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Reader rating
Description: "No messing, just steak-frites and secret sauce" -- that's the formula winning support for this "Parisian import", in Marylebone; after a shaky start, it's now finding more favour for "doing what it says on the packet".
Food: 
Service: 
Ambience:
Phone: 020 7486 0878
Website: http://www.relaisdevenise.com
Good for: Good food, Ambience.
Payment options:
Friendly service: a waitress with Le Relais's signature steak frites
The most critically reviled restaurant to open this year was the Chicago Rib Shack in Knightsbridge. I duly reported that the food was muck, as did nearly all other reviewers. Readers on the This Is London website have disagreed. "Lighten up Dave, your review read like Basil Fawlty had written it," one fan advised. And the Shack is still in business.
Three years ago, it was Le Relais de Venise that took the big drubbing of the year. It's the London outpost of a Parisian institution, created in 1959, the restaurant's gimmick being that it serves only one menu - a salad of lettuce with walnuts, followed by an entrecôte steak and frites, accompanied by a "secret sauce". Only with desserts is there any choice.
In Paris, the format has proved long-term popular. But when Le Relais de Venise arrived in London, it was promptly kicked all around the block. Fay Maschler thought the steak resembled "something knitted in a machine". Jan Moir said that eating it was "just like chewing on tasteless meat fibre - like your own arm, if you were careless and it was dark" and added that the secret sauce tasted like "liquid moss". Improving on Moir, Matthew Norman alleged that the sauce was a "crime against humanity", the recipe only kept secret because if it was ever published, "hans Blix would be out of retirement in five minutes".
So they did their worst, the reviewers. The restaurant responded by sacking their first chef, but then carrying on exactly as before. And they were right. Last Monday night the place was not only packed, people were keenly queueing in the rain - it doesn't take bookings.
They can't have been there for the decor. Le Relais is determinedly humdrum - maroon banquettes, close-packed tables, paper tablecloths and just one knife and one fork each. But the room has an cheery atmosphere and most of the people look as though they've been here before. There being no choice, service is almost instantaneous, by friendly French girls in black dresses and white aprons, somehow managing to be neither tarty nor kitsch.
The starter salad - a few lettuce leaves and some pieces of walnut, bound together with a pretty sharp, wine-killing vinaigrette - is almost too plain even for me. It could so easily be lifted by, say, a gentler dressing of walnut oil and lemon juice, some leaves of chicory, a smear of Roquefort ... It's served with some slices of baguette, but nothing so extravagant as butter.
The steak is offered blue, rare, medium or well-done and comes already sliced and smothered in the sauce, which might more tactfully be served separately. But the beef is good, the restaurant's website revealing that it is sourced from the Aberdeenshire-based butcher Donald Russell, supplier to the Queen, top-rated by Rowley and Nigella too (www.donaldrussell.com). And the matchstick-cut chips, if not entirely crisp, are hard to stop eating. The meal is a modest portion, squeezed onto a surprisingly small plate, but then a second helping is offered ...
And that green sludge of a sauce? It's mostly butter, flavoured, I would guess, with very cooked-down shallots, garlic and anchovy, with a lot of green herbs then chopped in - a little tarragon, perhaps, parsley and basil. It's quite distinctive, a bit sweet, nice enough, if more overbearing than the simpler, classic sauces.
At £19 per person for the two courses alone, with 10 per cent service to be added, Le Relais de Venise is not cheap.
There is a short list of puddings - crème brûlée, praline liégeois, choccy cake and profiteroles, £ 4.50 or £ 4.95 each. The cheeseboard, at £6.50, is predictable - Brie, Camembert, Comte, a bleu and a goat's cheeselog - but high quality.
The wine list is equally brusque, just four reds, one white and one rosé. But that's fine, for the house wine (£13.50 as bottle, £3.95 a glass) is great stuff: a sappy, red-berryish Côtes-de-Bordeaux, Chateau de Lardiley 2004.
And that's that. In its way, a definitive bistro meal. All you could want, some evenings. The critics might not have liked it, but plenty of customers do. And this time, I'm with them.
Details are correct at the time of publication - please check with venue before booking.
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