Christopher’s

I don’t know why I went to Christopher’s last week. Really, I don’t. It was like when you walk into a room in your home, pause, look around, and think to yourself, “Now, why did I come in here?” Except that this was a restaurant, so the answer wasn’t “Oh yes, I was looking for my hat,” or “Of course, I’m busting for a wee.” The mystery was deeper than that. But I was pretty sure that I hadn’t come in here, given my previous experiences, to eat.



Because Christopher’s, the famous old American restaurant in Covent Garden, is one of those places that always seem like a good idea at the time, but never are. Like curry houses. Under normal circs, it would just sink off the radar after a couple of bad meals, and be forgotten for ever. Except that Christopher’s is also one of those places that seems to close for refurbishment at least every 18 months, and reopen each time with a great snowstorm of press releases about its new chef/menu/weltanschauung, etc, so that it is in some respects always at the back of a reviewer’s mind – as well as at the bottom of his recycling bin.

Most recently, a few months back, the scaffolding came down in Wellington Street to reveal, among other things, the arrival of that most insanely counterintuitive of innovations, the downstairs martini bar – as if, in 2006, anybody still goes to a special venue to cane neat spirits before they eat. England has changed: you no longer need a quart of something ice-cold and strong to blur the senses and numb the lip before you embark on the risky business of eating. Except, perhaps – and I grant them this – at Christopher’s.

Out of a sense of professional duty, I dropped in for breakfast with three friends not long after this latest reopening, and enjoyed musty coffee, blueberry pancakes as thick and spongy as a cheap paperback dropped accidentally in a swimming pool and left out to dry in the sun, and a portion of bacon and eggs served, horrifically, with stripes of a sweet balsamic reduction smeared on to my plate, which I was compelled to wipe off with my napkin.

I thought I’d been kind, going for breakfast. Breakfast, or brunch, being the meal Americans are supposed to do best. But “best” is a relative term. It may be the case, as Somerset Maugham claimed, that to eat well in England you have to have breakfast three times a day – but to eat well in America you have to be on Death Row.

And then, like a fool, a fool with no memory, I found myself sauntering through Covent Garden last week with a friend from Atlanta, Georgia, looking for somewhere to have lunch (feeling, as ever, the pressure to provide somewhere excellent) and inexplicably exclaiming, as we passed the Lyceum on Wellington Street, “Hang on, what about this?”

“The Lion King?” said my pal.

“No, other side of the road. Christopher’s. Famous. Lovely views. Just been refurbished.”

And so in we went.

It’s still one of the great restaurant staircases, I can’t take that away from them (if I could, I’d put it in my house and eat brunch at home). The gleaming stone spiral turns its way regally upwards with a polished mahogany banister as wide as a slip road, and operatic arias play as you ascend. A walk like this needs something really big at the end.

And it has it, visually. Still there are the high ceilings and the views over Waterloo Bridge, the cream and brown paintwork, plush linen (for wiping), cleanly laid tables. It is always a bit disappointing to see American food on the menu – in an environment of such grandeur, to serve such puerile, boneheaded platefuls as surf’n’turf burgers and Caesar salad is just so, so? so American.

My pal got off lightly, thank God. He was well pleased (accustomed as he is to the Atlanta restaurant scene) with a cute little broad-bean risotto (made, one must assume in late August, from frozen beans, which is what makes it an obviously American dish – no point putting a bean on a plate unless you can involve some major machinery, expel a healthy belch of CFCs and consume a manly amount of non-renewable energy along the way) and a very flavoursome, very rare fillet of beef, with an excellent b?arnaise sauce.

Steak is clearly a priority here, with the menu informing us that Angus, Galloway, Shorthorn crosses from Buccleuch are aged for 28 days. And you can tell. It’s good steak. There were also good tobacco onions (dry and fine and oniony) and shoestring fries which were better than Burger King but not as good as McDonald’s, and a just-right 2000 St Emilion for £46 from a list that did a fine job, with a relatively small selection, of providing a bit of everything at every price level from under £20 to £150ish.

I failed to order quite as sagaciously, though I thought I was playing it safe with the “spinach salad, bacon, avocado, blue cheese, crisp fried free-range egg” starter. I love a country whose idea of a salad is something containing bacon, eggs and cheese.

It arrived looking a little flat. The blue cheese was not joyful, tangy-creamy chunks, but a thin, wet, luminous goo suggestive of, well, you know, other goos. The bacon was cold, hard little purple shavings. I popped the egg to release the yummy golden lava, and my fork bounced. So I very politely asked a waitress to take my salad away and have my hard egg replaced with the soft one that is the raison d’être of the dish, such as it is.

Ten minutes later, my salad returned, the egg this time not crusted with golden batter but served nude, blighted by a sort of mild psoriasis. I split it. The yolk, all grey-yellow and thin, fell out of the egg in that terrible way that happens so infrequently in these days of refrigeration. I sniffed it, and gurned with disgust. It wasn’t rotten exactly, just very old and very stale and musty. A truly poor egg. I pushed it away and looked forward eagerly to my main course.

When I asked what was specifically mid-Western about the “mid-Western veal meatloaf”, meatloaf being generally thought a Southern dish, the waiter couldn’t say. But he did confirm that the veal was English not Dutch and that the loaf also contained pork.

Now, isn’t that odd? If you just called it “meatloaf” and then bulked it with random flesh, that would be one thing. But if you call it “veal meatloaf”, people will assume, quite reasonably, that it is made only from veal. Furthermore, when it comes to slipping in another meat unannounced, pork is hardly the least controversial. Especially in these troubled times. Planes have hit buildings for less.

Whatever. The loaf was meagre and institutional-tasting, and I was glad I knew it had pork in it, otherwise I’d have thought “this tastes oddly of pork”. It was served with a veal stock reduction that had been burnt, so the spinach leaves on which it sat had the flavour of a J-cloth used to clean the oven.

What else? Oh yes, our waitress kept overfilling the wine glasses. I don’t mind being topped up, I’m not one of those tightwads who equate glass-filling with the hard sell and confuse a night out with the miracle of the loaves and fishes; but she sloshed it in like she was putting out a fire. Finally, I stayed her hand with a gentle finger to the wrist, and she didn’t do it again. Minutes later, alas, another waiter swooped on the bottle and up-ended it into my glass with all its lees and silts and sediments, utterly bollixing a good 200ml of claret (100ml of which was already in the glass), and then, holding it up to the light, asked if we wanted another one.

No pal, I don’t want another one. Not a bottle of wine, not a bad egg, not a J-cloth full of carbonised pork-beef liquids. Not anything.

Christopher’s
18 Wellington Street, WC2 (020-7240 4222)
Meat/fish: 6
Cooking: 1
Other: 7
Score: 4.67
Price: steaks £16-£27 – don’t risk anything else.

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