Teatro excels where clubs failed

This review was published in July 2001

One restaurant; two quests. The first? I had some theatre tickets in my pocket. A full stomach nourishes appreciation; an empty one undermines it. The second quest, by contrast, was for reassurance rather than sustenance:

When the Standard sports desk organised a tasting of football club's wines back in May, the derisory quality of the wines combined with their rapacious prices (around £10 for French vins de table worth no more than £2.99) constituted the most cynical exploitation of wine innocence I had ever come across. ( CLICK HERE to read that article). Does anyone in the football world, past or present, know what good wine is? I decided to try the pre-theatre menu at Teatro, where our tasting had taken place; it's owned by former footballer Lee Chapman and his partner Leslie Ash. Two birds, thus; one stone.

It's a strange sort of place, divided into club (for members only), bar and restaurant proper, the last being a long lozenge of a space. You commute between the different zones down long, dark, Kafkaesque corridors. An abstract hangs at one end of the restaurant, seemingly painted in dried blood; the geometrical designs on the windows, too, are blood-coloured, in different hues: goat, perhaps, along with ox and a little dark hare. The pretheatre menu offers only three choices for each course; there are nine on the full menu.

The first mouthful was a disappointment: what possible reason can there be for serving bread evidently cut some hours earlier in a restaurant with any fewer than 2,000 covers? Teatro at this particular pretheatre moment had no more than a dozen diners; cutting bread for all of them, even if they were eating nothing else and hadn't seen food for two days, would have taken less than a minute. The slices we were given were not quite curling yet, but they had begun to flex their toes.

No doubt my chilled beetroot soup was also prepared some hours earlier, though, in this case, it was a good idea: soup flavours need time to marry. Warm home-smoked salmon was adequate, though the red-onion salad had been assembled by an operative rather than an artist.

A main course of deep-fried stuffed aubergine was parcelled up with buffalo mozzarella and spiced tomato salsa (too much of the former, not enough of the latter) and left to recline barely on a bed of bitter leaves; grilled beef rump, by contrast, worked juicily enough with borlotti bean cassoulet, new potatoes and baby spinach. There was more unfresh bread with cool Italian cheeses; the date-and-walnut parfait with roasted apples made a better final flourish.

By then, though, I had a great red wine to finish. We'd discussed the choice with our waiter, who told me that all the bottles I was contemplating were "very nice". I went for the 1995 Château d'Aydie of Laplace, heartened by the fact that this Madiran had snoozed for half a decade in bottle. In fact, it needed longer - much longer. Not that we cared. Black, smelling of raked earth and iron filings, it tasted of blood and stones and was drenched in tannin, fine tannin, like powdered shoe leather.

This is what Madiran is meant to be like; it's a fearsome, no-prisoners kind of wine, made from a Basque terrorist of a grape variety called the Tannat. They stream oxygen through it in its vats and casks in a desperate attempt to soften and flesh it out; £32 plus £4 service made it a fair buy for a wine of roaring authenticity.

My guest, who ate the dessert, enjoyed a superb, though expensive, glass of the 1996 Juran?on Quintessence (all pineapples and honey) from Domaine Bru-Baché (£8.50 plus £1.06 service for a miserly 125ml); I tried to pinch as much as I could from him, though without any great success. We had begun the meal with a glass of excellent 2000 Pinot Grigio from Terrazze della Luna (£5.06 for 175ml), far sappier than the regional norm.

The only red card we were obliged to wave was at the cheapest white on the list, the 1999 Vin du Pays des Cotes de Tarn from Domaine Vign-Lourac (£3.94 for 175ml including service), which was almost indifferent enough to qualify as a football-club wine. That aside, the boy Lee done well.

Wine list scores three out of five.

Teatro
93-107 Shaftesbury Avenue, W1V 7DH