Full disclosure - I adore St John - I have eaten here many, many times over the years, for birthdays, client lunches, even for New Year's Eve. The menu is consistently exciting as it (normally) is well-executed (more on this later on). The reason for...the review however is a general sense of slipping standards over the past 3-4 years that are becoming more and more noticeable.
As I say, the food is generally excellent. Yesterday I had potted pork on toast to start, a rustic, how-it-should-be pate with plenty of flavour and offset brilliantly with pickled cucumber. Good start then.
Then things went up a level with the gurnard dish I had next. My word, perfectly cooked Gurnard, served whole, with a light dressing of caper vinaigrette, with a few fried croutons. Genuinely brilliant cooking and concept, which made the latest trip more than worthwhile and went very well with the 2020 St John white burgundy.
Pudding was profiteroles with pouring chocolate sauce which was fine - well executed but the ice cream was too cold and not hugely flavourful. I generally don't have pudding at lunch time but as am doing the Zoe app thing and was interested in how pudding would affect my blood sugar (oddly it went down significantly - eh?).
So all, in all, my lunch there was very, very good.
However...I mentioned slipping standards.
The waiter wasn't the best. Usually we have very good service here which makes it all the more noticeable when the service isn't great. This is more likely to be a one off but we will keep an eye on it.
When ordering sides, we noticed that the ox tongue dish came with chips (often a ploy at St John, if they think they may struggle to shift a more challenging dish, they will put it with chips - last time we were here it was tripe and chips). We asked if we could have some chips with our main courses instead of boiled new potatoes. Most restaurants of this quality would have been able to do this no question, no problem.
Our request was dismissed out of hand, saying they would likely not have enough chips for the ox tongue orders. Statistically this is enormously unlikely, and as it happens we didn't see anyone else order ox tongue while we were there (no huge surprise given it was the most challenging dish on the menu that day). We saw this as a needless denial.
Generosity seems to be thin on the ground here these days, and sadly has been for years. The roast bone marrow and parsley salad, a stone cold classic, has gone from four bones to now sometimes two, which can barely produce enough marrow to cover the piece of toast you get with it. At the New Year party I mentioned at the top, they hadn't provided enough potatoes with the main course for even one each, and when more were requested this was denied at first. Staggering really. This was sorted in the end, but further proof of the point.
Back to yesterday and my friend ordered date pudding, as ever exactly the kind of thing you would hope to see on the menu at St John, and wouldn't expect to find it in many other places. The pudding was good, but the butterscotch sauce was quite badly burnt. When sending this back, we were told "this is how we do it, as it adds the necessary bitterness". Fair enough in theory but if they tasted that sauce and were happy with it I would be very, very surprised. It was hugely bitter, and burnt, overwhelming the flavour of the pudding and ruining the pudding. And why this wasn't explained to us before ordering, that the sauce would be burnt, I don't know. You can't expect people to know that a butterscotch sauce would taste like that, so either tell us on the menu, or tell us when we order. Don't wait for us to complain then tell us that is "how you do it". Which as I say I doubt they tasted before serving.
I have never seen this attitude here before, and I have discussed dishes regularly as most diners would with a menu of the quality that St John produces. But there was a different feel to this, again our feedback was dismissed out of hand in a dismissive, even haughty way which is generally catastrophic for business.
So a nasty taste left in the mouth, in more ways than one, and a genuine fear that things are slipping. The food generally is still amazing and you should go here if you can but I fear things are not as great as some staff think they are, and certainly not quite what it was in its pomp.More
