Levantine26 London Street, W2 (020-7262 1111)Le Cercle
1 Wilbraham Place, SW1 (020-7901 9999)
London has suddenly developed a thing for all-day opening. Mealtimes are dead, the rolling scoff is on. St John Bread and Wine and The Wolseley have surfed the most conspicuous crests of this wave in recent months, but it seems that all over town we are being invited to drop into our favourite restaurants for seed cake and Madeira at eleven, a gentle snackeroo around four, or a snifter and a spot of Welsh rarebit at dressing-gown-and-slippers o’clock.
Chief among the reasons for this open-all-day business is the continued prohibition on opening all night. The long-promised licensing revolution just isn’t happening, and with rent and staff costs and the pressure to use pricier and pricier ingredients, you just can’t cut it - as any working hooker will tell you - on two quick bangs a day. Eating out in England is really a Friday/Saturday thing, and it is those empty midweek lunch and supper times full of idle staff that return to haunt you when the debt-collectors come.
Far better to rationalise the staff list and keep fewer waiters working longer cycles, downscale the kitchen outside main mealtimes - like a hotel - and prepare to turn a few quid with minimal fuss either side of lunch and dinner on smackerels for under-occupied locals and passers-by.
But does the principle of small plates, moderately priced, arriving in waves, or singly with a drink, work for all cuisines and all restaurant styles? I aim to find out by applying the age-old technique of “compare and contrast”. Do you remember comparing and contrasting? It was a quaint old way of talking about simple ideas back when young people used to go to school to be educated rather than to eat crisps, buy condoms and shoot each other.
And what I intend to compare and contrast are Le Cercle (the first offshoot of the hallowed Smithfield foie gras joint, Club Gascon) which offers all-day cutting-edge French cuisine in Chelsea, and Levantine (shot off from the very successful Levant
on Wigmore Street), which is peddling perpetual Lebanese in Paddington.
First off, a glance at the menus. It is no surprise to find Levantine lending itself easily to the all-day concept. Middle Eastern food tends to be eaten as a series of itty-bitty separates, anyway. So much is raw or preserved or cooked, then served cold or lukewarm, that the clock is an irrelevance. I tootled about à la carte because the all-day set mezze is a bit limiting, but the division of Levantine’s dinner menu into themed feasts - meat, fish, vegetarian, regular - is a novel touch.
Novel is by no means an adequate word for Le Cercle’s menu, which divides highly wrought dishes such as “light aniseed crab parmentier”, “crispy black pudding pie with apple” and “roasted langoustines on a warm foie gras flan with crispy bacon” into sections headed Vegetal, Marin, Fermier, Terroirs, Plaisirs, Fromagerie and Gourmandises. Should you have the pot au feu de sot-l’y-laisse before or after your tête de veau with sauce ravigote? The narrative here is altogether more confused (or Post-Modern, I suppose, in the manner of such French anti-narrators as Perec and Robbe-Grillet and Queneau).
Let’s look at the suitability of the locales for all-day dining. First, Chelsea: perfect. If anybody has spare time to kill and money to kill it with, it’s this lot. As yet things are quiet at Le Cercle, but the locals are slack-witted and will wise up eventually. Paddington is more of a bustle; it’ll be workers nipping out for fag breaks and a falafel that’ll make or break them. I was there from two till four and had the place to myself after a business lunch broke up, until a twentysomething and her mum came in for mezze and an elderly Sikh came in alone to eat quail.
As a nip-in-and-nip-out gaff, Le Cercle does not convince. A greeter at street level sends you down a very steep staircase to a labyrinth of marbled vaults and nooks, with billowing drapes and sultry French waiters in the black leather armour of medieval bandits. It’s just too much effort for elevenses.
Levantine, on the other hand, was staffed by two chirpy local boys looking forward to QPR’s open-topped bus parade through Shepherds Bush to celebrate promotion. They waved me in to the easy, street-level dining room, and while the red quilty wall-hangings and sequins, Moorish doors and filigree lamps looked a bit embarrassed in daylight (like belly dancers at a bus stop) the notion of scoff-and-go seemed altogether more feasible.
The food was mostly first-rate at both places. More consistent at Levantine because far less ambitious, attaining neither the heights nor the depths of Le Cercle. But it was not utterly without innovation. In among very good tabbouleh, gigantes beans in tomato and coriander and grilled halloumi that glistened like young skin, came some crab kibbeh. These followed the model of the traditional lamb version, in that crab flesh was bound into a wheat-based batter and then filled with fresh crab meat before frying. The result was kibbeh that tasted of crab. Nearly as nice as kibbeh that taste of lamb. But the taste of lamb was gorgeous in seven little makanek sausages full of lemony juices and popping with pine kernels. There was also a lovely little octopus salad, oily and citrussy and life-affirming. I also had a grilled quail. And some warak enab. And some prawns. God, I’m a pig. But if these places insist on opening all day, what can I do but eat all day?
Now, if crab kibbeh strike you as a scary experiment, then you want to try Le Cercle’s light aniseed crab parmentier. Or, rather, you don’t. Touted as layers of light crab meat and dark crab meat beneath a potato topping served in a martini glass, it turned out to be a crab-offal smoothie
of rare grossness. And there was a sort of crème caramel with foie gras foam on it and bits of langoustine that I’ve been having nightmares about ever since, in which a Parisian gourmand has a scooter accident on his way home from the traiteur on a hot day and I have to eat what they found in his satchel.
But there was glory, too, at Le Cercle. White asparagus are a rare joy in England, though ubiquitous in France (where a vague consumer preference for little green spears doesn’t mean that manufacturers give up utterly on rarer breeds in the race for the supermarket millions), and to serve them with a beetroot vinaigrette opened up a new horizon for me. Tuna confit with pork belly and béarnaise was another new notion that did not fail. But it veered, like the crab slime martini, on the side of “molecular gastronomy”, and might scare the palate of some old dear who wanders in at five in the afternoon expecting scones.
As might the black pudding and apple pie, though I loved it madly. It was the very epitome of an all-day dish, a breakfast, lunch and supper in one, full of force and grubby nature in the blood sausage, but sweet and cute in the fruit and just enough pastry to tell you it’s only a pie. And then there was the cupful of little sautéed mousserons in a pot, boasting the light and joyful flavour you get only in a wild mushroom with a five-week season. Best of all was the sweetbreads and morels sautéed in cream. Glory be to He who gave pancreases to the beasts of the field. All day, every day, pal. You couldn’t stop me eating them.
From the all-day point of view it’s a win for Levantine, but order wisely at Le Cercle and you may have the meal of a lifetime. Order foolishly and weep. So just put some thought into it. After all, you’ve got all day.
Levantine
Food: 7
Service: 7
All-dayness: 8
Score: 7.33
Le Cercle
Food: 8
Service: 7
All-dayness: 5
Score: 6.67
Price: Entirely up to you at Levantine, but a bit more at Le Cercle.
E-mail: feedme@thetimes.co.uk if you think QPR will go straight down again.
