Cut Wolfgang Puck London Review

The Austrian-born Wolfgang Puck is probably the most famous chef in America. He was already a megastar the first time I visited one of his restaurants, Chinois in Santa Monica, in 1993. At that point, Puck was best known for having invented the postmodern pizza at his restaurant Spago; since advanced pizzas seem silly to me, I was expecting Chinois to be silly, too. It wasn't: the tart's boudoir decor was hilariously OTT, but the food was a brilliant early example of fusion cooking. I remember a grilled caramelised pineapple with foie gras (back in the days when I still ate foie gras) that sounded daft but turned out to be revelatory.

Cut
45 Park Lane, London
W1K 1PN
020-7493 4554.

Open all week, lunch noon-3pm, dinner 6-11pm (10.30pm Sun). Meal with drinks and service, from £70 a head upwards.

Now Puck has opened Cut, his first UK restaurant, part of an empire that has expanded to 20 "fine dining" restaurants and dozens of budget outlets. It's in a new hotel called 45 Park Lane, owned by the Dorchester group. The place might be going great guns already: it was hard to tell because I went during London fashion week and the place was heaving with unlovely men and elongated women, all air-kissing and calling each other dollink. Many were carrying goodie bags. Not for the first time, I was left with the feeling that the richer parts of London are an entirely different country.

Cut is Puck's fourth restaurant of that name, the others being in Las Vegas, Beverly Hills and Singapore, which gives you some idea: these places are targeted at the international rich. It is a steakhouse – in theory, an updated, modernised take on the genre, but in practice a fairly straight version, except with a less clubby, men-only feel to the decor. That's a decent idea, except something's gone wrong in the execution and the narrow room gives you an overwhelmingly strong feeling of being in a corridor, or maybe an airport departure lounge – somewhere on the way to somewhere else. It adds to a slightly frantic atmosphere, as does the service – so super-eager that it interrupted our conversation 10 times before I stopped counting. The Man himself was in the restaurant, which may have made the team more hyper. The loud, very unchilled pop music didn't help.

The menu is what you'd expect: starters, salads, side dishes and sauces clustering around Cut's main focus, steak. We had two successful starters. A salad of veal tongue with white beans, artichokes and salsa verde was a light, balanced, unshowy dish, in contrast to the other starter, which was rich, risky and flashy, but also worked: a "flan" of bone marrow with mushroom marmalade and parsley salad. This was only just in balance, with the mushroom's savoury depth rescuing the marrow from oversweetness just in time. The marrow was served in its bones, so don't ask me why it was a "flan".

As for the steak, we tried a "tasting" plate of three little pieces of sirloin – American, British and Australian – at the Park Lane price of £48. They were classic US steakhouse steaks: beautifully cooked, perfectly seasoned, ideally charred, unimprovable in texture. There's a word missing there. Do you spot it? Flavour. The meat had a little, but not nearly enough. The steakaholic friend with me expressed sombre disappointment and felt no need to finish them – quite a strong statement at that price. Slow-cooked Wagyu beef short ribs with puréed cauliflower and curry spicing, meanwhile, was sweet, satisfying, spoon-tender and so apocalyptically rich, I felt peculiar all night. (Maybe Wagyu beef, famous for its fatty marbling, is wrong for also-fatty short ribs.) Pudding was a so-so fried doughnut.

The wine list, like much else here, reminds you why Park Lane is so expensive in Monopoly. OK, it's a restaurant for rich people, but does there really have to be so insultingly small a range of choices below an already steep £40? I suppose that's the whole point of Planet Rich: it's refreshingly free of people who fuss about what things cost. I overheard the restaurant manager tell one potential customer that you could have dinner "from £65 to £70, but we're finding that the average spend is £120 a head". Look at it the way Mr Micawber would: by not going to Cut, two of you can save £240.
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