The Astor Grill at Cliveden House, Taplow, Berkshire SL6 0JF (01628 607 107). Meal for two, including wine and service: £160-£195
Mediocrity is often, by its nature, hard to spot. The mediocre doesn’t yell for attention. Mediocrity doesn’t tap dance into the limelight for fear of tripping over. At the Astor Grill, the more laid back dining option at Cliveden House in Berkshire, mediocrity presented itself on the edge of the saucer holding my cup of mint tea. It was a wrapped biscotti, sealed inside garish plastic packaging.
And what was wrong with that? The fact that it would be followed by the bill, which I estimated to be £165 for two, with two glasses of non-champagne fizz and the second cheapest bottle of wine on the list. For that sort of money I would expect them, at the very least, to pretend they’d made their own biscotti, by unwrapping them first. I’ve been around the restaurant industry long enough to be able to celebrate insincerity and sleight of hand, deftly executed. Instead they’d just got them out of the box. It was a cheap thing for an expensive restaurant to do.
As it happens I was wrong about the bill. It wasn’t a ludicrous £165 for two. Don’t be absurd. It was £196. And that’s a number which changes everything. It matters little that the staff are polite and friendly, though they are. It’s irrelevant there’s a terrace outside dressed with geraniums and rambling jasmine, with pots of lavender and miniature olive trees, like it was somewhere on a flower-happy hillside in Provence. When the bill is that big you step back and ask yourself one question: will this expense at least deliver an experience that makes you feel so good about the world, that you will forget momentarily about the cost?
In these circumstances, when the mood has soured and the credit card has begun to emit the high narcotic tang of burning plastic, the good stuff becomes less a cause for praise, than a plea in mitigation for a crime that everyone accepts has already been committed. So let’s have a look at the mitigation.
First there is the setting. Cliveden, famously the home of the Astor family from the late 19th century has, courtesy of the Profumo Affair, always had a reputation for indulgence. Great parties have long been held on the estate and it was at one of those that government minister John Profumo met Christine Keeler, who was also involved with a Russian diplomat. Decades later the scandal still lends an air of loucheness to the place. The view up the drive is magnificent. It is now the quintessential English Country House Hotel. In 2012 Cliveden joined forces with Chewton Glen, arguably the example upon which all the Country House Hotels established since have been modelled. Cliveden has chandeliers and over-stuffed sofas like North Korea has political prisoners.
For a long time Cliveden has tried to flog its dining room as a standalone destination restaurant. A couple of years ago the experienced chef André Garrett, who made his name at the Orrery, was hired to head up the big ticket restaurant. He is also overseeing the new Astor Grill which occupies what was once a stable block, and a lovely conversion it is, too. The stalls, with their intricate iron work, have been made into booths, upholstered in turquoise leather. There are bits of horsey memorabilia lying around. The high ceilinged space echoes to the sound of evening chatter. Elbows rest on tables.
On paper, the menu is right: a few starters followed by salads, fish dishes and grills. It is written for comfort rather than fireworks. And we do eat a couple of good things. Venison sausage rolls, advertised as a snack, turn up as small curls of butter pastry, around a meaty cylinder, inserted into the sort of dimpled Staubware used for snails in their shells. Of the main courses a Barnsley chop – a lamb chop, doubled – is well cooked, though oddly presented, the two long arms sliced off and tucked underneath like a trivet. An adequately sized piece of halibut for the money risks being overwhelmed by the slick of blitzed salsa verde across it, but there are signs of care and attention. Both cost £24. The chips are fine, and a raspberry soufflé does the job, as it should for £9.
Other things cause teeth grinding. Grilled Wye Valley asparagus have been overcooked and are limp and lifeless. The menu says they come with “flaked” feta, which is either a neat trick if you can pull it off, or a deadening piece of menu language cobblers. It’s the latter. The cheese is not flaked – it’s feta, for God’s sake – but crumbled on top. A plate of crispy Cornish squid is terrible: grey, pallid, and bouncing off the teeth. Yo! Sushi does a better crispy squid (just order it fresh when you sit down at the conveyor belt).
The other dessert is a trifle which seems present and correct until we hit the sliced strawberries on top. My companion and I look at each other. I say: “Are you tasting… garlic?” She agrees. So either they’ve sourced a unique variety of strawberry or somebody forgot to clean the knife. Hmm. I wonder which it is. And then the mint tea arrives with the shrink-wrapped biscotti.
The wine list is short and more shameless than a 1960s pool party thrown by the Astors. A glass of the Chapel Down blanc de blanc is £13. A whole bottle retails at around £26, before any wholesale discount. The cheapest bottle of white wine is £30. We have the second cheapest, A Pulpo Albarino for £33. It retails for no more than £7.50 (Majestic has it for £6.50). They have marked it up by a factor of at least four if not nearer five. I’m sorry, but no volume of driveways or vistas, chirpy waiters, blooming geraniums or miniature olive trees makes up for a pricing policy like this. Could we have eaten more cheaply? Yes, of course. But we could also have eaten more expensively. The 12oz veal cutlet is £33.
Curiously there are cheaper wines on the main wine list for the fancypants restaurant across the courtyard. Indeed, you could have the full André Garrett gastronomic malarkey for less money. Often at the end of a meal like this I ask myself a simple question. Would I come back here and spend my own money? Because let’s not pretend I could afford to, and if the experience is right I would. With the Astor Grill the answer is simple. It’s a no.
Jay’s new bites
■ The wood-panelled Colony Grill of the Beaumont Hotel, just off London’s Oxford Street, is everything the Astor Grill wants to be, but isn’t quite. As befits a restaurant from Corbin and King, the team behind the Wolseley, it is a glorious act of homage. Go for calves liver and bacon, or chicken pot pie, for the whimsy of ‘build it yourself’ ice cream sundaes, or just for one of the best bacon rolls available for breakfast in the capital (colonygrillroom.com).
■ Amid the constant tsunami of cookery books, a new one by the Chinese food expert Fuchsia Dunlop is always worth looking out for. The Land of Fish and Rice, published on 28 July by Bloomsbury, includes recipes for Wuxi meaty pork ribs, chicken with young ginger, sweet and sour radishes, and a whole lot more besides.
■ Proof that the good value lobster and over-priced burger peddled by the Burger and Lobster chain is really only for London: the current Cardiff and Manchester branches are closing. They say they’re looking for smaller units for both (burgerand lobster.com)
Jay Rayner’s new book, The Ten (Food) Commandments, is out now (£6, Penguin). To order a copy for £5.10, go to bookshop.theguardian.com
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or follow him on Twitter @jayrayner1
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