on the right: Marla Botterill, food and wine afficianado

I cannot cook. I have never been able to cook. I burn toast. However, I do love going out to restaurants and I do like food and I do like trying foods of almost any kind and variety which has, for years now, put me under the (apparently false) impression that I knew something about food and wine. After a summer of eating and drinking with people in the ‘industry’ (as in, the fine dining industry – servers, chefs, sommeliers, etc.) I now realize that I know nothing about food. I feel food-retarded when I’m out eating with these people. I mean, they can distinguish actual flavours in a piece of bread (the breadsticks at Chancey Smith’s contain a hint of rosemary). I’ve also observed that industry insiders rarely dislike whatever is on their plate. In fact, they enjoy food so much it seems like they love almost everything they taste and they take great pleasure in savouring every dish. Which is not to say they wouldn’t hestitate to offer their own improvements or criticisms or to rate meals and restaurants according to their experiences, only that they usually rate pretty high. That said, my best friend Marla and I recently sat down to dinner with some friends at Chancey Smith’s – a downtown London bar and restaurant where we have knocked Manhattan glasses many a time but never actually sampled from the menu.

Cream of Broccoli Soup

Since Marla and I are both great thinkers and since great thinkers think alike, we ordered exactly the same meal. It began with the featured Cream of Broccoli Soup with prosciutto and potatos. The thing I enjoyed most about this soup was the fact that it warmed me up on an otherwise unusually cold August evening and so I give props to the chef for creating a feature totally appropriate to the day on which it was served. It was rich and filling and hearty but could have done with some added flavours in the form of fresh herbs as most of the taste came from the ground pepper I had added on top.

Asian Vegetable Salad with Chicken

Our main dish consisted of an Asian Vegetable Salad with Chicken. Not enough chicken, however, and certainly not sliced chunkily enough either. In fact, it was more like acorn shaped slivers of chicken. Which is disappointing and hard to taste. The vegetables were shaved thinly but plentifully and I thought the peanut sauce was perfectly subtle and delicious although Marla insisted she’d had better elsewhere.

The service left little to be desired. The thing about eating with industry people is that they can tell straight away whether your server is actually interested in serving you or if they are merely trying to bullshit you. Our server was a bullshitterer. When we had to wait an inappropriate amount of time for our bread and soup she fed us some story about how they had just run out and were now baking us fresh bread and fresh soup. Obviously we could tell that, when we finally did get our bread and soup, they had not been freshly made. Marla decided that what actually happened was that our server merely forgot to place our order. Which seems like one of the stupidest things a server can probably do since that is the whole point of going in to eat at a restaurant. To eat.

Over all, the food at Chancey Smith’s is only not bad and the service is rather on the dumb side. I would recommend going only for the bar. They do make a mean Manhattan. And it’s ‘classier’, while still being casual, than most of the other bars in London.

Chancey Smith’s is getting 2.5 hearts out of 5: