L'Entrecôte Reviewed

SELDOM does a restaurant leave me speechless. 

This may all be down to the curious relationship the British middle and upper classes have with the French. Somehow a good Gallic slap across the face feels better than one delivered from one's own. 

Sometimes the quality of the food, good or bad, can drop the jaw. Occasionally the service can leave you gasping for breath with its poverty or generosity.

But Le Relais de Venise 'L'Entrecôte' isn't like that.

For once with a restaurant I have no idea what on earth is going on. It's left me as discombobulated as a politician asked the price of a pastie.

Given all the love for the place from punters who recall visits to its London or Paris operations, given all the internet praise, I'm wondering if this is just me. Am I too pig-thick to see that 'L'Entrecote' is a pared down piece of pure brilliance?

The French steak bargeman has arrived

Maybe the key to restaurants is to ignore all normal standards of customer service, and believe multicoloured table cloths and 1947 waitress uniforms are the very apex of design.

Maybe the key is to offer people no choice over the starters and the mains, and then unacountably go mad with seventeen desserts on offer. 

Maybe I've been wrong all along about these things, because everyone tells me of the queues round the block for the other restaurants in the aforementioned capital cities.

Interior

So in Manchester this is what happens.

You enter the stately old 1840s' bank building and then it starts.

Staff almost pick you up and insert you into a chair. The next table is about six inches away. If you're on a banquette, the table is moved to let you in and then pushed back quickly and hard. The only way out is by Harrier Jump Jet. 

Those L'Entrecote uniformsDrinks are ordered, quickly, very quickly, as though you're part of a time and motion test - a welcome efficiency. 

Then the waitress - they're all waitresses in dominatrix outfits from the fantasies of overweight stockbrokers - ask you if you've been here before and if you have, then what would you like to order. Come on. Vite! Vite!

The request is odd because - oh so very famously - there's no choice. It's £21 for a starter and a main, or just the starter and no main, or just the main and no starter. Or no main and no starter - if you've got nut allergies and happen to be a vegetarian. One price for ever and ever, marching on, Gallically, into the distance.

So we order the starter and the main.

"How do you want the steak cooked?" asks the waitress.

"Medium-rare," I say.

"We have blue, rare, medium and well-done," she says. 

"I bet that chef gets bored all day just cooking chips and steak, I bet he'll do it any way just to keep himself awake," I say.

I'm trying to joke here, fishing for a softening of the service reaction.

"No, only blue, rare, medium and well-done," says the waitress without a smile.

The salad comes first. It's good.

Crunchy, fresh, with a decent vinaigrette and enlivened by walnuts. But about three and a half minutes after I've eaten it I've forgotten everything about it - blessed be the invention of photography to allow the brain to see back in time. 

The salad, a starter for all

Then the main event.

There's plenty of frites - or 'angry chips' as a mate's gran used to call them because they were so sharp and so unlike a fat Lancashire chip. These are good frites though. But they are still frites.

I really wouldn't like to do a blind taste testing of these frites or fries, pitted against others in the city. I don't think I'd be able to tell them apart even though the ones in L'Entrecôte are 'hand chipped in-house to the identical dimensions as those in Paris'. Yippy-yee. We're so lucky.

The flesh of the steak is trumpets, proper trumpets at last, bloody gorgeous.

Rare and moist and so very almost alive. If you eat the first portion, all sliced up as it is, then you're offered some more. I ate all mine up and then gorged on the latter. My plate was cleansed of everything meaty if still burdened with frites.  

I'm not sure why I wasn't offered the main without the peppery, admittedly pleasant sauce on the side rather than automatically poured over the meat. That way I could have basked in the flesh without the intrusion and added it at will.

The totalitarianism of L'Entrecôte would seem to preclude that sort of freedom. They know best.

The main event

The plate by the way looks Lilliputian, eight inches across. But if you have both portions of steak then you should be pretty full, unless you're an old-fashioned Yorkshireman and want to bellow, "Yer callin' that a proper supper!" 

We had a bottle of white Burgundy at £20 from a massive range that extends to the horizon of one white, one rosé, one champagne and five reds. The white tasted of nettles and pale weeds squashed beneath upturned wheelbarrows. It was thin, very thin. Poor.

Weedy wine

"Why are some of the desserts underlined?" we asked the waitress when she returned for the order.

"Because they are the most popular ones," she said.

"Why are some underlined in red and some in blue?" I asked.

She didn't know.

We had the tartelettes au citron (£4.95) underlined in royal blue. They were very tart, and very lemon, decent enough in flavour but a bit home economics in presentation, just thrust plainly onto a plate, and too loose in consistency. 

Citron - very

We could have had coffee but we didn't.

Within the hour we were out. 

L'Entrecôte isn't a place to hang around in. The chairs aren't comfy enough, the staff might stare. 

Above all it's simply too weird.

There's so much to remark upon in that respect, aside from the mad imbalance in the menu and the sergeant major service, there are lots of little things.

What's going on with that dessert list for example? Why is it all written in diagonal lines, partially underlined and with ditto marks all over the place? It's plain childish.

The fact that the extremely cheap menu needs preserving from grubbly customers in a little plastic case literally made me laugh out loud. 

Diagonally printed, ditto marks and underlining, all in a plastic wallet - shoot the designer

People who love L'Entrecôte say that it's perfect for a forty five minute quick lunch with great steak. Well yea, for £21 each, and then a bottle of £20 wine adding up to £61 without a dessert or coffee plus 10% service charge. It's perfect for that. A bistro bonanza at more than £70 for French fast food. 

Still, I must be wrong criticising it because people queue round the block in London for the beauty of L'Entrecôte. 

This may all be down to the curious relationship the British middle and upper classes have with the French. Somehow a good Gallic slap across the face feels better than one delivered from one's own.

Many of the people I've talked too have commented on the service in the various L'Entrecôtes in Paris and London with a shrug and said, "Yea, but it's French."

That's all right then.

If you want French in Manchester go to 63 Degrees on Church Street. That's the real star in our entente cordiale.

As for L'Entrecôte I can't fault the meat but I feel I'm walking into a bistro theme park - something based on the stubborn unchanging nature of France. Of course it's ten times better, but there's a whiff of Cafe Rouge about the place.

Not that there isn't a sort of reverse fun to be had here. Despite it all I'll probably be back once a quarter for that Gallic slap.

Bonjour monsieur, but au-revoir to your bourgeois notions of choice.

You can follow Jonathan Schofield on Twitter here @JonathSchofield

ALL SCORED CONFIDENTIAL REVIEWS ARE IMPARTIAL AND PAID FOR BY THE MAGAZINE. 

Le Relais de Venise 'L'Entrecôte', 84-86 King Street, City, M2 4WQ, www.relaisdevenise.com  

Rating: 12/20
Food: 7/10
Service: 2.5/5
Ambience: 2.5/5

Hand-sized plate

Handsome 1842 former bank