Restaurants

By Guy Dimond

Sometimes it's the service that really stands out. The waiting staff here couldn't have tried harder; smiling, hugely helpful, and going far beyond the call of duty. A bottle of wine arrived radiator-warm; they offered to replace it with a cooler one, even though we'd already poured and supped the warm one (our mistake). There was no dessert wine to be had, so they gave us a carafe of decent wine - for free. Are they this nice to everyone, we wondered - or was this to distract us from what wasn't running so smoothly?

St Germain's eager-to-please staff went a long way towards making up for the problems we encountered. The first two dishes we tried to order, they had run out of; ditto our first choice of wine. Our food took 45 minutes to arrive. When it did appear, we wondered what had taken them so long in a quiet restaurant.

Coq au vin is a deceptively hard dish to get right, too often resulting in overcooked, tough breast meat. The kitchen gets around the problem by marinating the chicken for a day before braising off the legs, then assembling these with the breast and sauce just prior to serving; a smart idea, but the result had a 'here's one I assembled two minutes earlier' quality.

A simpler but satisfying dish was the daily special of roast pork shoulder with apple sauce and lovely chewy crackling. The veal chop was good - though our waiter reassured us the veal was British, and the chef later told me it was Dutch (ie the welfare of the calves is less guaranteed). We succumbed to the sales pitch and ordered side dishes to go with these, at an additional cost of £3 or more each; with mains that are already pricey, these little extras add up to an expensive meal. However this didn't restrain us from trying the dessert of tarte tatin; it was the best dish, perfectly slow-cooked and caramelised.

The endearing service and airy, attractive space, a pastiche of real France like the 'French' brasseries you find in New York, made us want to like St Germain more, but the glitches stood in its way.

Time Out London Issue 1893: November 29-December 6 2006