Timing is everything. You have to feel sorry for the guys at Red Dog Saloon, who battled through a soft opening week blighted by a broken smoker (a not inconsiderable issue for a barbecue restaurant), only to have their limelight stolen away from them by a van parked under Hungerford bridge. A few months back, in fact even a couple of days back, I would have approached Red Dog with only the expectation of something better than what I'd already had in London, and let's face it, that's not setting the bar very high. Yesterday though, as I took planted myself in a spacious booth in the attractively refurbished room in the corner of Hoxton Square (I've never been to an actual Southern USA BBQ joint but I'm willing to gamble that Red Dog does a decent impression), it was, unfortunately for them, with the memory of a stunning lunch at the Pitt Cue Co. as a gastronomic benchmark.
Things did start very well though. I'd be the first to admit that when it comes to buffalo chicken wings, I'm very easily impressed. Or perhaps they're just very easy to get right - I even quite like the version at TGI Friday's (look, you try and find something to eat at Gatwick Airport, OK?), and everything else they serve is completely bloody inedible, so that might tell you something. Either way, these were crispy outside, moist inside and doused in enough of Frank's Hot sauce to make the whole thing very enjoyable indeed. I also liked the blue cheese dip they came with, which was refreshing and salty.
My friend's cheeseburger was good enough to be worth the money, and if that sounds like damning with faint praise then you only have to poke your head out of the door in London and see just how many terrible pub burgers are being pushed on unfortunate punters for £10 or more each. This version, at £7 including fries and beetroot slaw and presented authentically in a greaseproof paper-lined plastic basket, wasn't bad at all - not a Meatwagon beater obviously, but it did at least contain American cheese, the bun was soft and held its shape, and was cooked nicely medium rare. The beef was a bit lacking in flavour - Red Dog use never-frozen chuck but it's not aged, which I think is often the difference between a nice burger and a great burger - but the pickles were good and there was a pleasing absence of any kind of salad; how many times does a great big lump of iceberg lettuce, or, even worse, rocket (bleugh), just make it all more annoying to eat instead of adding anything positive? More often than not, I'd say.
And so to the main event: the BBQ meat. For a place that makes a big show of its "World Championship", "award-winning" smoker, you'd hope that at the very least this area of the menu would be worth the entrance fee. And indeed it was - just about. The pork rib was huge and moist, and did have a nice earthy note of mesquite alongside the mix of spices they'd used for the rub. My only real issue was the lack of texture contrasts, as despite having a good firm flesh (none of that horrible "falling off the bone" nonsense that seems to pass for authentic slow cooking in most restaurants in London serving ribs - I'm looking at you, Hard Rock Café) there was no crust. How much better it would have been with a thick, dark coating of smoky, caramelised goodness - like for example these babies that Simon Majumdar of Dos Hermanos enjoyed on a recent trip to the States.
Chicken was, again, moist and firm and perfectly edible but I do wonder about the logic of slow-smoking chicken at all - surely this isn't an animal that really has enough of a fat content to make slow rendering down over so many hours necessary - a quick blast over the coals would have given a nice crispy skin (sadly missing here) while keeping the flesh inside juicy. I could be being overly critical; this huge plate of food was only £12.50 (well, it would have been had I been paying for it) and it is a better standard of BBQ than I've had anywhere else in the city... with one exception, of course. Don't blame me, then, blame Pitt Cue. As I said, timing is everything.
I am going to struggle to sum up my meal at Red Dog Saloon without sounding either hugely patronising (though that doesn't often stop me) or hugely disappointed, and believe me, I'm not. By the standards of the city, and let's remember it's a very big city, Red Dog does very nearly the best BBQ money can buy - I ate all of it, more or less enjoyed all of it, and I would probably go back. Service was efficient and friendly, the American beer selection is top-notch (Sam Adams, Sierra Nevada, Brooklyn East IPA and more) and even a margarita was as good as I've had from most places. But it is still, sadly, a BBQ restaurant serving ever-so-slightly dissatisfying BBQ, and though it's not bad, it needs to be better. Perhaps, one day, it will be. Time will tell, and timing, as I said, is everything.
Last night I went to the Hard Rock Cafe and enjoyed a tasty, reasonably-priced meal served promptly by honest and obliging staff in comfortable surroundings.
Ha ha! April Fool!
Before we go any further though, perhaps I should explain what I was doing there. It all began with an email from their PR people to a friend of mine, inviting her to their famous Piccadilly flagship restaurant. Being of sturdier moral constitution than most, she politely declined but mentioned that a friend of hers would happily whore himself out to any old ethically-bankrupt tourist dive as long as there was a free burger in it (me). For whatever reason (and I'm sure they had theirs), my invitation never arrived, but by now my interest was piqued - I had often pootled past the place on the bus and marvelled at the queues that on summer evenings stretched around the block, and no less than top restaurant critic Charles Campion rated their burger as one of the six best in London. So, I managed to persuade said friend to come with me largely on the promise of a boisterous and tacky but hopefully entertaining evening, and very much assumed we'd find if not the greatest food in London then at least a decent night out.
It may sound like I'm saying all this merely to defend myself against accusations that I've deliberately picked an awful restaurant in order to give it a gleeful battering on the blog. But I can only assure you that honestly, neither of us were expecting anything less than a tasty burger under a case containing Eric Clapton's guitar, and to this day I have never gone anywhere actively hoping for a miserable time. I may be a glutton, but I'm not a masochist, and the abject misery of a bad meal isn't worth any number of extra blog visits.
I'll say this for the Hard Rock Cafe though, it is definitely popular. On arriving at about 6:45pm, we were told by the friendly doorman that it would be up to an hour wait, which, lubricated by if-not-great-then-not-horrible dry martinis in the small terrace out the front, actually went by fairly quickly. I probably shouldn't have looked too closely at the barman's mixing method though; it wasn't so much the fact he chilled the glasses by dumping in then discarding handfuls of ice and soda water - this happens a lot in places short on freezer space - but he then crafted a lemon twist by taking a pre-cut wedge of lemon and ferociously scooping out the flesh from the inside, the end product looking like something fished out from the bins at a tequila bar. It was such a difficult job though and he had taken so long doing it, I didn't really have the heart to say anything.
Before we knew it, the little remote pager thing they'd given us started bleeping and flashing and shaking quite insistently, and we were led inside to a tiny table beneath the bar. The menus were huge, laminated and depressingly familiar in that International American Chain kind of way - think TGI Friday's or Tony Romas - and the first scintilla of doubt had begun to set in, but we'd waited long enough by now and weren't about to go anywhere else, so ordered the LEGENDARY 10 OZ. BURGER and a rack of hickory smoked ribs.
I'll tell you about the ribs first, and briefly, because I've just had my lunch and want to keep it down. Over-marinated, overcooked to oblivion and drowned in a fiercely sweet and vinegar-sharp sauce, they were that rare combination of tasteless and over seasoned, like someone had dunked the Yellow Pages in a bucket of Tesco Value BBQ Sauce. The meat was cardboardy and stringy, of desperately poor quality with no pork flavour whatsoever, and came with an even more hideous side order of what I can only describe as "sugared bean paste". Chips were frozen but if I'm being perfectly honest not completely inedible, and coleslaw was OK, but this was not a pleasant plate of food. It cost SEVENTEEN POUNDS.
And then we have the "LEGENDARY" burger. In many ways of course, being literally the worst burger I've ever eaten in my life, its legend will definitely live on. Where do I start? Perhaps with the onion rings, and a breadcrumb casing that shattered at the slightest touch and left you to fight with a slimy grey tapeworm of chewy onion inside; or perhaps with the buns which were splintered and desiccated, as flavourless and insubstantial as polyester sofa cushion filling. But no, let's talk about the meat itself - grey, crumbly and bitter thanks to disastrous overcooking, accompanied by a square of salty carbon I can only guess had once been streaky bacon, and yet topped incredibly with a sheet of largely cold - and uncooked - cheap cheddar. You have to admire their technique, to produce a beef (presumably) patty so cremated it was like eating coal and yet somehow present it with a rigid slice of cold cheese - the timing involved must have taken years to perfect. It cost FIFTEEN POUNDS.
So, as you might be hoping, we complained. And very shortly the manager - a smart young woman in black trousers (and not the joke-shop "sexy nurse" outfits that the more junior members of staff are forced to wear) turned up. I'm not the best complainer, I tend to get very nervous and worry I might offend someone, but as politely as I could I explained about the overcooked burger and the woody ribs and wondered what the story was. The ribs, we were assured, were bought in raw and smoked in their own smokehouse(!!) in a dry rub marinade for 24 hours, before being finished on the grill and doused in the sauce. We must, of course, give them the benefit of the doubt, and I have no reason to believe she was fibbing on this point at least, but we were still aghast - how could they go to all that effort, their own smoke house for heaven's sake, and end up with something so poor? They could have bought in some Brakes Bros budget cuts and achieved the same effect. On the burger, she was more defensive.
"You should have told your waitress you wanted it more medium."
My heartbeat increased. "She didn't ask!"
"Your waitress tells me she came over and asked you how everything was and you said it was fine."
That was a complete lie. I looked over towards my friend, who was pale with rage. "No, she didn't. In fact we haven't seen her between when she brought the food and now - we had to flag someone else down to complain."
"Well perhaps it just wasn't to your taste."
They'd tried defence, now they were trying condescension. Great.
"This is not just a matter of taste. That burger was burned, and the ribs were horrible."
But we weren't getting anywhere, and by now we were feeling so wound up by the manager's attitude we just wanted to cut and run. She did, as a conciliatory gesture, offer free drinks, but we were definitely not in the mood to hang around and I suggested could she take a round of drinks we'd already had off the bill? "No, we can't do that." Of course. We paid up, £30 each for one of the most miserable experiences in a restaurant I can remember, and left.
When I got back home, emotionally drained and shell-shocked from the evening's events, I loaded up the Hard Rock Cafe's entry on various different aggregate review sites to see if others had had as bad a time as us. It was somewhat of a relief to find that, by and large, they had, but amongst the various 1/10, 2/10 and 3/10 star reviews one in particular caught my eye, a 10/10 score from a name matching the initial PR invite all those weeks back. It's gone now - the as-ever switched-on guys at London Eating have quite rightly taken it down - but I don't know which is more laughable, the idea that someone in PR would use their own real name to shill a client on a review site, or that anyone would ever consider the dross churned out at the Hard Rock Cafe worth shouting about at all. But then, perhaps that's how it survives. It's a vacuous, sneering noise of a place, the worst kind of corporate gastro-swindle, and yet with enough money pumped into falsifying reviews, unfortunate punters will just keep on turning up. Hard Rock Cafe have obviously long since decided, why go to the effort of being good, when some well-placed propaganda will do the job just as well?
There's no way I could walk past a restaurant calling itself "Biguns" without wanting to know more. Under the eaves of a strange 60s red brick condominium on the corner of Warwick Way and Vauxhall Bridge Road, this strange place appears to be a throwback to the What's Cooking? style of UK/US eateries, back in the days when spare ribs and nachos were an outrageous novelty. So accordingly, the menu travels a bizarre mid-atlantic route between fish and chips and cajun chicken, with peppered steak and "meat" lasagne thrown in for good measure. There's even an "unlimited" salad bar, where you can pick up a bowl of iceberg lettuce and e-coli bacteria from underneath a heat lamp.
It is, of course, all pretty mediocre. We went for the 'Platter for three' (between four of us), which consisted of tasteless ribs, wobbly chicken, soggy mushrooms in greasy breadcrumbs and oily onion rings. That's a whole lot of brown food. In addition we ordered a plate of Nachos, which were OK, and the platter also included a few skinny fries which I defy anywhere to mess up too badly.
To be fair, it was all just about edible, and along with a couple of beers and a lemonade the bill came to about £7.50 each. There was plenty of food here - plenty of crap food, yes, but lots of it - and at this price you don't have a whole lot to complain about. As a US-style diner and grill, Biguns fails on almost every level. As a mid-80s themed restaurant specialising in retro gastro-kitsch, I'm sure it has a long and happy future.
