London,

The Luxe

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Cuisine: British
About £100-120 for two with wine

109 Commercial Street , E1 6BG

Nearest Tube: Liverpool Street

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Phone: 020 7101 1751

 

 

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Left Luxe with a sour taste in the mouth

 

Quite splendid: but The Luxe’s stylish interior belies the poor quality of its food

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The view, as you walk up Brushfield Street, is one of the most inspiring in London. Hawksmoor’s wonderful Christ Church stands tall, a stranger and more powerful creation than anything managed by the self-conscious artistes currently adorning Spitalfields. And the whole area around Spitalfields Market is just getting livelier every time you come back. There are so many great shops and inviting places to eat and drink with St John Bread & Wine just over the road ruling the roost.

Directly opposite St John, inside the handsome old flower market building itself, built in 1887, The Luxe has been running for a while now as a popular and noisy bar, while work has proceeded slowly, over a year or so, towards opening the ambitious restaurant upstairs. It’s the latest venture from John Torode, the handsome one off Celebrity Masterchef, who already runs the meat-fest, Smiths of Smithfield.

The top-floor room of the Luxe is quite splendid, boasting the original parquet floor, lots of exposed brickwork and a high beamed roof. In the centre, there’s a giant open kitchen behind a mightily impressive monolithic white marble bar with a hollow central section housing a rustic display of logs, all ready for use. For the big thing, here is the wood-fired oven, blazing away behind.

On our visit last week, it was blazing a bit too much. Fire alarms went off, smoke and fumes wafted into the room, and Torode, not cooking (head chef is Paul Daniel) but swanning around in a tails-out shirt, ended up grappling with the smoke-extractor units himself, not entirely successfully.

No doubt these were teething problems that will be fixed in due course. Perhaps such mishaps make it unfair to assess the food we were served as fully representative of the restaurant? But there in front of us was the boss to oversee it all; a large staff was all present and correct, and we were charged full price (£119.70 for two, with a shared pudding and only £18.90 of that for wine).
And the fact is that, though the menu read enticingly enough, every dish we tried was a disappointment.

“Grilled Scallops & Squid, Tobiko, Chilli & Mache” (£11.50) was the first of a series of platefuls of assemblages in which the ingredients didn’t do much for each other. The scallops had been too fiercely grilled while the squid was barely cooked, and the other components had coagulated into a bit of a soppy mess, with the fluorescent roe adding little; an overpoweringly citric dressing predominated.

“Roast Quail, Foie Gras, Salsify Chips” (£10.50) was a de-boned bird, missing one leg, stuffed with foie gras, and then again over-aggressively cooked, so that the quail was oddly bitter, while the foie gras was liquefied and largely wasted.
I had been really looking forward to “Roast Grouse, Chestnuts, Lardo, Blackberries” (£27) as my first game of the autumn. Moreover, Torode has just published a recipe book devoted to “chicken and other birds” that includes recipes for grouse, partridge and pheasant, so this looked like a surefire winner.

But the poor little thing had again been roasted very hot and then, instead of being allowed to rest, apparently swiftly taken off the bone, with the result that, although rare, the meat had not relaxed and was already drying out. I didn’t finish the plate. Never thought I’d do that to a grouse.

“Open Raviolo of Wood Roasted Squash, Cauliflower & Sage (£16) was no better, a dull collection of chopped winter veg on a sheet of pasta, completely lacking in appeal.

From the short list of desserts, “Jaffa Tart with Crème Fraîche” (£6) was another unfinishable, the chocolate filling being way too citrussy to enjoy.

The wine list is strong on the New World, as you would expect (Torode is from Melbourne) but pretty punchily priced, too. The basic claret is £32.

The Luxe is a well-presented restaurant and as you sit down you feel sure you’re going to have a good time there, albeit at a steepish price. Then the food starts to arrive ...

Perhaps our meal was an early-days aberration. But as one dish succeeded another, it all began to seem too consistently ill-conceived and heavy-handedly executed to be just a chapter of accidents.

The Luxe has been long in preparation. But if this really was the food that Torode wants to serve, then the idea that he has a starry career on TV assessing the cooking of others is a bit of a joke.

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

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