Upstairs at the Grill, 70 Watergate Street, Chester CH1 2LA (01244 344883). Starters £8-£15, mains £15-£52, desserts £6-£9.50, wine from £34
Upstairs at the Grill, a smart steak restaurant in Chester, has much going for it. There are eager staff, one with a magnificent beard that ought to be promoted as a tourist attraction by Visit Cheshire. There’s a beautiful setting, good ingredients and smart ideas about what to do with them. But good intentions do not always mean good experiences. Be aware: there’s no assessment of the dessert menu in this review. It had all gone on too long by then and the fight had gone out of us. True, ours was not a straightforward booking, but nor was it the most complicated: a table of seven, with two of our number arriving about 45 minutes after the first five, when they would order separately. By email they had told us this would be fine. And, frankly, given the cost, it should have been fine. Upstairs at the Grill, which opened 20 years ago, models itself on a New York steakhouse. Steak should never be cheap. It should be a treat. It should never be disappointing.
First, let’s deal with the good things. It’s located inside one of the city’s handsome redbrick buildings and is a multi-levelled collection of comfortable rooms, which are clearly cared for. It starts with a moody, downlit bar, which is a rich confection of brass rail, olive-green banquettes and date-night pheromones. There’s a dining room full of booths and a brighter upstairs room of bare brick and glass walls that, on hot days, can be opened to let in the breeze. There’s lots of polished parquet. Pleasingly, in the men’s you are serenaded by 1970s New York punk and the walls are slapped with handbills for gigs at CBGB in the East Village.
The menu makes sense. The starters at such a place should include oysters, steak tartare, a prawn cocktail and a caesar salad, and they do. There are individual cuts of British beef and ones for sharing, though given the high quality of that British beef it’s odd that they also offer steaks dragged in from the US and Australia. There are obvious sustainability issues around beef consumption, some of which can be mitigated by native grass-rearing. There’s no way you can deal with the footprint of beef imported from a great distance. The sides include creamed spinach, a couple of salads and four ways with potatoes. Jolly good. The struggle lay in getting to eat any of this. The management will doubtless point out that we arrived 15 minutes early. Quite reasonably, we were asked to wait in the bar. So, let’s not start the clock until 8.30pm, the time of our booking. No starters were served until 9.20pm and mains didn’t arrive until just before 10pm.
The sense was very much of a kitchen trying and failing to cope. Rib-eye and sirloin steaks were served medium, rather than medium rare as requested. They were piping hot and tense, because they hadn’t been rested. Chips were undercooked. Steakhouses have to do a small number of things perfectly. Unrested, overcooked steaks at £30 a pop, and undercooked chips isn’t good enough. I would have loved to try the Café de Paris butter I’d ordered. It didn’t arrive, but by then I just wanted to eat so I didn’t mention it. I assumed they hadn’t heard the order. Later, I noticed it had been charged for. A grilled swordfish steak was overcooked and came with a split béarnaise sauce, although another portion of béarnaise was great, as was the beef gravy. The “dirty” mash, loaded with cheese, gravy and bacon, was pleasingly true to its name. Dauphinoise was fine; a blue cheese salad came dressed with a weird foam and pressed into a pot. The key word for this review is “inconsistent”.
Obviously, any vegetarians here have come because they are indulging their companions. Our non-meat-eating friend appreciated the thought and effort that had gone into a starter of “heritage carrot tartare” with salted pistachios and confit egg yolk under a lacy lattice of tuile. He liked the charred cauliflower, grated with Gran Moravia, a vegetarian alternative to parmesan, a roast onion purée and herb salsa. Other good things: a deep, almost chewy French onion soup, better eaten with a fork than a spoon, and some well-cooked, if slightly over-seasoned, scallops.
But oh dear, the caesar salad. It’s great that the romaine leaves are kept whole. It’s delightful that they make it tableside. That kind of performance is always entertaining. But it’s all pointless if the wrong ingredients are used. Salted anchovies are friable and can be bashed into a paste to mix into a dressing. Anchovies marinated in vinegar, or boquerones, do not break down into a paste. They just turn into weird, meaty, vinegary lumps. Using marinated anchovies in a caesar is a misunderstanding of the basic recipe.
The service, when they had something to serve, was mostly fine, but performative in places. One member of staff gives a big speech about the menu structure, even though that structure is starters and main courses. It’s the kind of place where they will take your wine bottle away from you and then forget to refill you. At one point, I had to go hunting for our bottle and found it in a bucket outside the door to the room we were eating in. Our bill for seven people with two bottles of the cheapest wine, a couple of beers and no dessert or coffee was just over £450.
I am aware that fans of Upstairs at the Grill will be outraged by this review. It has a grand reputation in Chester; has traded successfully for 22 years, which is a serious achievement. They will want to tell me they have always had a fabulous time there. Fair enough. But the fact is, we didn’t. It is, I think, worth pointing out that their PR, who had also encouraged me to go in the first place, emailed me the very next day offering help with photography. They knew I was there even though the booking was in another name. Some argue my lack of anonymity warps my experience of restaurants. And then dinners like this happen. But let me return to where I started. Upstairs at the Grill has an awful lot going for it. It clearly has what it takes to offer a great experience for every single customer. They just need to rest the steaks, cook the chips properly, change the caesar salad recipe and sort the service. Those things are eminently doable. I hope it gets there.
News bites
A cookbook has been launched by Foster Wales, the Welsh network of local authority fostering services, to encourage people to become carers. Bring Something to the Table, published to coincide with this month’s Fostering Fortnight, contains recipes from care leavers, foster carers and celebrities including Olympian Fatima Whitbread, Young MasterChef judge Poppy O’Toole and comedian and foster carer Kiri Pritchard McLean. Digital copies can be downloaded here.
In my otherwise positive review of the Big Mamma group’s Kensington restaurant Jacuzzi a year ago, I criticised the absurd extra charge of up to 2% that diners incur if they pay their bill via the Sunday payment app, use of which means less work for the staff, not more. The hospitality company has suddenly had to defend the charge after the Daily Mail got wind of this a year on. However, the defence of the app, which was founded by the co-owners of the restaurant group, amounted to the fact that you don’t have to use it.
Back in February, I auctioned myself off in aid of the Food Chain, the HIV charity of which I’m a proud patron. The prize: I would go to the home of the highest bidder (within the M25) to cook the menu with which I won the critics round of MasterChef over Christmas for up to eight people, that’s the cumin-crusted spare ribs, the seafood fregola and the baked chocolate pudding. Some complained that an auction favoured only the wealthy. So this time, I’m doing a prize draw in aid of the Food Chain: it’s £10 a ticket and it closes next Sunday. In short you can win me. Enter here.
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or follow him on X @jayrayner1
