‘Undifferentiated international hi-luxe’ — review

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I’m going to remember 2023 forever as the year I first encountered “The Mayfair Shocker”. This is a dish for which even a critic on expenses, avowedly supportive of raised prices in the hospitality industry and firm in the belief that it’s your money and you should be able to bloody well spend it on whatever you want, actually chokes at the price on the menu. The £96 lobster pie at Mount Street springs to mind, but there have been too many others in the area recently.

Il Gattopardo, a stylish new Italian on Albemarle Street, hides a shocker. But we’ll get on to that later. First, let’s talk about the place itself. It’s by the same owners as Zuma, Roka, Amazónico, COYA and Bar des Prés and, unless they have a thing about big cats, we can assume the name (translation: “the leopard”) is a reference to Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s elegiac 1958 novel set in Sicily in during the Risorgimento. The design style is supposedly inspired by “Italy of the 1960s”. Perhaps they meant Visconti’s 1963 film of the book, so dear to food lovers for its sumptuous feasting scenes. Indeed, chef Massimo Pasquarelli’s menu focuses on “Sicily, Amalfi, and the Southern Isles”.

“Tonno” comprised thin, rectangular slices of very fine raw tuna, semi-cured in a lime marinade. It was a sort of Italianate gesture to ceviche, but there wasn’t much of it. A sparse layer hidden beneath a froufrou cloud of artfully shredded pickled red onion and beetroot. The Vitello tonnato was a good effort. The meat was correctly “magatello” from the top of the leg. The idea is that the flavour is strong, but it needs microscopically thin slicing to avoid toughness. Unfortunately, it remained flavourless. The “tuna anchovy cream” struggled to compensate. It felt like it had been dialled back a bit.

£56 for two langoustines feels like they’re rubbing your nose in it. The dressing contains garlic, oil, herbs and olives, and sadly neither diamonds nor cocaine

“Frittura” was a selection of squid, pink prawns and zucchini in a surprisingly robust batter. Japanese cooking has taught us so much about lightness in deep frying that it’s a bit of a shock to find it laid on thick. It was well flavoured though, and not oily, so the lemon aioli played nicely with it.

The shocker came next. I’m more than prepared to shell out tall money for fine seafood. God knows a langoustine is worth, if not a whole king’s ransom, then at least a minor duke’s. And by happy coincidence, the best langos in the world are widely accepted to come from Scotland. Fifty-six quid is not too much to drop on a good seafood course, but a menu listing of “Scampi (two pieces)” forces you to do the maths: £28 for each 10cm crustacean. It feels like they’re rubbing your nose in it. There is “salmoriglio condiment”, which may be supposed to help. But it contains garlic, oil, herbs and olives, and sadly neither diamonds nor cocaine.

OK. Let’s try to be professional about this. They tasted bloody gorgeous. You’ll have to make your own call on the price.

“Milanese” on the menu is described as a “Vercelli veal tomahawk”, which was an unusual bit of pandering to fashion. A tomahawk is beef ribeye with a foot or so of rib left intact. It has the proportions of a badminton racquet and has no other purpose than looking good on Instagram. This was, in fact, a regular veal chop with a modest length of bone . . . precisely the traditional cut you’d get for a Milanese in any red-sauce joint. It came on its own board, draped in anchovies like furs round an ageing starlet and squired by a smooth caper and lemon brown butter as an emollient. It was good, but I couldn’t do a whole one. The breadcrumb and Kevlar crust sadly lacked salt. A caponata I’d ordered with it also needed the salt cellar, which I tentatively requested. It was described on the menu as “mixed vegetables, pine-nuts, olives, capers and raisins” and failed to exceed the sum of those parts in any way.

They brought the salt and pepper with unusual ceremony. They were the “Twergi” ES18 and ES19. Large, bulbous and in screaming primary colours, by some distance the least brown thing in the room. It was an interesting choice. It can’t have been part of the ’60s aesthetic. Ettore Sottsass designed them for Alessi in 1989. I checked. I can only imagine that, in revenge for questioning their seasoning regime, they parade through the dining room a couple of absurdly Fisher-Price-bright sex toys. Maybe what the caponata was missing was joy.

There was a lot of PR for Gattopardo at launch and I confess I was drawn to it. It’s part of a portfolio of popular top-end places and I was excited by the promise of the food and the aesthetic. In truth, short of one or two prints on the wall that could only be ’60s Italian, everything else is undifferentiated international hi-luxe. The cuisine could have been West African or Welsh and it would have fitted just as well. The food was extremely competent and there’s obvious talent in the kitchen, but there’s also apparently a strong countervailing imperative not to scare the horses.

By coincidence, last week’s column found me at La Famiglia, a Chelsea Italian restaurant, largely unchanged since it opened in 1966. Its design was less considered and its food just as “crowd pleasing” as Il Gattopardo’s but it was entirely at ease in its own peculiar authenticity.

When I think of Italy in the stylish ’60s it is less of Visconti’s sumptuous, historical “Il Gattopardo” than Antonioni’s austere L’Avventura (1960), an existential study of the vacuity and ennui of privileged young Italians, utterly beautiful and totally lost, funnily enough, in Sicily and the Southern isles. It’s one of my top 10 favourite films of all time, but a lot of people think it’s a triumph of style over content. With which I agree, but don’t care. Perhaps you could approach Il Gattopardo in the same spirit.