When we speak a little ahead of last night’s Oscars ceremony, Elliott Grover, the executive chef of Cut at 45 Park Lane, holds up a trembling hand. Is he nervous, I wonder, about heading back to Hollywood to cook at the Oscars for the second time? He smiles. “Last year, I didn't have this feeling — but now, I'm already getting a little bit of anxiety, just talking about it,” he says. “But the excited anxiety, you know?”
It’s perhaps not such a surprise he’s already feeling a little het up. Last year was a whirlwind, a 17-hour slog of celebrities and golden statues and sherry trifles. It had come about almost by accident, Grover having teasingly suggested the idea to Wolfgang Puck, the chef who owns Cut, and who’s cooked at Oscar’s after-party the Governor’s Ball for 30 years. It was just a joke, Grover says, but Puck took him at his word.
Cue a flight to Los Angeles to join Puck’s brigade of chefs from his various restaurants across the world. The ball is laid out with stalls throughout the room, each offering different bites to eat. Grover arrived armed with a recipe for fish n’ chips and another for sherry trifle. There was a third dish planned too, chicken pot pie. “And then, literally a few days before the ceremony, Wolfgang added the beef Wellington to the menu. Which was…” Grover pauses, eyes wide. “A spanner in the works. We were asking: how can you do a beef Wellington in a standing service?!”
But, even though “he put Wellington on the menu for 2,500 people, with barely any notice”, the truth, he nods, is that “what Wolfgang says, goes.”
So the Wellington was added to the line-up, hastily put together as the clock ticked down to the ceremony. How did it go? “Oh, we managed to do it quite well,” he says, before a grin sweeps his face. “It was… it was a spectacle, and one of the most popular dishes in the whole room, I’d say. Brendan Fraser was holding one of the Wellingtons on this giant board as we were there, carving away.” Puck had him hold Fraser’s Oscar as the actor posed for photos.
The ball heaves, partly as it's held in the room where the statuettes are engraved. The last-minute Wellington wasn’t Puck’s only surprise. “Wolfgang has all these stalls about, and he says to me: ‘oh, you’re on this one.’ And all the chefs that have been there 30 years are smiling and laughing and patting me on the back like, good luck mate. And I thought, why are you all laughing?
“And then I realised I was about six foot from the engraving station.”
The result, Grover says, is that once the first Oscar was done, “it went crazy, because everyone just comes forward.” Besides Fraser, Lady Gaga swung by, and Grover found himself in a half-hour chat with “this really lovely lady stood next to me, who really loved what we were doing. And then she said, you're more than welcome to come back to the house party if you’d like. And I was like, ‘yeah, yeah, no worries!’ but I didn't think anything of it.” Grover was oblivious to his inviter, who turned out to be Vanderpump Rules star Lisa Vanderpump. “Biggest regret of my life,” he laughs.
He left that night at midnight, shattered, having arrived at 7am. “It was absolutely flat out.”
He soon arrived back in the UK thinking the whirlwind he’d just been swept up in — “it was just very overwhelming” — would be a one-off. “But then I saw people coming into Cut because of it, and the whole hotel was just sort of relit again. And people here love the Oscars, and I thought, well, why not give people another chance to try some dishes we could do?”
Once more into the fray, then. This year, Grover will stick to the theme — take a British classic, and give it the super-luxe treatment.
“We’re keeping the fish and chips, but we've changed it slightly.” Whereas last year it was haddock, this year “we're going to do native lobster, with a spicy tartar sauce. And then I want the other two dishes to be so British and really show what we do. The first will be a prawn cocktail bridge roll. It's a soft, brioche bun, topped with a little lettuce, a few Atlantic prawns and then a little bit of caviar.” He shrugs, smiling. “Well, you have to have caviar. It’s the Oscars. It’s special.”
What about the Welly? “Well, you've always gotta be flexible and it is last minute.com with Wolfgang…” But no, no plans for Wellington (as yet). “My favourite dish, and which I'm hoping will beat the fish and chips, is the roast beef with a Yorkshire pudding and horseradish sauce, with English watercress.”
Simple enough, but the upgrades are there. The beef will be slices of pink USDA prime sirloin (“fewer air miles”), and the Yorkshire will be cooked in “wagyu dropping, which gives it that extra crunch and shine, so it's glistening.”
The prep, he says, has been non-stop. “I've tasted and tested it many, many times now, because, I’ll be honest, I'm so nervous about the Yorkshire pudding. It's got to be perfect, tall, crispy. It can't fail.”
To have enough for the evening — 2,000 is the plan — Grover and his team will start at 8am on the morning of the ceremony itself. “I've Whatsapped the American team all the specs over, sent them the Yorkshire pudding tin and where you can buy it on Amazon,” he laughs. “I mean, imagine going to LA and then asking if they’ve got any Yorkshire pudding tins.”
Grover will head Hollywood way come March, but for now is concentrating on Cut, where the Oscars menu is now available in the bar until April 1. An exhibition by celebrity Andy Gotts — named “And the winner is…” — is also on display (this until May 16). Black-and-white portraits of actors hang; there is a particularly good one of Roger Moore in his later years staring sceptically at a halo above his head, just as he did in Sixties hit show, The Saint.
The bar is mixing a cocktail, And The Winner Is, to go alongside Grover’s dishes. It is suitably grand, a riff on an Americano, made with pickled red pepper-infused-Campari, sweet vermouth, clementine liquor infused with Kaffir lime leaves, and all topped with Champagne. It comes in glasses marked with an edible gold triangle, a nod to the first-ever Oscars winner, 1927's Wings.
Grover understandably wants the taste of the Oscars to be a hit with the public — there’s a hope that if the dishes land, he might persuade Puck to let the likes of the prawn cocktail or the fish and chips onto the menu permanently, just as the beef Wellington has now made Cut’s Sunday lunch menu. But once he’s flying off, he’ll be solely thinking about nailing Oscars night. “Oh, and this year, if anyone asks — yes! I’m going to the after-party!”
