Beast, 3 Chapel Place, London W1 (020 7495 1816). Meal for two, including wine and service: £200
You could easily respond to this week’s restaurant with furious, spittle- flecked rage. You could rant about the posing-pouch stupidity of the meat- hanging cabinet that greets you as the lift doors open, and the frothing tanks of monstrous live Norwegian king crabs next to it, each 4ft across. You could bang on about the bizarre pricing structure, and the vertiginous nature of those prices; about the rough-hewn communal tables that are so wide you can’t sit opposite your dining companion because you wouldn’t be able to hear each other, and the long benches which make wearing a skirt a dodgy idea unless you’re desperate to flash the rest of the heavily male clientele. You could shake your fists and roll your eyes and still not be done.
I think this would be a mistake. Instead you should accept Beast as the most unintentionally funny restaurant to open in London in a very long time. It’s hilariously silly. The most appropriate response is to point and laugh. I don’t even think I’d advise you not to go. As long as you go with someone else’s money, because God knows you’ll need a lot of it. Got any friends who are, say, international drug barons? Excellent. They may be able to afford dinner. It’s worth going to see what the unmitigated male ego looks like, when expressed as a restaurant.
If Beast were a chap, he would be a part-time rugby player smelling of Ralgex who’s trying to tell you he’s deep and thoughtful, even though he’ll later be implicated in an incident involving a traffic cone and a pint glass of his own urine. It is a venture by the Moscow-born company behind the admirable steakhouse Goodman, and the clever and ever-expanding chain Burger and Lobster, where you can get only an expensive burger or a cheap lobster, both for £20. Beast is essentially a luxe version of the latter.
When it first opened a few months ago, it offered only a set menu for £75 a head: a few antipasti of aged parmesan and the like, followed by 400g of bone-in rib-eye per person, and a quarter each of Norwegian king crab, a species which cleverly manages to be both a delicacy and a cause for concern to environmentalists due to the way it is advancing down the Norwegian coast. This is to be eaten at those huge 6ft-wide communal tables, planted with guttering candelabras. There are dry-stone walls and glass-fronted wine cabinets bulging with Montrachet and Pomerol, priced in four figures for men with teeny-weeny penises. I order one of the very cheapest options, a Bordeaux by the glass.
A few days before our booking, Beast had introduced an à la carte option. Apparently not everyone wanted the full Beasting. Given the apparent intention to make everything more relaxed, the pricing system is utterly dysfunctional. The starters, priced in the mid-teens, are the best value. Thick slices of impeccable yellowfin tuna, seared and then chilled, come with an insistent lemon aïoli. Even better are the grilled red prawns, offering huge head-suckage possibilities.
We watch the salty juices pool on the plate, exploding with umami, and conclude we need bread. “I’m sorry sir, we don’t serve bread.” Eh? What’s all that about? I could see this as some stand for a bang-on-trend, carb-free Palaeolithic diet, were it not for the fact they serve chips. Mind you, they’re crap chips, huge fat things that could exclude drafts. Who actually likes their chips this way? They’re advertised as coming with truffle and foie-gras salt, which is like getting a gold-plated, diamond-encrusted case for your smartphone because you’ve run out of things to spend money on. It’s a spoilt person’s version of luxury; the pillowy “chips” do not taste either of goose liver or truffle.
Next we want a single serving of the rib-eye – 400g – and a single serving of the crab. This is where it all collapses. The beef is listed at £10 per 100g. But the smallest cut they have is 600g. You’re in for £60. With the crab, which costs £75 a kilo, it’s even sillier. You have to buy a whole beast, and the smallest they have is 4.3kg, at a mere £325.50. Before service. We have to make do with a single spindly leg at £25. It’s served with a cloyingly sweet basil and chilli dressing which makes us bare our teeth. Of course, despite the price, you have to extract the meat from the shell yourself using scissors, picks, crackers and a heart monitor. It’s a messy business for not very much sweet meat. I ask for a finger bowl. They don’t do those either. I am directed to the hard stone sinks around the edges. Maybe I should save on a walk to the men’s while I’m there. It feels like that sort of place.
The corn-fed, dry-aged Nebraskan rib-eye, with a carbon footprint big enough to make a climate-change denier horny, is bloody marvellous: rich, deep, earthy, with that dense tang that comes with proper hanging. And at £100 a kilo it bloody well should be. At that price they should lead the damn animal into the restaurant and install it under the table so it can pleasure me while I eat. We love the buttery truffle sauce that comes with it. We love the bone, which demands to be taken in hand. We especially love a side salad of plump multicoloured tomatoes in a smoky dressing.
At the end there is a lemon mousse which is too much acidity and nowhere near enough fruit. There is also a “deconstructed” vanilla cheesecake, which, as too often, is code for: “We couldn’t be bothered to make a proper cheesecake.” A cushion of whipped vanilla cream lies under a landslide of shattered digestives with a few berries in mourning. And all of this is served with huge solemnity and seriousness. It may be hilarious, but those involved have no idea. It is also full of men, being manly. Looking around I finally conclude that Beast is the sort of restaurant invented solely to be photographed for in-flight magazines determined to present a portrait of your home city you do not recognise. I imagine there will soon be one in New York which will look just like this, with Dubai close behind and Moscow after that. They will all look the same. They will all cost the earth. They will all be completely and utterly absurd.
Jay’s new bites
■ For great steaks and seafood in surroundings which are not hilarious, head to the glorious Art Deco sweep of Hawksmoor Air Street, located above London’s Regent Street. The beef is stupendous and so are the fishy options, particularly the grilled cuts of turbot. Cheap? Absolutely not. But if you’ve got the cash it’s worth it (thehawksmoor.com).
■ Another week, another foodie Kickstarter campaign – this one gets you in on a restaurant expansion scheme. The highly regarded Sticky Walnut in Cheshire is trying to raise £100,000 to open a second site called Burnt Truffle. Experience with banks has taught them that getting standard loans is a hassle (go to kickstarter.com and search for Burnt Truffle).
■ How commodity markets work: fears that the Ebola outbreak could reach Ivory Coast, the biggest cocoa producer in west Africa, have forced prices on international markets up to a three-year high. And if there is actually an outbreak? ‘You could easily see prices double,’ says a spokesman for Ecobank, the African lender.
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk. Follow Jay on Twitter @jayrayner1
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