Dining out in a Viennese whirl

This article was published in February 2002

I can't remember the last time I ate in a nightclub, but that's probably because nightclubs are not about memories but about fragments of barely recalled experience. Or at least they ought to be.

I have been trying to recreate, from shards of memory remaining from the early Eighties, my few visits to the Embassy before it shut and I have come to the conclusion that it never was in Burlington Street on the site of Legends. Back in those days, no one, however wrecked, could have mistaken the Embassy for Legends.

Except Mark Fuller, who had a hand in the creation of late-Nineties drinkeries Red Cube and Sugar Reef and was obviously so confused during the Eighties that he has taken over Legends and named it Embassy, which is a bit cheeky. It's a little like some future entrepreneur taking over The Avenue and renaming it Le Caprice.

Moreover, Mr Fuller has compounded the confusion by hiring a spin doctor so delirious as to devise such spectacular oxymorons as 'the interior of the restaurant has a contemporary feel, reminiscent of Vienna in the Twenties'. Since when was 80 years ago contemporary? And if you think a redecorated nightclub between Savile Row and Cork Street looks anything like the city of Klimt, Strauss, Kaiser Franz Josef and The Third Man, then may I suggest you take the next available flight to Austria - except, of course, you would probably wind up in Australia.

Happily, Mr Fuller has also secured the services of Garry Hollihead, so even if he had taken Spearmint Rhino, renamed it Annabel's, and plopped it down in Sudbury redecorated in a style an enthusiastic PR might describe as pre-Christian-neo-Taliban-19th-century-Los-Angeles-whorehouse, you might still want to eat there.

Hollihead really can cook and why he has never quite managed to hit the big time eludes me. Maybe his work at Embassy/Legends will finally do it for him.

If there was a menu that deserved the appellation modern classic it was the one I perused one damp January evening: roast langoustines thermidor, chicken Rossini, fillet of venison Wellington, lobster Newburg, lobster americaine and sole dieppoise were among the dishes demonstrating strong classical references.

Although they sound different, cauliflower and truffle soup, and scallop and asparagus velout? share a similar principle: the first of the listed ingredients arrived in a small bowl, on top of which was poured the soup/velout?. I have a fondness for this vaguely old-fashioned at-table preparation and it was handled impeccably by the head waiter.

Of the main courses it was the pheasant 'Archiduc' that was the clear winner, a quite spectacularly Ruritanian name for a well-presented platter of slivers and slabs of pheasant. The recipient of the dish had been hoping the pheasant would have been carved at the table and I rather suspect our head waiter, who let slip that he had worked at White's and Cliveden, wished he had been able to demonstrate his ability with the carving knife.

To get to the loos at Embassy one has to go through the nightclub/disco/members' bar and this is where the schizophrenia of the place resides. While the restaurant is, for want of a better term, a class act, the nightclub strikes me as just another run-of-the-mill nightclub.

Back at the safety of our table, I ordered cr?pes Suzette which, to my chagrin, were not set alight, but served with three adequate ices and an orange sauce that would surely have benefited from some pyrotechnics.