I've been to Christopher's American Bar and Grill for weekend brunch or for evening martinis a few times, and finally had dinner there on Saturday.
Booze
The downstairs bar (The Martini Bar) is fairly small - you couldn't get more than about 50 people in it, including a few standees - and a rich red colour, with only hanging lights shaped like interplanetary jellyfish of various sizes and four big windows to the outside preventing it from being a just bit too uterine. There are four or five horseshoe-shaped booths which can comfortably accommodate six, a corner table of similar size, a few smaller tables and about half a dozen stools at the bar.
There is a menu of martinis and other cocktails, as well as some other stuff. Ignore the rest - the point of this place is martinis. A martini is not a difficult thing to make, and they do not fail here, so that is not why you must drink martinis here. The reason is that you will look completely out of place if you have a fruity cocktail or, The Lord Forbid, a glass of wine or a beer in here. I know this because I am off booze at present and I felt utterly stupid drinking my bright pink "Shirley Temple", and faintly embarrassed that one of my companions was drinking Becks from what seemed to be an oversized snifter glass.
Do beware, however. The martinis (most at 8 GBP each) are made with 75ml of spirit. Four or five is a sensible limit for drinkers of reasonable skill. My record (fortunately on the work dollar) is somewhere north of 8, perhaps as many as 10. It left me with no recollection of getting home and the only pieces evidence for the later part of the evening I was left with were that the price of a cab home was missing from my wallet and that my shoes - but no other part of my clothing - smelled quite strongly of vomit.
The service (all at your table unless you are drinking at the bar) is polite but seems to vary a little in competence, especially when the bar is busy.
The Restaurant
The eating area is upstairs in a single large wood-floored, high-ceilinged room with a slightly separate alcove. The martini rule does not apply here.
Weekend brunch
Brunch is a shit word, but often an enjoyable meal and that is certainly true here. The brunch menu at Christopher's (available Saturdays and Sundays, 11am-3.30pm) comes in two courses for 14.50 GBP or three for 17 GBP for the extra two and a half quid you might as well go for three courses, but unless you have a well-developed appetite you will probably not finish it all.
The way it seems to work is that you choose your two or three courses and nominate one as your main course. This is important because it will beg twice the size of the other courses. I won't bother going into detail on the menu - everything I have had has been good (generally meat-heavy) as has everything I have seen anyone else eat.
Since the martini rule is suspended until you descend the slightly scary round stairs, you should have a Bloody Mary. It has the too-often-neglected requisites - horseradish and dry sherry - but you might want a to demand a little more tabasco for your second if the first disappoints. (They make it with Absolt Peppar and apparently no extra tabasco by default.)
Three courses, a Bloody Marys each, water, coffee and 12.5% service totals a nudge over 30 quid per head. The service is good, though last time they were full and didn't have quite enough staff on.
Dinner
We finally tried dinner at Christopher's last Saturday. I hadn't looked at the evening a la carte menu before but it is pretty steak-heavy. The wife, who is one of those vegetarians-who-eat-fish, didn't have a lot of choice, but I was happy.
We opened with beef carpaccio (twice), pumpkin risotto and the celeriac+porcini soup. The carpaccio was Ok, but not spectacular. Six large, thin circles of (presumable) sirloin, apparently rolled in some herbs before slicing, drizzled with something a bit bland which I guessed to be a sour cream with lemon. The meat was either too cold or too immature to have much flavour and the dressing didn't add much except moisture which wasn't needed. The other starters looked fine but I was too self-absorbed to ask if they were.
For the main course, the beef eaters stayed on course with the prime rib for two, and the others had baked halibut and the squash tamale. "What the fuck is tamale?" I hear you cry. Well, it seemed to something close in texture and taste to vegetarian haggis, but wrapped up in some kind of dried leaf thing a bit like an old-fashioned boiled sweet or a Christmas cracker. It looked pretty neat, but I'm glad it wasn't on my plate.
The halibut looked OK, but a bit small.
And then the beef arrived. Not really knowing about the American cuts of beef, I had assumed that we were getting a small roast from the fat end of the sirloin, to be carved at the table. I still don't really know where it comes from, but it was a roasting joint from the top of the cow. The two of us sharing were given clean plates and the waiter had a serving plate with a round bit of beef of about 6-7 inches in diameter and 2 inches high. "Goody," thinks I, "half of that will fill a hole". But rather than carve it, they put it on my opponents plate. And then they put the other one (how they managed to hide it I have not been able to work out) on mine. Fucking hell, we had what I estimate at 12-14oz of cow flesh EACH. Re-fucking-sult.
And it was pretty good. It had a reasonable roast-crust around the outside, but I think medium might have been a better idea than medium-rare, as once this had been eaten, we were still left with just the pulpy pink bit in the middle. I fought valiantly on and completed my task. My oppponent did not fare so well (being about half my weight I think we can excuse her this) and they were good enough to wrap up the remainder in a bit of foil to take home. Honestly, the experience of eating such a cartoon-style pile of steak was slightly better than the piece of meat, which should probably have been a bit more mature and (our own fault, this) a bit more "done".
The above were accompanied with a couple of portions of chips, the same of mange tout and some creamed spinach, about which nothing interesting can be said. Except maybe that I still managed to get through my share of the green stuff after (and only after) the beef was gone.
Puddings were a bit of a low point. My "ice creams and sorbets" involved three small scoops of obviously commercial ice cream and one of those long triangles of crispy waffle or pancake batter. The peach melba was an unimpressive sundae. The bread and butter pudding looked alright, but not amazing, and it wasn't clear why they have that sort of stodge on the menu after such heavy main courses.
The service on the night was pretty good - prompt and unintrusive, and the food arrived very quickly - but there was a bit much leaning over the table rather than going round to the relevant place, the bread and butter pudding arrived with ice-cream which we had specifically asked not to have (I ate it, of course) and Mrs Scoffer was annoyed that her wine glass didn't get topped up as often as the other drinker at the table. If these sound a bit petty, it's because the basic service and polite and competent in a way you shouldn't have to be grateful for but somehow are, especially in central London.
Total bill including a round of drinks at the bar, water, a fairly cheap bottle of wine and coffee, and again with added service, was a few pence under 230 quid, which I consider reasonable value for the experience. It was made very good value by the fact that I had a 25% off voucher we'd been given when we visited for brunch just before Christmas. Result!
In Summary
Of the three possible reasons to go to Christopher's I have listed above, the first two are very good reasons indeed and the last is not bad either.
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