Gauthier Soho

[cheeekymunkey]

Castration of a french coq

Trouble appears to be brewing in the kitchens at Gauthier Soho.

One does have to question the decision to blog about it so publicly.

It's got people talking, however, and maybe that is what it's really about...

[nickloman]

Great read - but I agree a strange thing to air in public, perhaps its his way of dealing with it.

[nickloman]

Also, not sure why Ducasse and other stars feel they need to act like such absolute nobheads.

[david goodfellow]

Astounding revelations and so very revealing. Hope their friendship, and business partnership can survive.

I had best check he is still in the kitchen when we visit.

[nickloman]

Sounds like you shouldn't go on a Monday!

http://gauthiersoho.blogspot.com/2010/06/bloody-mondays.html

[nickloman]

I see the post has been taken down now, probably for the best!

[david goodfellow]

I shall certainly follow his blog just in the hope of some illuminating behind the scenes info.

A number of critics and bloggers have reviewed the place with perhaps mixed views, still I shall make my own mind up on our visit, hopefully in the next couple of weeks.

http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/food-and-drink/reviews/gauthier-soho-1-romilly-street-london-w1-0207494-3111-1995727.html

[sunbeam]

Blogs and tweets are just PR and advertising in its new form. Cause a fuss, get the hits. They should stop listening to BS about 'social media' and stick to rattling the pans and getting the food out.

[Prawncrackers]

A number of critics and bloggers have reviewed the place with perhaps mixed views, still I shall make my own mind up on our visit, hopefully in the next couple of weeks.

Have you made here yet David? The missus and I had a really terrific lunch last week. It would be an amazing first to say we beat you to it!

Incredible value, 3 courses for £25. We had a couple of extra drinks that made the final bill a little shy of £80. But if you consider that includes 3 amushe, good bread, petit fours etc and the central London location then i'm surprised if they make any money from punters like me. The absolutely outstanding dishes were the Spring Truffle risotto with Reduced Chicken Jus and (for us) the main attraction, the Golden Louis XV. Marvellous stuff, the only negative point was my main of bream was on the very small side.

[olicollett]

That Louis XV dessert looks ace!

Hoping to go here some time in the next few weeks, bit far out of reach for lunch but the evening menu seems very reasonable anyway

[david goodfellow]

You most certainly did

We have been pretty busy the past couple of weeks and in fact we were in London last weekend for a couple of meals which hopefully I will write up in the next few days.

Gauthier is difficult on a weekend for me as they are closed on a Sunday and I prefer to have a long lazy lunch on a Saturday, but again they are closed.

Glad you enjoyed yourselves.Good report too.

Edited June 26, 2010 by david goodfellow (log)

[david goodfellow]

There is a 2 for 1 offer on the tasting menu on Toptable.

Normally £68pp this is an absolute steal.

Be quick though it ends 27 August which is too bad for me as I can't get there before then,

[MaLO]

Had a long lunch in Gauthier on Thursday. Toptable offered two for one on tasting menus so it was an easy choice.

We ate

Foie gras with poached apricot and reduced port

Scallops with garlic and parsley puree

Summer truffle risotto

Wild sea trout with beetroot, sorrel jus and light ginger

Crispy and soft piglet, thin leeks,cherry reduction and pig jus

Cheese

Cherry and chocolate with red wine jelly, champagne grainte, cherry jam

Praline and dark chocolate Louis XV

Coffee and petit fours

First visit to Lindsay house. I am not sure it is the most practical building for an ambitious, elegant restaurant. As you may know, you have to ring the doorbell and wait, not too long, to be greeted.

We were offered our table on the first floor. It was a terrible table, on wonky ground, in the farthest corner of a smallish room. I was not comfortable or happy. We asked to move and with very little fuss got shifted to a far nicer table next to the fireplace. Suddenly the gloom I was bathing in lifted, replaced by natural light and a far happier disposition. Much better.

Lunch was quite busy. Service was good. Interestingly, water is provided without charge, with no attempt to flog you bottled stuff first. They also provided gratis (posh) water at Aiden Byrne.

The food is elegant and mostly nicely cooked. I enjoyed most things. Particularly good was the foie with tangy sweet sour apricot and the scallops. Less so the sea trout that was very lightly cooked, bordering raw. I ate it non the less. It was ok but not as good as the best courses. The risotto was rich, chock full of parmesan and piled high with truffle and a slick of reduced chicken jus. It would be even better with a little less cheese and the fuller hit of winter truffle. It was good, although I would like to eat it later in the year if I could afford to. The pig was tasty too.

The plating was classic, bordering simple. Garnishes were very good vegetables. The pork came with half a purple carrot and some tasty, tiny leeks. Sea trout had a half beetroot, earthy and warm.

The cheese was really good. Munster, Comte, epoisses, a light goat cheese and a corsican rosemary bound ewes milk came with dried apricots, sultanas and crackers.

Good coffee, double espresso and petit fours including a very good lemon meringue pie macaroon ended things nicley. It took a few hours but we were in no hurry.

The only downside was having to listen to the endless high volume gibberings of the most important person ever to have eaten anything, ever, anywhere. The racket became more noticable as time passed and other diners presumably gave in and made a run for it. A mute button would have been good.

It was time to leave. Had a brief chat with the chef Alexis Gauthier on our way out. Seems like a nice bloke. It was a good lunch and the discount made it really excellent value. I would not have felt cheated had the discount not applied. Well worth giving a go.

A bit of a walk, a wine flight in Fortnum and Masons wine bar and we were good for dinner in Bar Boloud.

[RDB]

"The only downside was having to listen to the endless high volume gibberings of the most important person ever to have eaten anything, ever, anywhere. The racket became more noticable as time passed and other diners presumably gave in and made a run for it. A mute button would have been good"

It wasn't any of the fellows that post on egullet?

[Man]

Has anybody been recently? I had a shockingly disappointing experience there last Friday (my fourth visit).

The truffle risotto (at a £15 supplement) was as good and luscious as ever, but they are now packing the place to a point where the service suffers, and the cuisine too.

Our dirty plates were left on the table for an eternity, and it took another eternity to be served the next course.

It was unbearably noisy, courtesy of a couple of large tables (we tried to retaliate by flashing them, but they didn't seem to notice ). The small, full room felt oppressive. We were unhappy.

A wild seabass was massacred, I couldn't believe how poorly it was cooked.

At least they said 'sorry for tonight' at the end (though no concrete gesture of goodwill was offered...).

There are zillions of other places I want to go to in London. Therefore I think my experience with Gauthier ends here.

[Matthew Grant]

Presumably that £15 supplement was for preserved truffles or summer truffles which makes you wonder why you needed to pay a supplement for them. Of course I might be wrong and the season has been exceptionally long or arrived exceptionally early?

[Man]

Presumably that £15 supplement was for preserved truffles or summer truffles which makes you wonder why you needed to pay a supplement for them. Of course I might be wrong and the season has been exceptionally long or arrived exceptionally early?

To be honest Matthew this is one of the few aspects of that disastrous evening that, angry as I am, I am not sure I can complain about...I don't know where the truffles came from (service was so busy it was almost impossible to talk to them), but they were abundant and freshly shaved black Summer truffles of exceptional quality. The supplement is perhaps a fair proportion of what restaurants charge for the white ones from Alba (or supposedly so).

But I want to add a negative note: from this photograph you can see how slanted the floor of that room is: the sauce accumulated in one corner of the plate! (for the curious, the dish is veal sweetbread).

[cheeekymunkey]

So it seems Gauthier Soho has introduced a calorie count to its menus.

Sure, there might be some value in everyday places displaying calorie counts – the office canteens, the Pret a Mangers and the Itsus. It wouldn’t do any harm at Greggs for that matter, and McDonalds already post their nutrition information online.

But in a posh restaurant, the sort of place where people go for a treat? It’s bizarre.

[Man]

Dear me, my Summer truffle risotto was 557 calories! I'm also not sure it's such a great idea to remind diners of that.

[Jon Tseng]

To be honest Matthew this is one of the few aspects of that disastrous evening that, angry as I am, I am not sure I can complain about...I don't know where the truffles came from (service was so busy it was almost impossible to talk to them), but they were abundant and freshly shaved black Summer truffles of exceptional quality. The supplement is perhaps a fair proportion of what restaurants charge for the white ones from Alba (or supposedly so).

But I want to add a negative note: from this photograph you can see how slanted the floor of that room is: the sauce accumulated in one corner of the plate! (for the curious, the dish is veal sweetbread).

No way. Fifteen quid is way lower than the supp you'd pay for alba truffles. I would consider forty quid supp the starting point at a decent starred place. Fifteen definitely points to summer truffles rather than melanosporum or magnatum.

J

PS Does the angle of the table really matter than much?? If the table is wobbly or creaky maybe, but a couple of millimetres more sauce pooling one side would make zero difference to the taste of a dish. I'd venture to add the amount the food cools while it's being photographed would have a bigger impact on flavour (one of the reasons I never get round to photographing my food - I'm invariably too hungry...)

[Man]

To be honest Matthew this is one of the few aspects of that disastrous evening that, angry as I am, I am not sure I can complain about...I don't know where the truffles came from (service was so busy it was almost impossible to talk to them), but they were abundant and freshly shaved black Summer truffles of exceptional quality. The supplement is perhaps a fair proportion of what restaurants charge for the white ones from Alba (or supposedly so).

But I want to add a negative note: from this photograph you can see how slanted the floor of that room is: the sauce accumulated in one corner of the plate! (for the curious, the dish is veal sweetbread).

No way. Fifteen quid is way lower than the supp you'd pay for alba truffles. I would consider forty quid supp the starting point at a decent starred place. Fifteen definitely points to summer truffles rather than melanosporum or magnatum.

J

PS Does the angle of the table really matter than much?? If the table is wobbly or creaky maybe, but a couple of millimetres more sauce pooling one side would make zero difference to the taste of a dish. I'd venture to add the amount the food cools while it's being photographed would have a bigger impact on flavour

As I wrote, they were fresh Summer truffles (how could they be Alba truffles in this season???).

Re. the photograph it takes me about three seconds to take one (as is evident from the poor quality with zero artistic pretensions...). As normally the temperature of the room is above minus thirty Celsius, I find that the dish remains reasonably warm during the process.

The pooling of the sauce doesn't affect the taste of the dish, but it does affect the way it looks, which matters to me (when I'm in a fine dining mood and paying a corresponding price).

[Man]

In fairness to Gauthier, I'd like to add a couple of points, especially in view of the fact that I wrote that 'no concrete gesture of goodwill was offered'.

Gauthier has now communicated with us in a very civilised and sensible way (following a comment we made on another site), and did make a concrete gesture by way of apology. He also made us reflect on some of the comments we made on our blog (we'll comment there as appropriate). Not all chefs react in this way to criticism and so I think credit deserves to be public as was our criticism.

Also, with a cool mind, it is equally fair to emphasise that of the four times we have been there, we only made public comments on our bad experience, and not on the three previous good ones. So, while our accounts of that night are totally accurate, they do not present a balanced view of the overall experience. We should have emphasised this more.

(For the record, we did not accept the invitation, both because we would find it awkward to be served by staff we so heavily criticised, and because in general we find it a good rule to always pay the bill if we aim to write public comments - mind you, not that we pretend (or aspire for that matter) to be anything more than the nobodies we are in the food world, but even the minuscule influence we may have on anybody, we do take seriously and that's the rule we have set for ourselves. Needless to say, we don't criticise others for having different rules).

[felixhirsch]

Does anyone have an idea how the calorie thing goes down? It kind of seems bizarre to do that in a place like that.

I always thought it was more style over substance at Gauthier, and this doesn't make me change my mind I must say.

[david goodfellow]

Had an interesting meal here at the weekend. Been meaning to try the place out for an age, but as we mostly weekend in London and normally they only open for dinner service on Saturday (closed Sunday) its been difficult.

They now open for lunch service on Saturdays at least until Xmas, and we finally made it. That suited us down to the ground as we prefer to linger over a lazy Saturday lunch rather than shop or do other stuff.

Took a few decent photos. Will post a review when I have a bit more time.

[Andrew]

Has anyone been here recently? I'd been interested in some views?

Thanks

Andrew