Adelphi Building, John Adam Street, London WC2 (020 7321 6007). Meal for two, including drinks and service: £225
Cooking a steak well is tricky, because you cannot see inside the meat. It takes experience and knowledge. Cooking chips is easy: use the right potatoes, give them a couple of runs through the hot oil, make sure they’re the right colour, perhaps even taste a couple. The job is done. At Smith & Wollensky, the new London outpost of a well-known small American steakhouse chain, we sent back the chips because they were tepid and under-cooked. They returned to us hot and undercooked. And in that one example of carelessness and lack of attention to detail, you know all you need to.
But I had to sit through the whole damn meal so I don’t see why you shouldn’t, too. This US business has swaggered into London like it thinks it’s the bollocks. The description is almost right, if you remove the definite article before the reference to testicles. It is about as shoddy an operation in separating people from inexcusable amounts of their cash as I have seen in a very long time.
But first a little context. Until about a decade ago Britain was crying out for a proper steakhouse on the American model; one that knew how to source beef, cut steaks thick enough and char them properly. Endless feeble attempts came and went. Then we got both Goodman and Hawksmoor, the latter adopting all the tropes of the US steakhouse, but giving them a pronounced British accent. It put prime cuts of British beef centre stage.
And now comes Smith & Wollensky (hereafter S&W), which bellows loudly about importing US Department of Agriculture beef from Iowa, but which is backed by a consortium from Ireland, a country which produces some of the best beef in the world. They have spent a reputed €10m, and you can see where every cent has gone. The conversion of the basement and ground floor space of the 1930s New York pastiche Adelphi Building just behind the Strand is an orgy of leather and wood, of brass rail and tasteful mural. It can seat 300 people. Across 14 services a week I calculate they will need to find roughly 4,000 people able to pay the prices required to return that investment.
Cocktails are £13. That buys me an insipid Moscow Mule served in a stupid brass mug with a thin plastic straw. Five pleasant enough medium-sized seared scallops with shards of crisp bacon are £18; four jumbo prawns are £14. Except they don’t call them prawns, because despite the London setting the place must have a transatlantic drawl. So prawns are shrimps and all steaks are listed in imperial measurements. The USDA cuts include a 24oz bone-in ribeye and a 21oz sirloin. The prices for these are astonishing. The former is £65, the latter £62. To put this in context, at Hawksmoor the bone-in sirloin is £5.60 per 100gm. At S&W it’s £10.42 per 100gm.
Is that simply because it has travelled? Not if the fillet steak prices are anything to go by, because S&W have sourced those from the UK. At Hawksmoor fillet is £11.33 per 100gm; at S&W it’s £14.55. Both the menu blurb and the waiting staff bang on about this being the best steak you will ever have. The menu also mentions a list of blackboard specials – T-bones and so on – all of which have run out by 8.20pm. We order the bone-in ribeye. The char is feeble and the overwhelming taste is of salt. Worse is the texture. It’s floppy. Part of this, I think, is a cultural difference; Americans like to celebrate steaks based on tenderness, as if being able to cut a piece of dead animal with a butter knife is an aspiration. I think that if you’re going to eat beef, you want to know it has come from an animal that has moved. This steak slips down like something that has spent its life chained to a radiator in the basement.
The sauces are dire. A béarnaise is an insult to the name, lacking any acidity or the anise burst of tarragon. An au poivre sauce is just a shot of hot demi-glace. A side salad is crisp and well dressed. We take comfort in it. Many other sides are priced for two which is a quick route to higher profit margins and greater food waste. The £9 battered onion rings are good; the £10 truffled mac and cheese is dry and tastes not at all of truffle. Those terrible chips come in the kind of mini-chip-fat-fryer-basket used at chain pubs.
Service is omnipresent. Twice we ask to keep our bread and side plates when they attempt to remove them. When a third waiter lunges in I finally admit defeat. Take them if you’re so bloody desperate. How hard is it to communicate a table’s wishes to the half dozen people working a corner of the floor, especially when a meal is going to cost more than £100 a head?
Our waitress, an escapee from Hawksmoor, is lovely – efficient, charming and utterly wasted here. She has been sent out on to the floor in a jacket she admits is about three sizes too large for her and is already stained. Either the management gives a damn about the dignity of its staff or it really doesn’t. Still, she speaks fluent Smith & Wollensky, intoning the oft-repeated figure that theirs are the best 2% of all USDA steaks. God help the other 98%. We try to love it, really we do, but we just can’t. Clearly the poor animal died twice: once in the slaughter house, once on the grill. We give up and hope she doesn’t look too distraught. Curiously, the menu announces in small print that items “may” be cooked to order. May? Only may? Don’t put yourself out, guys.
We finish with the “Gigantic chocolate cake” which costs £15. It comes with a mini milk urn full of chilled lightly whipped and sweetened cream. That cream is by far the best thing we eat all night. The cake is an obscenity, a foul, brusque monolith of heavy sponge and cack-handed mousse almost a foot high. It tastes of fat and sugar and disdain. It eats like those showpiece cakes that have sat for years in coffee shop windows look. We are told there is an option to take left-overs home. We choose not to. The last thing we want, as we walk out the door, is to take any part of the dreadful Smith & Wollensky experience with us.
Jay’s new bites
■ At the other end of the expense scale, Grillshack on London’s Beak Street serves a quick-seared piece of flattened rump, with shoestring potatoes and smoked butter for just £9.95. It keeps prices down with new tech: although you can order at the counter you can also do so from a downloadable app. Food is then brought to you. There’s mac and cheese, buttermilk chicken, and an American pancake menu. It more than ticks the box marked cheap and cheerful (grillshack.com).
■ People of Ilkley rejoice. Friends of Ham, the much celebrated craft beer and charcuterie bar in Leeds – to be fair, mostly celebrated by me – is to gain a sibling there in August. As well as the bar and tasting room this one will have a deli (friendsofham.com).
■ Meanwhile from across the Pennines comes news of collaboration. Northcote graduates Tom Parker of the White Swan at Fence and Mike Jennings of Grenache in Worsley near Manchester are cooking together for two nights. They’ll be at the White Swan on 30 July and over at Grenache on 13 August.
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk
Follow Jay on Twitter @jayrayner1
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