Heinz Beck at Brown’s Hotel, Albemarle Street, London W1S 4BP (020 7518 4004). Meal for two, including drinks and service £150+
Set into the back of the yielding, overstuffed seats at Brown’s Hotel on Albemarle Street in London’s Mayfair are what look to me like air vents. I don’t question this. Of course the sort of people who come here sweat more than most; it’s all that Botox and entitlement pumping through their bloodstreams. It’s got to have some sort of impact on their bodily secretions. It turns out the square, brass inflow ducts are actually handles designed to help the waiters move the over-engineered chairs around. Possibly while the clientele are still sitting in them.
Everything about Heinz Beck at Brown’s is over-engineered, including the food. Especially the food. The kitchen must be full of pasty-skinned worker cooks, dicing and chopping and chiffonading – it’s not a word, but a place like this demands new ones – as if somebody’s life depended on it. Micro-cubes of edible matter are tweezered into place. Fingerprints are polished off porcelain. Dollops are sculpted. Sculpt that dollop. Sculpt it now! A simple Italian classic like vitello tonnato – thinly sliced veal and tuna sauce – becomes here a spring meadow as painted by a pointillist with OCD. Your eye keeps being drawn into ever smaller details. Lord, they even deep-fried the caper berries.
Pointing and laughing is fine. Some occasions demand it. But blatant ridicule only works when it’s greased with honesty. So let’s be straight: very few people would find the food served at this Mayfair version of a casual Italian restaurant actively unpleasant (bar some unforgivably stale carta da musica crispbreads at the start). If you weren’t paying for it or, better still, didn’t look at the prices or the final bill or, best of all, understand anything about how money works, and somebody said: “Here, eat this vitello tonnato with deep-fried caper berries,” you’d clean the plate and say thank you very much and that was nice. You’d probably be thrilled someone bothered to make a sandwich out of two red mullet fillets, or a planet out of hazelnuts. It wouldn’t ruin your day.
But my job does involve understanding how money works. It often ruins my day. When you clock that the cheapest glass of wine is £16, a glass of Chablis is £20 and the cheapest full bottle of wine is £37 because it comes from South Africa where the economy is shaky, it becomes deadening and exhausting. Which is precisely what you would expect to happen when a grand hotel asks a chef like Heinz Beck, who has Michelin stars and awards and gilded trophies, to come from Rome to London and give us his version of laid-back. It’s like watching the Archbishop of Canterbury trying on beanie hats. You just know it’s going to end up being awkward and wrong. Not that anybody here seems to be in the slightest bit aware. Here on Albemarle Street, it’s business as usual.
Italian food can be finessed. It can be detailed. The word “fine” as in “fine dining” can be applied to it. But it also needs to be comforting. Leave froufrou to the French. The good Italian dishes are the ones you slump over on your elbows as you put the world to rights. I challenge anyone to manage a proper slump here. The walls are half wood-panelled. Above them is wallpaper of birds of paradise flitting from palm frond to palm frond. The banquettes are covered in wildly floral prints. Waiters wear white jackets like lethal weapons (though still manage to deliver dishes in the wrong order).
The place is summed up by my £24 starter of spaghetti cacio e pepe, that ultimate crowd pleaser in which a cheesy, peppery emulsion clings to strands of thick pasta. The price tag is courtesy of three lime-marinated langoustine tails, still translucent, that have been plonked on top. They are the definition of unnecessary adornment, their brisk freshness adding absolutely nothing to what should be the warm, even hot, piquant embrace of the pasta. Except this version seems terrified of piquant. When you start grinding extra black pepper on to your cacio e pepe you know something is up.
The perfectly enjoyable red mullet sandwich – two fillets, with black olive mush between them, then wrapped in thin dough and fried – comes sliced in half then plonked on salty mashed potato. It is high end processed food. You’re paying £21 for someone else’s hard labour. Chicken breasts with baby gem lettuce and cardoncelli mushrooms looks like a roast chicken dinner reimagined for MasterChef. John Torode would nod approvingly at it, mostly because he’s a nice chap.
But it’s odd. The breast is skinless, and therefore a big lump of springy indeterminate protein. On the side is a golden crisp. We both nibble at it, my companion and I, and eventually conclude it may well be the skin after a traumatic experience. It crunches pleasingly, but tastes very little of chicken. The mushrooms turn up in myriad textures. My companion points at the dish and quotes the candelabra’s line from Disney’s Beauty and the Beast: “Try the grey stuff, it’s delicious.” Never trust a candelabra. This grey stuff is soft and lightly acidic. It tastes like it once shook hands with a mushroom.
A hazelnut planet is a sphere of chocolate hazelnut mousse bisected by a shiny disc of thin, tempered chocolate, as if Saturn’s rings. Trails of biscuit crumb explode away from it. By far the best dish is a light, bubbling, custardy gratin of fresh raspberries with candied pistachios, a spidery web of pistachio sponge and a little scoop of soft, milky ice cream. It is all those comforting and clever things at the same time.
But it comes too late in a meal that has made me wonder about the point of both this venture and, by association, life. It can’t be to create a restful experience. Unless, of course, you’re so fat-walleted that if somebody asked you afterwards how much lunch cost, you wouldn’t have a clue. It’s not the most expensive restaurant in London. There are many other nominees for that title. But it does feel like one of the most pointlessly spendy. At the end, a fretful head chef is press-ganged into standing by the door to find out what you thought of everything. Here, at Heinz Beck at Brown’s, even leaving is an unnecessary ordeal.
Jay’s news bites
No one would accuse Margot in London’s Covent Garden of being dirt cheap – it’s a classic classy Italian. But the value is obvious. For example, the set lunch menu is £29 for three courses as against £42 at Heinz Beck. They do a strong line in classic pasta dishes, including pappardelle with wild boar ragu. Leave room for some of the best desserts in London (margotrestaurant.com)
Deliveroo and JustEats have competition. The founder of EasyJet, Stelios Haji-Ioannou, is launching EasyFood. Rather than taking commission on each delivered meal from restaurants and takeaways, the business will work on a subscription model. It’s launching in Birmingham, then moving into northern cities before taking on London in 2019.
Obviously Britain doesn’t have enough burger chains. Happily, it’s to get another courtesy of film star Mark Wahlberg and his brothers. Wahlburgers – geddit? – has 22 outlets in the US. It will open its first London branch in September. The menu includes burgers made with short rib and chuck.
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or follow him on Twitter @jayrayner1
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