Boyds Grill & Wine Bar, restaurant review: Hidden high splendour

Boyds is the opposite of those restaurants in which the cooking is aimlessly novel or fatuously trend-pursuing: it’s about quality and giving pleasure to the diner at a fair price, says David Sexton
Find your marbles: the grand Victorian interior of Boyds
Matt Writtle
David Sexton28 November 2017

Evelyn Waugh had a pet name for the luxuries of London life that he coveted — “marble halls”, meaning by this the grand hotel dining rooms of The Ritz and so forth. He would have appreciated Boyds Grill & Wine Bar, I think.

For here, hidden away, despite being so central it is practically in Trafalgar Square, behind a hotel façade, is a beautiful room, with a soaring coffered ceiling, mighty chandeliers, marble on the walls, marble on the floor. It’s a treat in itself — yet almost secret somehow.

Northumberland Avenue has always been a slightly odd street that way. It was, explains Pevsner, planned in the 1870s and built up by 1887 with “big, high and ornate” stone elevations in what soon became known as the “Charing Cross style”. Many were hotels and Pevsner grants them “a certain French elegance”.

Of this one, formerly the Hotel Victoria, “the public rooms were lavish, as is clear from the entrance hall with its handsome marble-banded walls. As a hotel it was, however, soon outranked, due to its stingy provision of bathrooms.”

There’s a final snap to the tale: “To make the street, Northumberland House, the grandest Jacobean house in London, was demolished in 1874,” sniffs Pevsner. Too late now.

It’s here, in high Victorian splendour, that Charles Boyd, a long-term advocate of the best British produce, has opened both a bar and a grill-based restaurant of startlingly high quality, with executive chef Nate Brewster and, as general manager, Fabien Babanini, a flamboyant charmer, a native of Lyons but long-term UK resident, who has previously worked front of house for such places as Les Trois Garçons, La Tante Claire and The Square.

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The layout means you can sit at different bars, in the formal dining room, in very comfortable padded red leather chairs, or even on sofas in the lounge, and have the same menu, either as a drink and a plate or as a full dinner.

You could just have a glass of wine — the list is amazing and includes cheap 25ml taster glasses as well as the 125ml and 175ml servings, of fabulous Pouilly-Fuissé and Gevrey-Chambertin, for example — and the British cured meat board from Trealy Farm in Monmouthshire (£10 for one, £19.95 for two or more to share from the counter) with really first-rate charcuterie, artisan salamis and hams that easily match anything from Spain or Italy. Fabien told us that it helped that he spoke Welsh, baaing briefly. He’s a card.

'The simple steaks have remarkable tenderness and flavour: a small piece of the water buffalo (£18) had a gloriously rich, charred taste, not quite like anything I had tasted before'

But the main menu is surprisingly moderately priced (and there’s a pre-theatre menu at £19.50 for two courses, £23.50 for three). And, delightfully served, all the food we tried was startlingly good. From the cold small plates, Sipsmith gin-cured salmon with daikon and buttermilk sorbet (£5) was knock-out: the most deliciously marinated fish in a chunk, perfect with a glass of the unusual but excellent Croatian Primus Riesling, Bolfan 2012 (£7). From the hot plates, beef and bone marrow faggot with buttery mash and Bordelaise sauce (£5) came in its own little cocotte, deeply-flavoured, the very essence of such a rich, earthy dish.

All the meat here is most assiduously sourced — lamb from Anglesey, Blythburgh pork, Norfolk Black chicken, Scottish beef or more unusually. Red Sussex wagyu beef from Trenchmore Farm and water buffalo from Laverstock Park Farm in Hampshire. And, like the wine, it’s offered in rational portions, fillets of 100g, 200g or 300g, for example. There’s a range of optional sauces at £1.95 more — we tried an excellent béarnaise, and powerfully reduced lemon thyme and port jus — but they are hardly necessary at all.

If the new Pitt Cue boasts a monster grill imported from Michigan, here they have East Anglia’s finest, the Synergy, which went into production in Cambridgeshire in 2013, a gas grill that atomises fats in a different way from traditional chargrills, the company claims. Whatever, the simple steaks alone that come off it have remarkable tenderness and flavour: a small piece of the water buffalo (£18) had a gloriously rich, charred taste, not quite like anything I had tasted before.

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It seems a shame to enhance such perfect simplicity with anything more than good wine: Clos Maucaillou, from the fine year of 2009, classified as Bordeaux Superieur but sourced through the Margaux Château Boyd-Cantenac, is well worth £29.50 a bottle and the list includes half a dozen different vintages of Boyd-Cantenac itself if you’re feeling flush. Fabien serves them all in the appropriate Riedel glass, being a pretty persuasive evangelist for the difference this makes. From the sides, you will find that however many of the Parmesan fries (£4) you order, you will eat: sorry.

From the puddings, perfectly baked salted caramel chocolate fondant (with raspberry ripple ice cream and chocolate soil) and an Eton Mess, which was no mess but a very neatly deconstructed dish of meringues and wild strawberries (both £6.95) were hard to choose between. English subtlety or choccy sumptuousness? A bit of both. For Boyds Grill and Wine Bar is the opposite of those restaurants in which the cooking is aimlessly novel or fatuously trend-pursuing: it’s about quality and giving pleasure to the diner at a fair price (we paid £97.48 for two à la carte, although you could easily spend more than this on wine alone, if you felt inclined).

Any criticisms? The music doesn’t do quite enough to demarcate this pleasure-palace from the ambience of the rest of the hotel. And there’s still a stingy provision of bathrooms, the loos being accessed by a lift to the basement and a trek through a hotel-ish corridor. Otherwise: my idea of a good time. Waugh’s too, I reckon.

Open Mon-Sat 8am-11pm. Around £100 for two.

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