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Club Gascon
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Club Gascon dazzles just with its extraordinary flower arrangements – in spring, elaborate cherry blossom towers, echoing Japanese touches in the sleekly opulent decor. With Le Comptoir Gascon, Le Cercle and the wine bar Cellar Gascon, it forms a select group showcasing food and wines from south-west France, but here all expectations of peasanty cassoulets must be let go. Chef Pascal Aussignac uses traditional elements as a springboard from which to create extremely intricate dishes. Divided on the menu by base ingredients – with a whole section of foie gras – they’re all starter-sized, so it’s recommended you order at least three dishes per person, rather than conventional courses. Some are as impressive as they look, like the hot-cold combination of foie gras with fabulous truffle ice-cream, or richly pleasurable duck magret with lemon, pear and pied bleu mushrooms. Others had more fashionable froth than substance, as in spring tulip with mousseron mushrooms, saffron and broad beans, or a frankly disappointing sole with green tea and salsify. The wine list is a grand but very costly compendium of modern French fine wines (nothing under £22, little under £30); service wavers between utterly charming and bouts of listlessness. Special, certainly, but prices are more to die for here than the food.
Time Out Eating & Drinking Guide 2009
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Time Out reviews restaurants anonymously and pays for meals. Of course, we cannot guarantee the accuracy or independence of user reviews.
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Details
- 57 West Smithfield, Clerkenwell, EC1A 9DS
- Area: Clerkenwell
- Tel: 020 7796 0600
- www.clubgascon.com
- Book online
- Category: French
- Travel: Barbican tube/Farringdon tube/rail
- Times: Lunch served noon-2pm Mon-Fri. Dinner served 7-10pm Mon-Thur; 7-10.30pm Fri, Sat
- Price: Tapas £8-£28. Set lunch £28 3 courses. Set meal £42 5 courses (£65 incl wine)
- Credit cards: AmEx, MC, V
- Services:
- Available for hire: Restaurant available for hire
- Function room: Restaurant available for hire
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There can be no argument - the food at Club Gascon is excellent. Every dish is special with high quality ingredients and when combined the flavours on each plate are so perfectly complementary as to add up to more than the sum of the parts.
The staff are pleasant, however, for a relatively expensive / high class restaurant the service is surprisingly inefficient / sloppy. I hate overbearing staff that hover but this is the other extreme - despite a large number of staff (looked like at least one per table) it was difficult at times to get any attention. They spend a lot of time faffing around behind the bar at the top of the room, never looking around the room so it is impossible to catch someone's eye and every course is brought by someone different. The most difficult person to get hold of is the sommelier - we went for a different glass with each course rather than trying to match one bottle to everything but none of the other staff would serve wine so each time we had to wait for ages to be served and then having made a choice ended up half finished on each course before the wine turned up (a tip to the sommelier - bring the glasses and wine at the same time to avoid two trips and save time). We ended up having one course with no wine at all as the sommelier was too busy). As an aside, there is also a very limited selection of wines by the glass (i guess i have just been spoilt by restaurants like wild honey where the selection is extensive).
Overall, it was a very enjoyable experience and i would return for the food but there is no excuse for letting things down on the service front.