London,

Avista

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Cuisine: Italian
A meal for two with wine, about £130 including 12.5 per cent service.

39 Grosvenor Square, W1K 2HP

Nearest Tube: Bond Street

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Open: Open daily 12.30-2.30pm and 6.30-10.30pm (10pm Sun)

 

 

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Avista's unimmaculate conception

 

Ideas man: Avista's head chef Michele Granziera

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Avista is one of those names on which corporations spend hundreds of thousands of pounds for the purpose of rebranding and then, after a while, go back to calling themselves something comprehensible like the Post Office.

A quick trawl through the web reveals an American Avista utilities company in Spokane, Washington, and an Avista firm of private equity investors (still in business?) in New York City and Houston, Texas. Nowhere can I find an Italian connection.

Michele Granziera, chef of the newly opened Avista restaurant in the Millennium Mayfair hotel, has worked alongside Andy Needham, chef of Zafferano, for the past six years. Unlike Andy, he is Italian, from the Veneto. Not only has Granziera — a keen-as-mustard, personable chap from brief acquaintance — come up with, or been saddled with, a meaningless restaurant name, but he’s got a concept.

Kingsley Amis once observed in his restaurant reviewing role that two of the most lowering sentences in life were “Shall we go straight in?” and “Red or white?” I would like to add, “Can I explain our concept?”

The faultlessly solicitous manager at Avista immediately buttonholed us with the concept. It went something like this: on Sundays Italian families get together to eat and share many dishes. Dishes here are designed to be shared and they will be sent out from the kitchen whenever they are ready.

All fine and dandy, except the menu lists items that — apart from maybe the stuzzichini (“snacks”) — are inimical to sharing. If you want customers to tuck in together, then provide a suckling pig or bollito misto. And we are all familiar with that one about dishes being sent out when they are ready. It suits the kitchen, not the customer.

The folksy, let-it-all-hang-out notion of sharing also sits oddly in the confines of a formally decorated hotel dining room, featuring gauche art, strident flowers and a range of water glasses in pastel colours, even a dining room with a bare brick wall and its own entrance (but not its own loos).

Anodyne taped music droned throughout the evening, becoming increasingly jarring at about 10pm, when, I imagine, it was intended to liven up the bar area.

The designer David d’Almada has also worked on La Petite Maison in Brooks Mews, another establishment where sharing un-shareable dishes and bowing to the kitchen’s strictures on timing is encouraged.

In the lower (main) part of the restaurant a granite-topped bar is heaped with raw vegetables, some so muddy you would swear that they had just been pulled up from an allotment. However, a stuzzichini of raw vegetables with anchovy cream proved to be a miserable token array. It ably fitted the definition of “horrids”, which a friend of mine who can’t cook once said she was going to serve at a dinner party. She meant crudités.

Aubergine Parmigiano can be a lovely dish: crisp, light and comfortingly old-fashioned. The example at Avista, served in too copious an amount on a swooping, white, very Moderne dish, had drowned in its own tomato sauce. Crab salad served in its shell lost the plot with the inclusion of cubes of papaya and avocado as well as an over-sweet lemon and basil sorbet.

The vision of the extended Italian family — the game granny, the impish children, the saucy aunt, the distracted dad bonding over Sunday lunch — faded even further into the background.

The matriarch (me) insisted that one of our party try a pasta dish. Tom chose linguine with lobster, tomato and chilli, which was generous with the lobster but also generous with sugar in the sauce. It unbalanced the whole.

A main course of chicken rotolo stuffed with provola cheese was a misconceived dish of chicken breasts, with whatever life they had had beaten out of them, rolled around courgettes — no cheese discernible — with more courgettes, this time grilled, served alongside. Since chicken has a propensity to be dry and dull it seemed a bizarre decision to help them down that road.

Two main courses of the day — a beautifully roasted veal chop with wild mushrooms, and sweet, innocent langoustines served in a briny foam that, unusually, enhanced the dish as a whole — made us feel that here was an able chef floundering in an environment that was making all the wrong demands. Certainly, the over-elaborate desserts at £6.50, which included a hot chocolate foam that managed to resemble a bowl of raw liver and a pannacotta stiff with too much gelatine and overburdened with mango, plums and Armagnac, seemed more hotel fancy than rustic Italian.

Maybe Michele Granziera should revert to the noble simplicity that is at the heart of the best Italian cooking and indeed offer dishes served family-style. But then hotel guests dining alone might be made to feel their solitary state more keenly.

There is currently good news in Grosvenor Square but it is the departure of the American Embassy, not — at the moment anyway — the arrival of Avista.

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

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