Racine

[Tonyfinch]

Glad to see you are feeling your old self again.

Does that mean you didn't score?

[macrosan]

In the end I settled for a ( very badly made ) Gin & Tonic.

Aww come on, Simon. How badly can you make a gin and tonic ?

[Simon Majumdar]

You can make it with a small amount of gin and bring it to the table with too much tonic already poured in it rather than bringing a bottle of tonic and letting the customer add as much as they want. That's how

Oh, you can also serve it luke warm

S

[macrosan]

Oh

[tony h]

Glad to see you are feeling your old self again.

Does that mean you didn't score?

Yes - it means he didn't score

[Andy Lynes]

Another spur of the moment meal at Racine on Wednesday evening. A freebie starter courtesy of the chef of calf's foot jelly with saffron pickled eggs was surprising and quite lovely, triangles of the jelly resting against quarter of the eggs in a row across the plate dressed in zig-zags of some sort of emulsion and loads of fresh parsley. The sharpness of the eggs and dressing working very nicely with the unctious jelly.

The dish appeared on the bargin early bird menu, but even so seemed to signal that the kitchen had raised its game a notch or two since my last visit in October last year. In addition, the menu now offers around 12 starter and main course choices along with the set menu and specials compared with 9 when the restaurant opened.

The salade gourmand (£8.50) that night came with slices of ballotine of foie gras, duck ham, rabbit, croutons, tomatos, green beans and mache. A main course of mixed grill of lamb (13.95) included chop, kidney, liver, confit tongue and crepinette, plus some straw potatoes, watercress and a side of gratin dauphinoise. A real winner with a beautifully seasoned and cooked chop, spicey faggot and melting tongue making it the king of mixed grills.

Petit pot of chocolate (£6.00) was covered with a layer of creme friache which provided a nice foil to a very rich dessert, served in just the right amount.

A nice bottle of Macon, coffee, water and service brought the bill to £58.00. The room was absolutley rocking but the front of house was coping with ease.

Racine seems to me, speaking as an acquaintance of chef Henry Harris, to go from strength to strength. In the 9 or so months it has been opened, it has developed a strong personality in terms of both food and service and appears to be something of a minor London institution with Ned Sherrin name-checking it as one of his regular haunts alongside the likes of The Ivy and Joe Allen's in the latest issue of Restaurant magazine.

[Matthew Grant]

My first visit to Racine on Saturday, I won't go into too much detail but I thought this was a great restaurant - outstanding service (i'm ashamed to say that I let them go out to get me some cigarettes, I did tell them not to bother). Fish soup was suitably strong with croutons and alioli, Saucisson Chicago was served on a bed of lentils with a mustard dressing. Excellent Cod with crushed potatoes. Well cooked Partridge with a chocolate sauce, one gripe - the pomme puree was perfect once I had adjusted the seasoning Outstanding cheese to finish. I wish I lived next door to a restaurant like this.

Although busy you have to wonder how they survive, rent cannot be cheap in an area like this and there were a lot of staff on view, add this to the reasonably priced menu and you have to fear for it?

[Andy Lynes]

Racine won best front of house at the Harpers awards recently and they mentioned at the ceremony that the restaurant does 1000 covers a week. I think its safe to say they are doing alright!

[Matthew Grant]

1000 covers a week Another thing that surprised me was that they didn't seem to be turning tables, I may be mistaken here but lots of people were well into their meal or almost finished when we arrived at 21:00 and nobody seemed to be rushed out the door - fair play to them!

[Andy Lynes]

I believe the restaurant has 60 covers and is open 7 days a week, lunhc and dinner. That gives them 840 covers a week if they were full every service. I doubt this is the case for every lunch, so they must be relaying tables in the evenings. However, I have been 3 times in the evening, and have never been given a time limit. They are open quite long hours, from 6.00pm -10.30pm and I would guess that they could relay 2 or even 3 times in that period if they wanted to. I'll have to speak to Henry about this, I'm quite intrigued as to how they manage!

[Pinga]

I had dinner there on tuesday,garlic mouse with mussels then my favourite rabbit with mustard and bacon .I arrived at nearly 9.00 and was the last to leave at around 11.00-no hassle from them on being last and great all round.I am used to other places 'of the moment'still seating people at 11.00-maybe the more relaxed seating explains why everyone is so calm and helpfull.Another of my best things about this place is when you reserve they don't bother with a phone number and certainly no faxes,credit card details and the rest which seem to have become the norm This should be the model for others to follow.

[tony h]

Racine: Saturday 22/11 – Lunch

4 of us went to Racine for yesterday & had goog to very good lunch there.

For starters we had the calves brains & cauliflower (from the set menu) and foie gras & oysters from the a la carte. The brains were quite fishy 0 a bit like scampi from the 70s but I was assured that these were very good; I didn’t manage to taste the cauliflower soups or the oysters but I was told these were good – the oysters looked very plump indeed. My foie gras – 3 thin slithers (a bit on the small side) came with an excellent armangac jelly – in fact it was quite terrific so I forgave them the FG portion size.

Mains were tete du veau; scallops fro the al la carte & sea bass and partidge from the set menu. Sea bass & partridge were far better option than our carte choices. The partridge was lighter than I expected and balanced with a sharp sauerkraut-like dish. The sea bass came with herb puree (which didn’t over power) on a bed of mix lentils – v good. The scallops were presented on a bed of Jerusalem artichokes which were perhaps a little too strong for the delicate but perfectly seared scallops. The tete du veau was not to my liking at all – tasted OK but too gristly for my delicate constitution - also served with a huge lump of brain. Every last piece was devoured by its chooser.

We didn’t all have deserts: one had the cheese selection (form the fucking la frommagerie – its there no place to hide?) and another had the violet tart which was the scariest looking cake I’ve every seen – a sort of homage to Quentin Crisp’s hair. A brave dish but braver still the one who ate it.

So a few minor complaints but on the whole pretty good cooking – especially in that price range. Its certainly got better since I last went there last year.

[John Whiting]

Racine: not a French tragedy!

When Henry Harris decided in 2002 to open a traditional French restaurant in London, I got a phone call from him asking what I thought of the name Club des Cent. This was a prestigious Paris dining club whose exclusivity was determined by corporeal as well as social weight – members had to tip the scales at a hundred kilos!

I had just read a report that the Club des Cent had recently deserted Maxim’s because of its falling standards, which indicated that it was in fact still meeting. I suggested that it would be a good idea to check out whether they would object to their name being adopted. He reported in due course,

I was able to track down the current president of the Club des Cent, aged 75. He is very chuffed that we want to use his club’s name but has asked us very politely not to use it!

And so after further consideration Henry and his front-of-house partner Eric Garnier settled on the classic French tragedian Racine as their patron saint.

In the couple of years since Racine opened, Mary and I hadn’t got around to visiting it. Not because the reports were unfavorable – quite the contrary – but because there’s small reason to seek out a French restaurant in London. As I have observed so often, it’s usually cheaper and more reliable to cross the Channel for good bourgeois cooking, including the cost of transportation. But for my birthday dinner this year there just wasn’t time to go where my palate would lead me, and so Racine came to mind and we made a 7 o’clock reservation.

We like to eat early and have the restaurant to ourselves, but on a Wednesday evening it was already filling up. The menu offered a possible explanation – the set luncheon was also available in the evening if ordered before 7:30. It happened to include the dishes on the menu that most interested Mary, and so she prudently chose from it, while I determined to pig out from the a la carte – after all, it was my birthday! (Never mind that just a few hours before we had polished off a venison suet pudding at Saint John Bread and Wine.)

Racine’s discreet colour scheme is composed of the various shades of brown wood and leather that one encounters in French brasseries of a certain age and class, such as Paris’s venerable Balzar. There was no background music save the quiet early evening murmur of the clientele, as decorous as the décor. There were no brash young stockbrokers shouting at the waiters – they were no doubt incarcerated in some glass-and-steel prison, polishing off their first bottle of Petrus.

In short, this was a restaurant where we could talk without raising our voices. It was also possible to eavesdrop with discretion; in the course of the evening a middle aged couple at an adjoining table discussed their grandson’s first year at Eton, while a young pianist on the other side of us was explaining to his companions the challenge he faced in performing the Moszkowski Concerto in E with the CBSO.

Our first courses arrived. Feeling devout, I had ordered Jesus de Lyon, a soft fatty sausage whose large overlapping slices were complemented by a dish of vinegary cornichons. They set each other off nicely. Mary’s cream of celeriac soup was more a celeriac of cream soup, with an ineffable richness whose calorie count, if stated on the menu, would have run over onto the back of the page.

For my main course, I pushed the boat out with a favorite, tête de veau à la sauce ravigote. (Like the other traditional items on the menu, it was unpretentiously identified in English.) Having eaten it twice within the year at Paris bistros, I was tempting fate; but when the dish arrived it was immediately apparent from the generous slice of brain and the pervasive mustard/caper aroma that it would be in a class with its French rivals.

Brain with tête de veau is no longer to be taken for granted, even in Paris. Last year it was lacking even from the outstanding version at the venerable Cave Petrissan. At the bar I made a jesting reference to its absence in the wake of mad cow disease. Madame did not smile, but replied evenly that her mother, who had eaten traditional tête de veau all her life. had died of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. As I turned several shades of puce, she added magnanimously, “But you had no way of knowing.”

Mary’s simple roast lamb with vegetables proved to be a generous overlapping circle of thick slices concealing richly dark-roasted vegetables into which the meat juices were slowly seeping. Simple fare, but in Mary’s opinion the best roast lamb she had ever eaten. After sharing a generous forkful I could readily empathize.

Such a meal called for a return visit. A month later we were back and ready to challenge Henry to equal the best of our Paris memories. Mary’s inevitable first choice was soupe de poissons, a dish we make regularly at home. A glance at its deep brown color and a whiff of its aroma told us that we had been outclassed. The texture was thick enough to coat a spoon, the rouille was generously laced with garlic and cayenne, the croutons were crisp but not jawbreaking, and the gruyere was the sort that satisfactorily dribbles down the chin. These accoutrements can no longer be taken for granted, even in France. There were no garlic cloves to rub on the croutons, but one could “make the boat” as I had been taught by a lovely waitress in Nice – spread a crouton generously with rouille, pile it with gruyere, float it on a sea of soup and sail away to Paradise!

For me, an enormous helping of “little gray cells” – a plate of calf’s brain with black butter and capers. A squidgy mass of ecstasy! The Victorian directors of the Regents Park Zoo decimated the creatures under their care in order to up their smarts by dining off the brains of as many living species as possible. For me, as for them, the dietary myth of verisimilitude was roundly disproven.

For a main course we shared a double entrecote of veal and creamed spinach with foie gras and wild mushrooms. Was it traditional white veal or animal-friendly pink veal? The young French waiter who took our order didn’t seem to understand the question. But we needn’t have worried – the generous hunks of meat were reassuringly pink. A New Age California restaurant would devote a whole paragraph to outlining the calf’s ancestry and daily diet; Henry merely identifies the major ingredients, assuming that you will credit him with quality sourcing.

What fresh springy mushrooms! What rich sauce! What ambrosial spinach! And best of all, what flavorful and tenderly resilient meat! And all washed down with a velevety-smooth and versatile Côte du Rhône which, chameleon-like, subtly altered its savor with each varied mouthful. If I seem carried away, you may credit the fact that Mary rarely gets through as much as a glass of wine, and so I am forced, regretfully, to drink for two.

We had had such luck with old familiar classics that Mary decided to finish with a crème caramel. The consistency was firm but yielding in the mouth, the caramel sauce surrounding it rich and creamy.

My own final course proved to be the only disappointment. The cheeses from Patricia Michelson’s La Fromagerie were in good condition, but consisted of four narrow strips, each about three inches long. At £6.50 per serving, the mark-up must rival the wine list of a greedy hotel.

But how does a restaurant manage its cheeses if it doesn’t serve enough to turn them over smartly? The EU food laws now strangling the artisanal cheese industry require that they be kept refrigerated at a temperature which masks their flavor. For an evening’s service they may be brought up to a warmer temperature, but an individual cheese may only be thus warmed up twice. If it is not consumed by the end of the second exposure, it must be thrown away, even if it is reaching perfection (or so I was told by a catering manager). A butcher once gave me a whole wheel of Grinzola that had arrived unrefrigerated a day late. Sectioned and wrapped, it fed me magnificently from the freezer for a year.

My guess is that Racine serves so few cheese orders that they are kept refrigerated at the highest legal temperature and cut for serving into strips narrow enough to warm sufficiently by the time they reach the table. A disappointing end to a very satisfying meal – but today even in France one rarely sees a groaning cheese board whose aroma announces its trundling approach from halfway across the room. If the stern admonitions of the cheese police were justified, there wouldn’t be a dedicated cheddarast left alive!

We would have liked to congratulate Henry on the meal, but on both occasions he was out of town. If this had been the venue of a celebrity chef, priced like centre court seats at Wimbledon, I would have felt cheated, but I was content to learn that the kitchen performed reliably in his absence. With its careful balance of quality, authenticity and economy, Racine appears to be getting it about right. The dining room is full, many if not most of the patrons seem to be regulars, and there’s a buzz which reassures strangers that they’ve come to the right place. Even the dreaded Michael Winner has his regular table. Eric Garnier assured us that he was a reasonable and well-behaved diner who ordered with precision and was usually out the door within an hour. Temper tantrums? Apparently just part of the act.

Racine, 239 Brompton Road, London SW3, Tel 020 7584 4477. Set lunch, early dinner 3 courses £19.95; a la carte c£30. (plus coffee, wine, 12½% service)

©2004 John Whiting

[oldschooltie]

congratulations - I think that this captures the essence of Racine perfectly.

We were relegated to the back room on our last visit, so at least had no chance of bumping into Michael Winner. Very easy to take this level of understated quality for granted, but the number of lunchers/diners says different.

[Andy Lynes]

John, a very welcome update on what is one of my favourite restaurants in London. Its been a few months since I've been back so its good to hear that its still on form.

[Marco_Polo]

John, written with your usual style, eye and ear for detail, precise and knowing palate, and characteristic devotion to excess. I'll look forward to a visit on my next trip to town. Care to join me?

Brain with tête de veau is no longer to be taken for granted, even in Paris. Last year it was lacking even from the outstanding version at the venerable Cave Petrissan. At the bar I made a jesting reference to its absence in the wake of mad cow disease. Madame did not smile...

Gawd, what a howler. A classic case of foot-in-mouth disease?!

Marc

[Adrian York]

I remember just after Racine opened there were are couple of negative reports on the site which did not reflect the quality of cooking and service that I had experienced at the same time so it is great to see it getting such a well-written rave review. I believe the reason that the restaurant is called Racine, however, is nothing to do with the tragedian, but actually to do with the meaning of the French word which is translated as root. I know that this was an important project for Eric Garnier as he wanted to reflect his family's culinary roots in a room that is the antithesis of the mega-brasseries (Quags and Bank) that he had become associated with.

[John Whiting]

That makes sense to me. I never asked Henry what the name meant; the connection with the tragedian seemed a bit far-fetched, but it had been mentioned elsewhere and I went along with it because it gave me a snappy subtitle.

EDIT: My French dictionary confirms that racine's figurative meanings include beginning, principle, origin. I like it.

Edited March 20, 2004 by John Whiting (log)

[rjs1]

while a young pianist on the other side of us was explaining to his companions the challenge he faced in performing the Moszkowski Concerto in E with the CBSO.

As a descendant of the composer, I am delighted and surprised to hear that he is still being performed at all...

[Gavin Convery]

I concur with the positive reviews - I particularly liked the soft roes on toast...heavenly!

But the wine list is awful...:-(

[Scott]

Disagree Gavin,

the wine list is simple, straightforward and shortish, but it's not awful.

Had a perfectly respectable 97 Girardin Pommard Rugiens 2 weeks ago, and it was a perfect luncheon wine.

with good value Coche Dury and a lovely 2000 Roulot Mon Plaisir Meursault, they do have some interesting items.

Food was cracking!

[Gavin Convery]

I suppose its a factor of what you order but other than a nice Cote Rotie from Delas I wasn't impressed - the half bottle of late harvest Tokay Pinot Gris was dull,dull,dull especially at £50+

[Scott]

I suppose its a factor of what you order but other than a nice Cote Rotie from Delas I wasn't impressed - the half bottle of late harvest Tokay Pinot Gris was dull,dull,dull especially at £50+

Gavin,

what disappointed you?

the wines on offer, the prices, names you didn't know?

Given the style of restaurant, I thought the list perfectly adequate, and the markups very fair.

[MobyP]

I only have myself to blame.

I should've known. Had a lovely meal here last night - my first of an incalculable future amount. Given how close I am, I think I'll be returning as often as the wallet allows or the soul requires. It's been a while since I simultaneously wanted to eat at least 6 things on the menu. What a great place. Simple food, done very well.

[Scott]

Moby,

I am rapidly becoming a whore for their fish soup...