Off to see the wizard of Woz

This review was published in April 2002

I fear that I am being stalked by Madonna. It started innocently enough, when I found that she was on the next table to me at Giorgio Locatelli's fashionable Portman Square restaurant. Two days later, I was enjoying a restorative flute at the Berkeley Hotel's Blue Bar - a favourite of mine - when someone told me that Madge has modelled her drawing room on the place.

However, when I booked into Antony Worrall Thompson's new steakhouse, Notting Grill, which is on the site of his old restaurant, Wiz, I thought that I would be safe from my more famous shadow. Admittedly, she wasn't actually there herself, but the staff looked depleted; so depleted that Wozza himself was in the kitchen in a set of barely used whites.

When I asked why he was working in his own restaurant instead of appearing on the telly, I was told that the majority of his staff were round at the Ritchie residence, cooking supper for a little party that included, among others, AA Gill. The Ritchies obviously have a thing about restaurant writers.

Wozza may now be a telly chef - a tubby, bearded, Thames Valley version of Jamie Oliver (just a lot less rich) - but 20 years ago he was a genuine celebrity chef: Marco, Gordon and Jamie rolled into one. In 1981 he virtually launched nouvelle cuisine (remember that?) in Britain from a basement restaurant called M?nage ? Trois, on Beauchamp Place (what we used to have in those days instead of Conduit Street). By the early Nineties, it seemed that a week did not pass without him opening a new rustic-style restaurant.

Then he burned out, got married and opened a couple of restaurants in Notting Hill. One was called Woz and nestled in the lee of Trellick Tower; it was held up by a gang of Rolex robbers on its opening night and forced to close as too many of its customers were getting mugged. The other, called Wiz, has now been made over as Wozza's steakhouse.

I was a little bit embarrassed to see Wozza in his own restaurant as I had brought along one of London's leading meat connoisseurs. Wozza can bore with the best when it comes to marbling, muscle fibre, texture, cross-breeding, and the deleterious effects of a barley-rich diet for cattle. His motto is: 'Well Bred. Well Fed. Well Hung.'

Of course, these days, steakhouses are hip: Sophie's, Springbok Caf?, Popeseye etc. Britain has had its BSE moment and is now back on the beef. And Wozza's, while not the cheapest, is one of the best. After a couple of tasty starters - an adequate bubble and squeak with poached egg, and a sublimely delicious reblochon en cro?te with chilli and apple jelly - the T-bone steak arrived.

We had specified a Pittsburgh (black on the outside, blue inside) and it was delivered as requested, but it was not the impeccable cooking that impressed me so much as the size. It was so big that you almost needed an Ordnance Survey map to guide you around it.

It was less of a slab of meat and more of a small undulating prairie of flesh, crisscrossed with griddle marks. It was a triumph and in a fit of generosity, no doubt enhanced by the Jim Barry Chardonnay and the bottle of dodgy Greek claret, my guest pronounced it, 'a damn fine steak, a very, very fine steak, a steak of such excellence...' Well, I hyperbolise slightly, but we liked it a lot.

Unable to press my guest into sampling a tumbler of Armenian cooking brandy or Yugoslav plum eau de vie, I forced him to have a chocolate brownie, while I went for sticky toffee pudding. They both looked identical on the plate and they were further confused by an identical sauce. Add to that a waiter who kept coming over, calling us 'gents', and it was not an entirely unblemished evening. Nevertheless, for cow flesh at its finest, it's worth checking out.