8 Mount Street, London W1 (020 7491 7078). Meal for two, including drinks and service: £175
How much per square metre does it cost to clad a room in tarnished brass? Nail that figure and you could put a hard numerical value on what’s wrong with Le Chabanais. Because something has gone very wrong. Not with the food, which is interesting, if rather less interesting than it thinks it is. But in the very notion of this restaurant, here on Mount Street off Mayfair’s Berkeley Square.
It shouldn’t be this way. Le Chabanais is the London sibling of much-feted Franco-Basque chef Inaki Aizpitarte’s Paris bistro Le Chateaubriand. The latter is located in an unfashionable part of town and occupies a space which is pure Parisian down-at-heel bistro. There’s a zinc bar, unadorned magnolia walls, a tiled floor and bare wood tables. The first sitting from 7.30pm is bookable; for the second you have to queue. For this you get a set menu governed by what’s good that day. General opinion – I haven’t eaten there – is that the result can be thrilling. It is this contrast between humble surroundings and imaginative cooking that has made Aizpitarte a poster boy for the “bistronomie” movement, which argues that great food does not have to come with the frottage and stroke of tinkling glassware and heavy linen.
So what, then, have we got in London? Well, there’s still no linen, but instead of warm wooden tables, as in Paris, you get hulking lumps of marble which even on a warm summer’s evening chill your forearms. You get a London postcode which, short of occupying the Queen’s front parlour at Buckingham Palace, couldn’t be more central. There’s a reservation system, an à la carte rather than a set menu, and a room clad in so much brass you can’t help but feel you are locked inside some weird physics experiment involving voltage and resistance.
It is also overstuffed with fretting waiters of the sort who ask whether you’d like any water when you’ve already ordered from somebody else; who follow that up by asking if you’d like help with the wine list, when a bottle is already on the way. Apparently the staff here do not like talking to each other.
And then there are the prices. Le Chabanais is named after a famous Belle Époque Parisian brothel, which is an irresistible gift from the god of restaurant critics. I could resist it, of course, but I didn’t get where I am today by being classy and subtle. Because, believe me, this does feel like a place where the customers come to get screwed.
In Paris the set five-course menu is €70 including service, or £50. Here, three courses including service hits an easy £60 – more if you max out on the lobster or Dover sole. And then there’s that wine list. There’s one bottle at £28 and a handful at £30. After that it’s all: “If you’re looking at the right-hand column you’re too poor to be here so sod off back to the bit of London where normal people live.” When the bill comes all I can think is that I am paying a premium for some annoying interior designer to express their awful, gloomy vision in tarnished brass at whatever it is per square metre.
For Le Chabanais to have been true to its roots I should have had to schlep out to Dalston, to sit in some bare-bones room where the absence of frill forced me to focus on the food, for which I would have paid two-thirds of the cost, alongside a cheerful £24 bottle of wine. Because some of the food is diverting. There are lots of punchy, clean flavours. Pearly salt cod is here a piece of fish rather than the mash-up that comes with brandade, beneath the brassic, lightly bitter leaf fall of summer purslane. The whole is carefully lubricated with a mayonnaise-like sauce.
A Basque squid stew is all deep, funky black ink – mind your white shirt – and softened bits of squid and the sudden hit of finely sliced jalapeños. Most classical are the delicate chicken liver ravioli, the pasta so thin you can see through its translucence to the fine, earthy dice inside, as if they were delicate marine creatures. They bob in a perfectly clarified consommé flavoured with fennel. The Chabanais version of the bistro classic frisée aux lardons is pelted with a fine julienne of fatty piggy bits, heated gently until just melting rather than caramelised, with an egg yolk at the bottom.
Mains all hide under some drape of foliage. The turbot is a good bit of fish concealed under ribbons of courgette with the crunch of fresh almonds. The advertised caper butter is so close to a beurre blanc as makes no difference. Guinea fowl, both the breast and the crisped, boned leg, lies under browned crisps, as though an autumnal tree has dumped its load. A mush of purple potatoes is nice enough, though the listed ground ivy does not register. This may or may not be a good thing. My shoulder of pork is hidden under purple sprouting broccoli. When I dig through it I find something that has been shaved to resemble a late Friday night doner kebab. It’s nice enough but makes me think fondly of a good doner kebab, which might not have been the plan.
It all begins to feel like inventiveness for its own sake. At dessert, their take on Paris-Brest is a cream-filled dome of sweet pastry. It’s pleasant, but not as satisfying as a classic Paris-Brest. A Mont Blanc does the same thing, only more so. All the flavours are there: there’s a chestnut ice cream, some whipped cream and friable wafers of meringue. Which again makes me think how nice a classic Mont Blanc would be. This is not helped by the inclusion of finely sliced mushrooms which are there because, oh, I don’t know. Just bloody because. And don’t ask me why they put crumbled Kalamata olives on the serviceable cherry sorbet. There’s no excuse for that – not even being French.
Do you sense a growing irritability with this meal? You should. Just what were we doing here, in this neurotically burnished room, being charged absurd prices for food whose cleverness we were meant to swoon over rather than nod appreciatively at? The fact is that the pleasures here are fleeting and can leave you full of doubt and self-loathing. Well, at least they named it after the right sort of place.
Jay’s news bites
■ In truth, if you’re going to drop a shedload of dosh on dinner on Mount Street, you might as well pop down the road to the venerable Scott’s. Since its refurbishment by the Caprice Group in 2007, Scott’s has established itself as one of the capital’s great fish restaurants. Come for perfect oysters, Dover sole both on and off the bone, and some top celeb spotting (scotts-restaurant.com).
■ An increasing number of people are realising they want to eat out with someone they truly love: themselves. According to thecaterer.com, the restaurant reservation site OpenTable has seen a 110% leap in solo bookings over the past two years. Likewise a One Poll survey of 2,000 people found that 87% of British diners would have no problem eating alone.
■ The RNLI, the charity which does tireless work operating the lifeboats that save lives in the treacherous waters around these islands, needs money to pay for it. From 9-11 October they’re asking us all to stage a fish supper to help raise cash. For more information visit rnli.org/fishsupper.
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk
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