DEAN STREET TOWNHOUSE, 69-71 DEAN STREET, LONDON W1 (020 7434 1775). MEAL FOR TWO, INCLUDING WINE AND SERVICE, £110
There is not a single shocking item on the menu of the restaurant at the Dean Street Townhouse, a new boutique hotel in London's Soho. It is the last 10 years of British food in one tidy list. Dorset crab? Check. Pressed ham with piccalilli? Check. Dover sole, roast chicken, braised pork cheeks? Check, check and check again. That's the point. The Soho House Group, the company behind Dean Street, has worked to create a completely unshocking and therefore thoroughly soothing experience. Your granny would like it. From the wood floor edged with black and white tiles, through to the red leather banquettes, the olive-green cross-hatched wallpaper to the long mahogany bar, the whole place is designed to look like it has been there forever. Not bad for a joint that opened a couple of months ago.
Converting what was a grim outpost of the Pitcher & Piano chain – is there any other kind? – required substantial investment, and that comes courtesy of the fashion mogul Richard Caring, who has bright white teeth, skin the colour of a walnut dining table and pockets so deep there must be lost tribes hiding in them. Since 2005, when he bought Caprice Holdings – The Ivy, Le Caprice, J Sheekey, Scott's, etc – he has been rampaging about London throwing cash at the business. In 2008 he paid £105m for a majority share in the Soho House group – a bunch of members clubs around the world, plus Cecconi's, Café Boheme and others – and has helped bankroll their expansion. The expense is breathtaking: openings in New York and Los Angeles, a multi-million pound investment in a club at The Ivy (disclosure: I am a member) and now this place.
It would all be gauche and nauseating were it not for the professionalism of the operations. The dining room of the Townhouse is, as all the best restaurants are, a carefully managed machine. Unfortunately, right now, there is some grit between the cogs. But let's deal with the good things first. All tables having been taken, we were booked at the bar, which is fine by me. I like bar eating. I like watching the clatter and rush of the people behind it and having a waiter nearby to hassle. Deep-fried sprats, the size of my index finger but much tastier, came with a spiky caper mayonnaise. A salad of wild rabbit and black pudding had a carefully balanced dressing and was adorned with a perfect quartered quail scotch egg. At £6.75 and £9.75 each, nothing was cheap, but the quality of the ingredients was high and the execution spot on.
Then we waited for our main courses. And waited. And waited. And stared around the room a bit, and made polite conversation a bit, and then began menacing the bar staff by banging cutlery and baring our teeth and miming hunger. Finally, the mains turned up. At this point you want the narrative to take a positive turn, with an unambiguous "worth waiting for". They weren't. While the chervil-boosted shellfish sauce and the mussels bobbing in it were great, a fillet of cod on top was overcooked.
Much less impressive was the salt-beef with caraway dumplings and pickle. All I can say is there are no Jews in that kitchen. As I ordered, I asked them to make sure a little fat came with the meat. They shook their heads mournfully. This was not possible because it had already been thrown away. This was a bad sign. Salt beef can be desperately dry and tiresome without a little of the amber, jellied fat, and so it proved. It crumbled on my fork. The dumplings were sad, dense, slippery little things.
And whoever thought hot pickles was a good idea should be sent as cargo to New York then frogmarched to Katz's Deli and made to eat salt beef sandwiches and cold pickles repeatedly until they scream "Oy vey gevalt! I get it." Mr Caring, you may employ the most expensive dental hygienist in London, but you are still a nice Jewish boy. Deal with this dish. Expensive restaurants are only justified if the food is uniformly great – as the rhubarb and pear cobbler with vanilla ice cream was; as the queen of puddings, with its soft piped meringue topping giving way to a light raspberry-jam-smeared sponge, especially was. There is, however, absolutely no excuse for taking peasant food and gussying it up to such a degree that it loses all sense of purpose. Hell, I may just have to go to New York myself, just to banish the memory.★
