The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - The Telegraph Magazine
William Sitwell visits Beck at Brown’s
The dessert is the best part of a meal overshadowed by some very spendy wine
A GREAT SOMMELIER has two skills: knowledge of wine and an ability to sell it. Even the most ardent aficionado of the grape must go to their grave wondering what more there is to learn. There are the characters who make wine, the landscape and climate that craft it, the market that manages to both simplify and complicate it. The opportunity for new discoveries makes one’s quest for knowledge in the wine world like that of a spaceship’s captain searching for new galaxies. The sommelier edits his or her learnings for the benefit of the customer, before exhibiting that second essential trait: a knack for flogging the stuff.
They must get the measure of their customer. You may have had that feeling of dread when, in some posh gaff, you spot the chap with the grape brooch pinned to his lapel making his approach to your table. ‘Not now, Cato,’ you think to yourself.
The sommelier must also, subtly, suss the depth of your pocket. If this meal is your treat, it can be a bit embarrassing if there’s too much chat about the financials. Sommelier: ‘I have this lovely Puligny-montrachet for £80, sir.’ Me: ‘Got any chardonnay for around 20 quid?’
At Heinz Beck’s restaurant in Brown’s Hotel, I’d given the sommelier a very big clue as to the bottom of my pocket when ordering a bottle of white at the start of dinner – the cheapest on the list, an Italian vermentino (Cantine Lunae 2017) at £50. Having exhausted it, and now facing the chateaubriand, we asked for two glasses of red.
A barolo was suggested, and soon
enough two 125ml measures of the stuff materialised. It was wonderful, and you might imagine sommeliers high-fiving at this fine example of skill-set delivery. But fast-forward to the bill, where I noted that the two glasses of barolo came in at £68 – £34 for a smallish glass of red? I looked at the room, sparsely inhabited, no more than four tables taken, aside from a small beauty-product convention in a screened-off section. Was that scorpion of a bill an attempt to prop the place up? Hardly, since it would surely take a very large number of 125ml glasses of barolo to make the numbers work.
So all I can say is, ‘Nice wine, horrible price. Naughty sommelier.’ And given the rather terrible reception that this place got from critics when it opened last summer (‘the most pointlessly spendy’, was the general consensus), this kind of travesty should alarm the bosses of Brown’s.
I too visited when it first opened, so while I knew that Olga Polizzi’s florid wallpaper would still be clashing with the dark-wood panelling, I wanted to see if the over-imagined food (created by Germany-born, Italy-based Beck, a chef with restaurants bearing his name across the world, which means he likely wouldn’t come to this one more than once a month) had improved.
And those triple-cooked chips? A mere triplet of them. That’s right: three chips
mess with a classic, I had thought when I tried the fagottelli alla carbonara that first time. But now the little al dente parcels of pasta containing a mouthful of that raw-eggy, cheesy carbonara sauce tasted original, in a good way. A plate of veal tartare was so pretty it belied its edgy rawness. Placed between two Melba-toast-style pieces of bruschetta, which had measured hints of rosemary, it came with dollops of cream scented with truffle and Parmesan, showing that the chef has a rather clever sensibility.
Still, the chateaubriand for two was strangely soulless. I always thought the point of chateaubriand was that it came as a feasting dish. A burly piece of meat, resting from the fire, to be carved and shared. And the menu promised ‘triple-cooked chips’. So I anticipated a hairs-on-your-chest, meat-and-potatoes moment. Instead, out came two plated portions of the meat, cooked in a way (possibly sous vide and then a little grilling to colour) that rendered it too tender, too light; textureless in fact. And those triple-cooked chips? A mere triplet of them. That’s right: three chips.
The kitchen was back on form for dessert – affogato tiramisu, a rare example of when deconstructing a dish can be startlingly successful. Beneath a disc of chocolate powder was a floaty, light cream that tasted of tiramisu but without its over-sweetened, heavy vulgarwhy ity. Running under it and drizzled over it was the espresso.
A triumph I would have written home about were it not for the wretched sommelier, wowing me with his knowledge, but then slapping me about the chops with his outrageous financial demands.