A lesson in bad manors

Owner Mark Raffan bought Gravetye Manor from the Herbert family.

10 April 2012

Few people realise that the inspiration for Jean-Paul Sartre's seminal work Being and Nothingness came to him in a Paris café, when he asked the waitress for a cup of coffee with no cream. "I'm sorry," she replied, "we're out of cream. How about with no milk?" And thus a philosophical masterpiece was born.

There was a whiff of French existentialism in the early-evening air as I approached Gravetye Manor. As I motored along the misty, wooded drive, the stags seemed straight out of L'Aprèsmidi d'un faune (surely supplied by central casting, or perhaps on wires), while the staff were soon uttering enough Gallic bons mots to furnish Sartre with a second volume.

"Ze bread is surreal," the waiter told us as we reached our table, and I wondered if he was referring to the hallucinogenic properties of the poppy seed topping, until he repeated himself: "Ze bread ... it eez cereal."

An easy mistake to make, especially as I am the man who also once ordered "pageone" in an Italian restaurant, before realising it was not a dish, just a typo on page one of the menu.

Sadly, most of the clientele were anything but surreal. Young, rutting, foghorn-voiced stockbrokers who believed themselves to be temporary owners of this 16th-century manor house, they behaved in a thoroughly obnoxious way, intimidating staff and fellow guests alike, knowing the price of everything but the value of nothing.

Actually, some didn't even know the price, because the waiters (in a curious throwback to the 1950s) always asked, "Who is going to be the host?" and only gave the costed menu to that person, while the guest received a price-free copy.

If one diner was a woman, the man seemed automatically to be given the host menu, which is absurd, because if they're on a date and she doesn't get to see just how much money he's prepared to spend on her, it makes that Y-shaped business afterwards so much harder to negotiate.

The stockbrokers were continually complaining, but it must be admitted that the staff gave them every reason to. I overheard one telling reception that the waiter who'd brought breakfast to his room that morning had said "I forgot the cutlery" and then wandered off (presumably expecting the guest to eat with his fingers), and the general air of ineptitude soon tipped over into surliness.

Though not quite as surly as a place I once visited in Stamford, where I made a can-I-have-the-bill writing gesture to the waiter, who promptly brought over a plate with only a couple of crayons on it. Imaginative high-octane rudeness like that can only be admired.

Sadly, Gravetye's rudeness is strictly low-octane, and unimaginative, too. The menu makes bold promises ("chef de cuisine with his brigade of nine ... offers an imaginative and carefully planned à la carte menu embracing traditional British and classical French"), but the clumsy and insensitive staff don't live up to expectations, nor do the dishes.

The terrine of cured foie gras and artichokes was a perverse attempt to do something novel with that vastly overrated substance, plonking it down atop a thin meniscus of jelly, covered with puerile smiley-face dots of artichoke purée that made me feel I was attending a children's party.

Meanwhile, my obese guest (let's call him Jim Neighsiam) had "passable" butternut-squash-andleek soup, simply because he'd heard a rumour that Camilla Parker Bowles, the Princess Consort, had once ordered it here. Princess Consort. It sounds like an old banger from the 1940s. Which I suppose is precisely what she is.

At that point, I went to see un homme about un chien, and found my main course already cooling on the table when I returned. My risotto with truffled leeks was too emince and too al dente (as were the vegetables), and so overdosed with sage that it resembled Paxo stuffing gone wrong (though can Paxo ever be right?), while Jim's sole was declared "soulless and dry", not the lickerous meaty feast it ought to be.

His caramelised lemon tart was a routine citrus crème brÃ»lée, while the cheese selection was a paltry affair served from a paltry trolley (doubly disappointing as I'd recently eaten at Winteringham Fields in Lincolnshire, home of the UK's finest cheeseboard).

Out of curiosity, I asked the waiter if one soft white-crusted variety was Brillat-Savarin, and received an unhesitating "yes", but he and I both knew he was lying, as sure as celery is anaemic rhubarb, and grissini are anorexic French sticks.

To add to my misery, the acoustics in the dining room appeared to have been modelled on the whispering gallery in St Paul's, as though the diners in the far corners of the room had megaphones pointing directly at us (in the case of the stockbrokers, though, they didn't need them).

However, the wine list was undeniably impressive, with a respectable number of half bottles (the ideal size for older wines to be stored in), although none of the three I requested were actually available. Moreover, I could have done without the sommelier's unscientific insistence that the tannin in wine "will break down ze fat in ze risotto", because it won't.

At best, it's arguable that a youngish claret has a sufficiently tannic mouth-feel to withstand the cloying effect of fat-bearing foods like roast beef, but I reckon the fruitiness of a light cru Beaujolais works just as well, if not better. Anyway, for the record, I finally settled for a white Burgundy, because I like to drink as I dress. Chablis.

The most surreal touch of all came when I finally asked for the bill, which came to about £120 for two with wine. "Ah, you 'ave Mr Parsons's bill," they told me, then added optimistically, "could that go through on your credit card anyway, and zen be taken off your proper bill?"

What has happened here? My previous visits (when Mark Raffan was just the chef de cuisine) were excellent, but things have deteriorated since he bought the whole business from the Herbert family, who used to run it in a ship-shape fashion.

Gravetye Manor
Near East Grinstead, West Sussex, RH19 4LJ

MORE ABOUT

France

Mansions

Tourism

A lesson in bad manors

Read More