Steak a chance on Schrager

This review was first published in February 2001

I have an ambivalent relationship with the hotels of the famous American tax-dodger and former jailbird Ian Schrager.

Most of the time I tend to think they are the apotheosis of meretricious money-grubbing trash. But then, when I actually visit them, I invariably have a good time. The obvious conclusion is that I, too, am meretricious, money-grubbing and trashy.

OK, shoddy finishes and impermanence do have a downside (as my son found while spinning in a chair suspended from the ceiling of the lobby at Sanderson that suddenly became detached), but, rather as in learning to love the bomb, once you embrace the Schrager philosophy of gaudy disposability, life suddenly becomes much easier and more fun.

I have a theory that Schrager and his business partner, Jeffrey Chodorow, are the Dolce & Gabbana of restaurants, reinventing each season their witty, funny, high-glam take on eating out. If restaurants were frocks, the Jacquettas and Libertys would be wearing S&C. And just in time to catch the invasion of international fashionistas for London Fashion Week, S&C have opened Tuscan Steak.

S&C are not afraid to change something they feel isn't working. Such was the case with Saint M, to my mind the best of the three operations at Schrager's Saint Martins Lane. They thought differently, and Saint M has been replaced by Tuscan Steak.

The change has been effected with minimum investment - the only alterations are the addition of a bull's head on the wall and a couple of empty wine bottles scattered around at picture-rail height.

I had intended to have my car valet-parked, but this service has been suspended. The doorman was so pleasantly apologetic, however, that I quite forgave Mr Schrager this shortcoming as I circled Trafalgar Square, Covent Garden and most of the West End looking for a space in which to put my car.

Thus I arrived later than usual. I need not have worried - I found my date, the wife of a successful City analyst, ensconced at the bar, chatting to a fabulously wealthy American businessman.

Having batted her eyelids at this man for the better part of half an hour, she then proceeded to dazzle him with her cigarette-rolling skills. He had apparently seen nothing like it since Haight Ashbury in the late Sixties, and called his brother, similar-looking and only a few billion better off, to marvel at this charming English affectation.

As soon as I decently could, I moved this woman, by now slightly delirious with adulation, over to our table. I had just begun to examine the menu when a waiter glided over. After asking us whether we had eaten at a Tuscan Steak before (there are two others, in New York and Miami), he explained that the dishes all came from somewhere called 'Toscaneee'. As he said this, my eye alighted on the section detailing 'Tuscan Steak's famous grilled Florentine T-bone steak', which actually comes from America. Thus I felt I could not take everything he said entirely literally.

This feeling was enhanced when the bread arrived, focaccia and some pleasant, paper-thin 'carta di musica'. Sardinian in origin, carta di musica is, I suppose, marginally more Tuscan than USDA prime.