'These are designed for the kind of people who find Jamie's Italian a bit new-fangled and leery'
On the Brasserie Blanc website, celebrity chef Raymond expounds in lyrical manner. "I am often asked what a Brasserie Blanc is," he says. "Well if the Manoir [aux Quat'Saisons, his two Michelin-starred bourgeois fantasy in Oxfordshire] is a delicate waltz then the Brasseries are the Can Can."
So, to launch this flagship of the burgeoning chain – branches in nice towns such as Milton Keynes, Cheltenham and Winchester – cancan dancers were drafted into Covent Garden, a beaming Raymond high-kicking with the best of 'em. Alas, our dinner here is less hoots and splits, and more lumpen dad dance.
Raymond continues: "I can offer you simple, high quality food that comes as close as possible to the meals that my mother prepared for me at home in Besançon." Seriously, M Blanc? Did your maman dish you up a hunk of ribeye for two from Aubrey Allen catering butchers, smoked so hectically that any vestiges of meatiness have fled? Did she serve it raw (we asked for medium-rare), so it is unchewable, like gnawing at a stray limb that's fallen into the bottom of the Aga?
When we ask for it to be shown more heat, would your ma have chucked it back frazzled into oblivion? With mass-produced fries? And charged you £58 for the privilege? To be fair, the menu does mummy us by helpfully translating "les steaks" for us. It's "steaks".
"I want my Brasserie Blancs to be a central part of the local community," Raymond says. This must be why they're run by a bunch of moneymen with backgrounds in the likes of Loch Fyne, TGI Friday's and Chez Gérard (whose striking listed Opera Terrace premises this replaces). Or, as umbrella company Brasserie Bar Co puts it, "the premium casual drinking and dining market". These are designed for the kind of people who find Jamie's Italian a bit new-fangled and leery. As befits the outlet of a TV fixture, Brasserie Blanc is entirely rammed with them.
"My brasseries," it says on the menu, "are places where you can relax and enjoy honest French cooking." I don't know about you, M Blanc, but I find it hard to relax in an environment of deafening noise levels, stressed and overstretched staff, and legions of people processed like so many frozen frites. And I'm not sure where pasta with Jervaulx blue cheese (from North Yorkshire), chestnut and apple fits into the pantheon of honest French cooking, the pasta (it looks like Sicilian casarecce) tired and limp, the topping slapped on and whacked under the grill so that skidmarks of cheese are blasted on to the Blanc-branded bowl. Chestnuts aren't fresh, apple isn't peeled. It's removed from us, virtually untouched, with a grimace of apology.
"Maman Blanc's miscellany of salads"? Really? Fridge-cold, damp celeriac remoulade, perfunctory carottes râpées, sort-of-Waldorf, beetroot, endive with blue cheese. Why would you go to all the trouble of peeling and coring cucumber, and of serving the dinky little spoonfuls on a handsome oyster platter, when it all has the air of something scooped out of a plastic catering pack some time earlier in the day?
Several of these reappear on a "plateau varié", bolstered by some decent but gelid chicken liver parfait, three paper-thin slices of rosette de Lyon sausage and hot-smoked salmon (not bad) – £11.60 for a few mouthfuls. It would seem Maman Blanc is quite the operator.
According to Caterer mag, there are plans to grow the chain to 40 sites in the next five years. I'm sure this expansion strategy will continue to keep standards lofty, and people who genuinely care about food will continue to pile in. Oh yes.
We're taken aback by a rather excellent "winter pavlova", all toffee and apple and cinnamon and cranberries. Where did that come from? (At a guess, I'd say, a massive fridge.) "I'd really love to know what you think about us," smarms Raymond on a card given to us as we leave. Well, M Blanc, voilà.
• Brasserie Blanc, 020-7379 0666. Open all week, noon-11pm. Three-course meal from about £35 a head, plus drinks and service.
Food 3/10
Atmosphere 5/10
Value for money 3/10
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