Club Gascon

Club Gascon is reputed to be one of the best "high French" restaurants in London. After having dined there last week, I think they have some case as a matter of food, but their service is diabolical, and I'm not sure about their gimmick either.

You see, Club Gascon purports to do something called "French tapas", trying desperately to hook itself into the all consuming bar snacks craze of the last few years. The chief problem, however, is that French food doesn't work very well as tapas - the whole idea of either Spanish tapas or Middle Eastern mezze is that the meal becomes a communual experience, where people are able to taste a wide range of easily seperable foods. But most high french cuisine isn't like that- and at Club Gascon, it shows. Cassoulet de Toulouse, for example, the famous pigeon, sausage, and bean stew of southwest France, can't be shared properly at all, even if the restaurant does remember (as they did not) to bring extra plates - the stew was well done, unsurprisingly, but what's the point? Similarly, the dish of buttered, truffled pasta was fragrant, rich, and delicious - but how are you supposed to portion it out? Frog's legs are much more easily shared, but I would have traded the decorous foam sauce for more of the tiny, delicate, appendages, while the delicous seared foie gras was much more generously prepared. The only thing that I thought was perfectly designed for sharing were the skewered duck hearts - small, rich, chewy bits of meat layered with a flavorful glaze. That, I think, is as close France, and certainly Club Gascon, gets to tapas.

There were some surprises as well, I'll admit. King scallops are usually served in france with their bright orange coral, it's true - but at Club Gascon you get a cracker flavoured strongly with coral instead. And I have to admit to be a little struck by bacon on top of beef carpaccio - that's not usually what I would expect, or like. But some of the preparations were a little too clever - dark chocolate "bar", for example, turned out to be an entirely unsatisfying centimeter wide strip of chocolate, while the chef tried to get incompetently exotic with a banana crumble obscured by "leaves" made of flour, sugar, and banana. Still, everything was tasty - I just can't say I was completely blown away by any of the cooking. Frankly, you could do a lot worse than ordering two bowls of the cassoulet and another two of their delicious olive oil French fries - tapas concept be damned.

The service, unfortunately, was remarkable - remarkably awful. Waitresses didn't know what either riesling or gewurztraminer was, and when the "sommelier" was called, he suggested a dessert wine. Dessert wine instead of a dry alsation white wine? That's what an expensive French restaurant recommends? Of course, you can't order even inappopropiate dessert wine if no one comes to your table, which was our experience for a half hour at the beginning, and you certainly don't need any wine if there are hour long waits between courses - another fascinating twist thrown into Club Gascon's diabolical efforts to make eating there impossible. The whole experience was summed up by one employee's response when we asked where our second course might be, in the middle of a second interminable wait - "Ah, monsieur", in the french accent of someone imported from France to trick you into thinking she might be a competent waitress, "your food is in the kitchen".

If it had been up to me, that's where it would have stayed.