Restaurants

By Guy Dimond

Lehman Brothers folds with the loss of 5,000 City jobs in London alone. The housing market has been in decline for months. Experts predict the worst recession since the 1930s is imminent. With the prospect of bare-footed hedge-fund managers marching on Downing Street, it’s hardly the ideal time to be opening top-dollar haute cuisine restaurants –after all, it’s City earnings that has kept most of these places afloat for the last 16 years of economic bouyancy.

The just-opened Andaman restaurant must be following the news, and be concerned, as they have just introduced a cut-price set lunch. Presumably not enough customers are willing to pay £100+ per head for a meal, which is what is would normally cost.

Andaman is a collaboration between the St James's Hotel and Club, which has just reopened after an 18-month refurbishment with rooms costing from £200 per night; and chef Dieter Müller, who holds three Michelin stars for his restaurant Schlosshotel Lerbach in Germany.

As you might expect, the cooking is in the European haute cuisine canon, and the service is as polished as the bar counter. The dining area is a collection of small rooms beyond the bar, decorated in an odd but soothing mixture of Siennese tones (ochre walls) and oriental motifs (polished black wood, suggestions of chinoiserie). The fittings reeks of quality, but the place isn’t showy; proper posh never is.

We had to ask about the advertised set lunch, as it wasn’t even mentioned on the menus we were given. Yes, the set lunch today is the soup of the day and dish of the day, trilled our waitress. This £25 no-choice menu includes bottled water and coffee – just as well when these cost £5.20 and £4 respectively. Deviate from this offer and starters will cost you around £15, main courses £28, desserts £10 or more. Even a club sandwich will set you back £16.50.

But it’s the wine list which is truly alarming if you’re being price-conscious. The prices start high then soar, and the mark-ups are huge: three-or four-fold on the shop price is typical. So we ordered the cheapest half bottle (£22) – only to discover they didn’t have it in stock. They only had two half bottles of white from the half dozen listed, so we settled for a half bottle of pinot grigio costing £24.

But was it an amazing meal? In short: no. The soup of the day, which our French waitress called as a ‘Curie’ (like Marie), was a perfectly pleasant curried lentil purée poured over a cube of white fish; the main course of the day was a very rich piece of oxtail topping stuffing tightly wrapped in caul.

So far so good. But from the à la carte, our veal escalope had been seasoned far too strongly with what the waitress could only describe as ‘spices’; it was excessively salty, so we had to send this dish back (version two was better). Another à la carte choice was the starter salad of slivers of guinea fowl with salad leaves,topped by a wafer-like croûtons. The Asian touches seemed misguided, such as adding cubes of cooked pineapple and white shimeji mushrooms to this dish; the clash of flavours and textures was not a huge success.

Ultimately, Andaman disappointed not because of the alarming prices – the wine mark-ups are particularly cynical – but because you can get far better food for a lot less in London. Our light lunch for two came to £107. If you still have that sort of money to spend, I suggest you try the set lunch at Le Gavroche instead.

In January 2009, Dieter Müller announced he would be leaving Andaman to return to his restaurant in Germany. The kitchen will be left in the hands of his protégée, Philipp Vogel.

Time Out September 2008