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A great-value brasserie that offers the taste of the gastro-palaces of Paris at the price of your local Café Rouge
20 Sherwood Street, London W1 (020 7734 4888). Meal for two, including drinks and service: £75
The very best restaurants are film sets in which diners play both cast and audience. No restaurateurs know this better than Chris Corbin and Jeremy King. In the Wolseley and, more recently, the Delaunay they have created poised British costume dramas, flogging tickets to those who can afford their brand of Mitteleuropean (by way of belle époque Paris) good taste. By comparison their latest venture, the gilded, plumped, marble-clad and sconced Brasserie Zédel, is a vast, bums-on-seats crowd pleaser, a love letter to the classic Parisian brasserie, a soapy wallow in all the things we adore about French bourgeois ideals. Above all, though, it's cheap. In places it is astonishingly cheap. Vegetable soup at fast-food chain Leon costs £3.10. At Brasserie Zédel the soupe du jour is £2.25. Plus, at the latter you get to eat it sitting on a velvet banquette.
Anybody wanting to sneer at the place could recall the old gag about Sainsbury's only existing to keep the riffraff out of Waitrose. There has already been a certain amount of that: suggestions that this is just a fancy-pants version of a Café Rouge. I could respond to that with a particular word, but I'm too fond of my testicles to let them become a blunt epithet. Because you would have to be a vile, self-regarding little snob not to swoon at what Corbin and King have done here.
A decade or so ago this basement space, once under a less-than-lovely hotel, was turned by Oliver Peyton into the Atlantic. It was glamorous then and lovely in its way, but more than a little hipper-than-thou. Now, the huge, columned ballroom has been returned to its former glory. The marble is back, the gorgeous original lighting has been restored and £750,000 spent on 23ct gilding in all the right places. There is also a new cabaret spot and a stand-alone bar, though if you are eating in the restaurant, get your cocktails at the bar in there. They are not far off half the price.
The menu is an homage to the great gastro-palaces of Paris; to Bofinger and La Coupole, albeit without the gastronomic flourishes. Instead, it's celeriac remoulade and snails, frisée with lardons, and pâté de campagne. It's steak haché and boeuf bourguignon, duck confit and choucroute. They even serve that gloriously stinky sausage-of-death, andouillette.
Are better versions of these dishes available in London? Perhaps. The pissaladière, that killer tart of flaky pastry, caramelised onions and salted anchovies, may be more finessed at La Petite Maison, but you'll pay almost double. The remoulade could have had more of a mustardy punch, but at £2.95 for a serious heap, I am not complaining. The fish soup, though, is exceptional, and the snails swim in deep, savoury pools of garlic butter. I have eaten choucroute, that glorious Alsatian dish of sauerkraut and salty piggy things, here and at the Wolseley. The difference? None that I could see save that it costs £4 less at Zédel.
The boeuf bourguignon is a deep-flavoured sticky stew. We liked the vanilla millefeuille and the summer fruits under a lightly gratinated custard. The wine list is short and opens at £16 a bottle, with almost everything below £30 (an especially good Bordeaux is £24). Cocktails are £6.50.
Let's not pretend. This is a volume operation. They can seat 220, and need to turn the tables four times a day to make money. But that means they serve you quickly and efficiently. Still, I can imagine single diners being able to eat here unhassled; they hold back a significant number of seats for walk-ins. Brasserie Zédel feels like a gift to London, the sort of restaurant it needs and deserves.
It may take nerve to open a big-ticket restaurant. It may take ambition to believe enough fat-walleted people will turn up to fill the seats. But it takes real guts to open a restaurant like this, built around the notion of serious value. It deserves to succeed.
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or visit
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