£700 for a steak? £9.50 for a plate of broccoli? Former food critic Jan Moir is sickened by today's rip-off restaurants
There comes an age when you get to a certain age – and that is the age when you are crumbling inside like a landslip, but determined to present a Mount Rushmore-strength façade of youthful capability to the outside world.
Those who have gone before you, those who have already tottered down this path of incipient doddery, often leave helpful hints to navigate the terrain. Here is rule number one; never complain about the price of anything, because nothing is more ageing.
Too true – but who said it first? Dame Joan Collins? Haile Selassie? Obviously, I can’t remember. Obviously, I had to Google ‘American presidents carved in stone’ to retrieve the Mount Rushmore reference and slip it back into a dusty file in the Jan-brain, where it promptly disappeared into the Jan-ether once more. Obviously, intensifying age means I now complain about the price of everything, especially when in restaurants.
Dear God, what has happened to restaurants? Dining out just seems so gaspingly expensive these days, weirdly out of whack with the rising cost of living.
While even the most desultory pub burger can cost £20, inflation has resulted in a 25-per-cent price increase at Nando’s, where half a chicken culled from a corner of hell is now £8.50.
The surge is real and some price rises are understandable, but surely not even the pandemic, Brexit, staff shortages, the tomato crisis and Mayfair rents can justify, at a new restaurant called Socca in London, £35 for a portion of beef and carrots? Or £28 for a rabbit leg in the same establishment, which bills itself as a coastal Provençal bistro and adds a 15-per-cent service charge to every bill.
Not that the service is, shall we say, skilled. At lunch, my guest ordered a glass of champagne (£22) and when he complained that it was warm, the waiter decanted his tepid pour into a chilled glass, as if that solved everything.
If anyone did that in a real coastal Provençal bistro, I like to think the resulting uproar would be heard from Toulon to Menton and back again.
If you are in the mood to be amused at restaurant prices, the real laughs are to be had at the top end of the market.
Despite the chill wind of recession, a wave of expensive new places have gaily opened in London, catering to super-rich thrill-seekers who clearly don’t mind paying £110 for a lobster pie for two at Mount Street Restaurant or even 30 quid for a vegetable stew with potato dumplings further down the menu.
Who are these people? International gas-pipeline-owners with a sideline in uranium stocks and a desperate need for luxury comfort food and creamy saucing?
Just up the road from Socca, billionaire restaurateur and nightclub-owner Richard Caring has launched a restaurant called Bacchanalia, where guests crowd into a room adorned with sightless statuary, where they are invited to ‘dine like Bacchus’ on grim fillets of sea bream at £42. Maybe with a side order of broccoli spears for £9.50 plus 14.5-per-cent service – surely the most expensive spears since Marcus Aurelius tooled up his army during the first Marcomannic War.
Over in Knightsbridge, notorious condiment-frottager Salt Bae makes a disgusting fetish of prices at his Nusr-Et Steakhouse, wrapping a chargrilled tomahawk steak in 24-carat gold leaf and selling it for north of £700.
His is the extreme for which there is no excuse, yet even the River Café is slipping beyond the financial moorings of mere mortals, with main courses such as wood-roasted pigeon with green beans now nudging into £50-plus territory and beyond.
Of course, there are lots of restaurants where skill is still in the kitchen and value for money is still on the table, but they are few and far between.
I don’t include Noma in this category, even though it is supposed to be the best restaurant in the world. The famous Copenhagen establishment pioneered the global fermentation and foraging movement, a joyless experience often involving jellyfish, moss, ants and deer-brain custard.
To dine there on what sounds like the contents of Thor’s bunion-alleviating footbath will cost diners £400 each, plus £175 per head for the mandatory juice pairings.
Juice pairings! I’ve heard it all now. Yet expensive restaurants everywhere should beware – for even this steep pricing cannot save Noma, which is closing next year for good.
Chef René Redzepi says it has become financially and emotionally unsustainable. For customers or for staff? He doesn’t elaborate.
Once upon a time I was a restaurant critic for a national newspaper, but I could never do the job now. Why? Every week, I would be barrelling into new dining rooms, bellowing ‘HOW MUCH? You’ve got to be joking. Listen, mate: I want to buy just lunch, not the entire restaurant.’ And not only is that very ageing, as Dame Joan Selassie once pointed out. It is also very boring.
The Older May 2023
