Review of Masterchef host's Restaurant ...

[Clarets4me]

In need of a lift after the endless " Brexit " droning, I noticed that this years " Masterchef " is due to be crowned next week. For some reason, I can't take to Gregg Wallace, the co-host & his name always comes to mind when names are periodically requested for the P***k list, together with Nihal Arthanayake, from 5live and Richard Bacon of course.

This is the transcript of a 2012 Review of Mr Wallace's old Restaurant, " Gregg's Kitchen ", published in the " Telegraph " ...

" So much about today’s restaurant is so monumentally wrong that were punctuation tsarita Lynne Truss reviewing it in my stead, she would suspect even its name of having fallen victim to an inexplicable cock-up. While Gregg’s Table is the official styling, Lynne would assume that this, like almost all else, is a comical error, and that the apostrophe was mistakenly inserted to compensate for a mislaid question mark. “Gregg Stable?” is infinitely more apposite to what seems not so much a commercial venture involving the sale of food as a deeply-felt cry for help.

You may know Gregg Wallace as the MasterChef co-presenter who dishes up critiques, often brutal, of contestants’ cooking. As such, you’d think that his guiding light as a restaurateur would be “let him who is without sin cast the first stone”. Yet, here, in a boutique hotel in Bermondsey, we find him presiding over a sin so heinous that if the Dalai Lama himself were to eat here, he would tear up the Buddhist rule-book and convert to Catholicism purely in order to consign Wallace to the nethermost reaches of Hell. Or, at very least, arrange for him to be reincarnated as Loyd Grossman.

When Gregg’s Table opened early this year, I noted some hideous reviews, and gave it a wide berth: not out of fastidiousness, but simple charity. Setting up a restaurant is a devil of a job, and the kindly critic allows time for any teething troubles to be resolved.

Six months later, having replaced both chef and menu, it seems that Mr Wallace models his approach to filling the mouths of his clients on Laurence Olivier’s dentist in Marathon Man. I wouldn’t say that Gregg’s Table is abysmal, but I’ve had more pleasure from root canal work.

A room festooned with clashing shades of grey, blue, green, yellow and mauve suggested a designer transfixed between the Scylla of a Nineties children’s television show set and the Charybdis of the Annual Guild of Colour-Blind Cut-Price Hoteliers’ Convention.

Service veered between the hyperattentive (inquiries about the order every 90 seconds) and the laissez-faire. Having been ignored for an aeon in a room in which one other table was occupied, we eventually called the restaurant on the mobile, giving up after seven unanswered rings. As for what ensued once the order was taken: a Languedoc white was fairly priced, leek and potato soup was hot and well-textured and a wedge of Bakewell tart was fine. So much for the adequate.

What appeared on the menu as “focaccia with crudités and dips” manifested itself as stale bread with no crudités and a – singular – dip. An exceedingly singular dip, in fact: this bitter and clinical-tasting gloopy mess of aubergine and tomato was ideally adapted to fill a hole in the tangerine-hued wall of the said children’s TV studio. “If I made this at home, I’d bin it,” said my friend.

“Cheese and meat board” translated to greasy, tasteless ham and some sort of possibly Germanic luncheon meat, married with a sub-Branston pickle and four anodyne, non-artisan cheeses. And this a short stroll from the foodie nirvana of Borough Market.

Were any of our main courses to be presented on MasterChef, Mr Wallace would be entitled to express his opinion with the meat cleaver. Any calorie-conscious patron tempted by “blue goat cheese & beetroot salad” would be startled to find the cheese rendered into deep-fried balls, accompanied by smears of puréed raspberry seemingly liberated after a daring, Entebbe-style raid on the interior of a Raspberry Ripple.

Passing hurriedly over a miserable marinated chicken sandwich, we come to the star exhibit in this chamber of horrors. The chef’s refusal to crisp the fat on a grilled pork chop – which arrived slumped on a lakelet of gravy which had been allowed to form a skin sturdy enough to see an Eskimo through the bitterest Alaskan winter – was the least of it. A sausage laid alongside two huge and viciously burnt croquettes hinted at the unfortunate fate of a mumps victim who had fallen asleep while sunbathing in the nude. We’ve all heard of “gastro-porn”, but never like this. Mary Whitehouse would have campaigned to ban that plate.

The clearest sign of lunacy was a tomato and oregano salad in which our singularly vile dip made a shock comeback as a relish. Any proprietor who puts his name to such slushy, tasteless tomatoes is surely in danger of crossing the line between cynical profiteering and anguished confession.

Rod Stewart popped up on the speakers with I Don’t Wanna Talk About It, and I know how he felt. Therapists speak of the need to objectivise trauma, but there is much to be said for soldiering on in silence; and I for one shall never speak of this meal again.

Whether Mr Wallace should remain in denial about this monstrosity is a matter for him. But any prospective MasterChef contestant is advised to visit Gregg’s Table beforehand – and on the off-chance that he has the insolence to belittle your work, store away a Greggorian “Mate, have you eaten at your own bleeding restaurant?” for later use. "

Matthew Norman

[paulus the woodgnome]

Is it still open?

[Clarets4me]

Is it still open?

Oddly enough, no ...