9/10
Telephone 020-7935 4007
Address 66 Baker Street, London W1
Open All week, lunch, noon-3pm; dinner, 6.30-10.30pm.
Menu Lunch, £15.50 for three courses (£17.50, 6-7pm); à la carte, about £40 a head.
Wheelchair access and disabled WC
In the age of the £100 a head meal, I am pleased to announce the development of a new fantasy. Loosely based on scenes from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, it involves the recall of Peter Mandelson from his hidey-hole beneath a pile of ladies' lingerie in Brussels, in the role of the Chef Catcher.
Given a wagon in the form of a heavily barred cage, Mandy will travel the land, enticing liberty-taking chef-proprietors into the back with the siren call of "Free truffles! Free truffles!" Once he's rounded up a dozen, he'll drive them to Galvin Bistrot De Luxe in Baker Street, where he will demand - on pain of being taken back to his dungeon, to spend the rest of their days as slave labour in the manufacture of Euro-bras - that they justify their charges when the brothers Galvin can serve such fabulous food for so little.
Given the prevalence of the £25 sea bass fillet, the Galvins' £15.50 three-course set lunch is a dazzling curiosity. It's what an erstwhile neighbour of the restaurant at 221B might know as a three pipe problem, although perhaps it's more elementary than that. The truth is, you can feed people for relatively little, and provide smart service, fresh flowers and an appealing decor, if you choose to keep it simple and lack avarice.
Avoiding all the poncery that goes with the £100 meal certainly helps, and it was a delight not to be laboured with any facetious amuse bouches, those mini-cups of frothed-up soups that seem about half as amusing as the cup of cold cat sick they so closely resemble. Here, in this spacious, wood-panelled room - less bistro than first-class airport lounge, but with such classical touches as antique mirrors, squishy banquettes and globe lanterns - there are no such irritants. No foolish canapés, no "cappuccino of syphilitic mountain yak with pickled girolles", nothing to distract but some fabulous rye bread.
The à la carte menu is oddly reasonable, too, with the caveat that new restaurants tend to hike prices by 30% within two minutes of the last reviewer leaving the building. But having had a chat with one of the brothers, Chris, a veteran of the Wolseley and Orrery, I suspect this is more labour of love than fleecing job.
The friend who came suffers from a pathological fussiness about his food. He cannot eat anything unless the ingredients are clearly visible, and separated from each other by a two-inch exclusion zone. So it came as a shock when he ordered lasagne of Dorset crab (£9.75) - "It's the least dirty food I can find," was the explanation - but any lingering doubt was quashed when it arrived. "Mmm," he said. "Lovely, delicate pasta, mushroomy, creamy sauce, very strong crab flavour. Mmm." My charcuterie maison (£9.75) was also impeccable, comprising three garlicky salamis, chunks of chorizo, outstanding ham and a pork rillette of perfect texture.
We were getting stuck into a decent riesling (the wine list is also very reasonable) and admiring the portraits of phallic root vegetables taken by Chris's wife in apparent homage to Baldrick, when the main courses arrived. "Oh dear," said my friend, distressed by my daube of venison with celeriac purée (£15.25). "Yeuggh." There's nothing like a resounding "yeuggh" to sharpen the appetite, and in retaliation I told him that unless he tried it I'd drop bits of deer on the smoked salmon he'd sequestered from the starters (£9.75). With my fork hovering over his plate, he began to crack. "What's that?" he asked nervily, as if the morsel on top of the meat were a nugget of depleted uranium. "Bacon? You're sure?" He took the fork. "Ahhh. Mmmm. That's meltingly good." So it was, the venison having been slow-cooked in a rich, red wine, bacon and mushroom sauce until it was almost beside itself with flavour and tenderness.
His salmon wasn't great, what little there was being ringed with capers ("Satan's bogies", as his wife-to-be knows them), but Chris promises to do something about the portion. And that, once we'd finished with a gorgeous, moussey St Emilion au chocolat (£5) and a plate of various and magnificent red berries with sorbet (£6), proved the only weakness in a meal that made a point about how to compete in a crowded market rather more succinctly than a certain European commissioner has managed so far.
