised sear marks on the outside (suggestive of wildly excessive heat), and had neither the healthy marbling of fat nor the succulent texture I expect from top-quality meat. Dylan (a beef expert) stated bluntly that the best Argentinian steaks "just taste beefier", adding that "the outer edges of the best roast joints have always been slow cooked so they're salty and caramelised, but not burnt". The Peter Luger Steakhouse in New York is a place where you'll get the real thing, not the lacklustre travesty on offer here.
The starters and side dishes were equally disappointing. The grilled gambas were dry, the mashed potato uninspiring and the green pepper sauce spoke to me of mass catering, and could well have come from Brakes (the fluid, not the restaurant suppliers). The "fine wine" list was hideously expensive for such an average restaurant, and I object to being charged £33 for a bottle of Carmela Benegas Rosé that was just too alcoholic to be refreshing (15.5% is on a par with sherry). Moreover, even though the place wasn't packed, service was extremely slow, except at the very end, when I requested the bill. Then, and only then, they suddenly became only too eager to part me from my dosh.
What made me pleased to be here? Only the act of leaving and getting back to street level after an experience that had left me thoroughly in the dark (literally and metaphorically). So dingy was the cellar that it was almost impossible to distinguish between the waiters and the diners, or, for that matter, to see where your food ended and the plate began. Frankly, I don't agree with being asked to eat dinner in almost pitch blackness, because I want to be able to see the colour of my food. Well, how else can I check to make sure that I'm eating nothing blue?
