Two common themes run through all my most recent disappointing meals, whether at Per Se in New York or Arpège and Carré des Feuilllants in Paris.
The first is that in so many instances just too much money has been spent on design and over indulgent service and not enough on what is on the plate, surely the main role of any restaurant. The second is that nowhere near enough time, thought or attention has been focused on whether or how the customer will actually enjoy what so many have lavished so much time and money, invariably not their own, on creating
After I had left maze, the new restaurant with the irritating lower case first letter in the Marriott Hotel, Grosvenor Square for the second time, I could only wonder whether the two chefs behind its concept, media darling Gordon Ramsay and Jason Atherton, whose cooking I had so enjoyed at the Frith Street restaurant and then L’Anis five years ago in London, had ever sat down at one of the tables in their new restaurant and tried to experience what they expect others to pay for. I doubt it.
The initial reason this is unlikely is their menu which confronts you rather like an assault course. While picking up on the current fashion for tapas style dishes and the willingness to share and taste, maze’s menu opens with 20 small dishes, 10 starters and 10 mains courses plus a dessert menu of the same length (whose dishes come in small and large servings) from which the waiting staff advise you quite firmly to order a minimum of six per person including dessert (too many as it proved on both occasions). But then, as though to hedge their bets, there is another menu of 12 of these same dishes but served in bigger, normal servings, plus of course three different tasting menus made up of six, eight or eleven of the tapas style dishes whose price is not revealed either on the menu or by the waiter. I take great care in what I order but when I was asked by the waiter at the end of my first meal at maze whether I wanted my desserts small or large I was just about ready to scream.
Part of the dissatisfaction with my initial meal lay with just how uncomfortable the process was. It is great fun to stand at bars and counters to drink, share tapas and chat but here at the cramped tables for two one has to do this on a small surface that already occupies a side plate, two glasses, a small rest with a knife, fork and spoon on it all of which are subsequently joined by a butter plate, a holder with some excellent bread in it and another couple of glasses as well as a mineral water bottle – and maze’s waiting staff are certainly the most aggressive water pourers I have ever come across.
Returning for dinner as a party of four was no better. This time we were seated at a large round table where conversation was difficult because of the noise level accentuated by a low ceiling and the use of hard finishes around the walls, an experience not helped by being placed right by an unattractive white wine fridge which let out even more cold air whenever it was opened into a room already heavily air conditioned.
And while there was plenty of space on the table on this occasion ordering for four revealed the menu’s main structural weakness because by the time one of us had taken a couple of the dishes, either the Orkney scallops roasted with spices, peppered golden raisin purée and cauliflower or the wood fired squab with four spice celeriac, spring cabbage purée, date and bacon sandwich, cut it into four and then started handing them round the table not only did these over-worked and over-handled dishes not look so pretty but they were lukewarm at best. As these and the other dozen or so dishes came and went one of my companions, an experienced restaurant-goer, looked up from her plate and commented resignedly but most perceptively, “I think I have just lost the plot completely.”
Atherton exacerbates the menu’s structural weakness and the logistics of an awkward L shaped room where the kitchen is some distance from the most distant table (a similarly awkward layout which Nobu London overcomes most successfully by serving predominantly cold food) by piling too many ingredients on to one plate. The quality of a small piece of aged English beef is traduced not improved by the juxtaposition of artichoke, foie gras, snail and a small dollop of pommes purées incorporating garlic and aligot de marinette, a strong French cheese. A piece of turbot suffers the same fate sadly by being wrapped around what the menu describes as ‘five-spice oxtail’ and then being surrounded by baby leeks, crushed peas and Moroccan mint – a dish that looks even worse once it has been cut into four – while in the dim light three of the main meat dishes, lamb with cinnamon sweetbreads, the squab and the beef look indistinguishable, each a dark, murky dish with a sticky, slightly sweet sauce. Desserts incorporate the same plethora of ingredients so there is no clean, refreshing end to a confusing and confused meal.
There are one or two nice touches, most notably the two bars and the wine list which serves several interesting flights of wines by the glass (although how the customer deals with permutating, multiple glasses and dishes I know not) but these are not enough to redeem an ill-conceived restaurant. maze is a mess.