London,

Café Bohème

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Cuisine: French

13-17 Old Compton Street, W1V 5JQ


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Mark Bolland, ES Magazine

 

Description: **STOP PRESS** Note (January 2008): Closed until March for a total refurbishment. **STOP PRESS** Traditionally a "vibrant" destination, this heart-of-Soho bar/café/brasserie is being relaunched with a new look in the spring of 2008.

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Phone: 020 7734 0623
Website: http://www.cafeboheme.co.uk

Good for: Romantic meals, Good food, Ambience.

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Great people – so what went wrong?

 

Fine pedigrees: Ed Wilson and Henry Harris both have impressive CVs

Other reviews

• Plenty of life in Cafe Boheme

Look here too

• Launceston Place review

Anyone on the waiting list for membership of Soho House or another club set up by Nick Jones, or those who left school without much in the way of qualifications — not necessarily a mutually inclusive group — will be bucked by the following.

The careers master at the school Nick Jones attended said that the lad should definitely go into catering, in those days (1980) the obvious way forward for academic duds or, as we might nowadays sometimes put it more correctly, dyslexics.

After joining Trusthouse Forte’s Management Training Programme and working for the company for eight years, Nick Jones set up his own restaurant business called Over the Top. The concept was different meats over which could be poured one of 10 sauces. The sauces were named after mountains. What went into Kilimanjaro I am not sure.

Neither the Fulham Road branch nor the one in Soho flourished since, as Jones readily admits, the idea and its execution was terrible. With the bank too deeply committed to foreclose, Jones sold the Fulham site and turned the Soho branch of Over the Top into Café Boheme. In 1995, with £1 million worth of backing from his landlord, the late Paul Raymond, he turned the space above Café Boheme into Soho House. Recently Richard Caring bought a majority shareholding in the expanding Soho House Group for squillions.

A while back Café Boheme closed for refurbishment. It opened a couple of weeks ago with a new look and new chef. The interior is now eerily reminiscent of Keith McNally’s Pastis in New York’s meatpacking district (itself a pastiche of a Parisian brasserie).

Henry Harris, chef-director of Soho House Group, is overseeing the launch and Ed Wilson, who worked with Harris at Harvey Nichol’s Fifth Floor and later for Chris Galvin at The Wolseley and Galvin Bistrot de Luxe, is head chef. What could go wrong? On the food front, anyway? Quite a lot, as it turned out.

My first reaction to the menu was that it was the Ladybird Book’s version of a French brasserie list with nothing too frightening, such as the tête de veau and cervelle au beurre noir that Henry Harris used to serve at the restaurant Racine which he co-owned in Knightsbridge.

Then I noticed that there were dishes such as hamburger and frites, chicken club sandwich and frites and crab and avocado on toast (pain Poilâne) included presumably to reassure Soho habitués that a favourite hangout had not gone irredeemably native. The potentially alarming hamburger “à cheval” only means with a fried egg on top.

On a Sunday evening four of us decided to stick mostly to froggy classics such as eggs “en cocotte” (arbitrary French words on the menu are in quotation marks), a ham omelette, lapin à la moutarde and lamb gigot with flageolet beans.

We also tried pea and sorrel soup at the reasonable price of £4 and whole grilled royal bream. This last also seemed something of a bargain at £12 but unfortunately it smelt as if too much time had passed since it had been in the sea. The eggs with cream hadn’t set in any part and so presented as completely slimy.

The rabbit was flavourless and the lamb a tough grilled steak rather than slices from a roasted leg as implied. Green salad at £3.50 tasted as if dressed with an emulsion made with oil from the fryer. Not everything was so disappointing. A beetroot, lentil, walnut and goat’s cheese salad was fine, as was the soup, and a Coupe Boheme built around coffee ice-cream was generously composed, but I was surprised to see Henry Harris emerge from the kitchen that evening.

Indeed, I went back to the restaurant for lunch a few days later to see if the experience had been an aberration.

Egg mayonnaise latticed with anchovies was comme il faut and the only quibble my companion made about the tarte à l’oignon was that the filling was too deep. He was anticipating something more like a slice of pissaladière.

Steak frites featured a not particularly admirable piece of meat and like most restaurants, Café Boheme would seem to have decided that to achieve consistency it is better to buy in prepared chips.

Coq au vin was sour as if marinated too long. Now that we peasants don’t have to make do and mend with an exhausted rooster from the barnyard, maybe it is time to embrace coq au Riesling, using a chicken in a sauce which avoids making the poultry flesh stringy.

Good news is the existence of an alluringly decorated “salon” in the basement. You don’t have to be a member to while away your life down there in one of the nooks and crannies, although the French manager on the Sunday evening said it was reserved for “the right sort of people”. Should you be one of those, you get some Nick Jones sorcery without having to “belong” to Café Boheme.

Details are correct at the time of publication - please check with venue before booking.

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