Open daily midday–11pm
A set menu is something that either indicates a failing or stellar restaurant; very good or very bad food. You never see an average gastropub serving a set menu (unless it’s Valentine’s Day, in which case you really need to reconsider how you wine and dine your loved one). The recently opened Chez Boubier on Brompton Road serves a set menu and, mercifully, is at the very good food end of things.
It’s a simple, three-course menu based around that great leveller of every chef and restaurant; steak and chips. Or, in this instance, entrecôte and frites, which is served in a ‘secret recipe’ butter. Now ‘secret recipes’ are a bit worrying and generally the preserve of mega-brands or batshit-crazy kebab shop owners trying to foist off out-of-date mayo. Luckily Chez Boubier is neither of these. The story dates back to 1930s Geneva, where a restaurant owner enlisted a family recipe to help sell his steaks. It was an instant hit, made the restaurant world-renowned and is still made there today and distributed to a few select fellow restaurants, such as this one.
The set-up here is fantastically old-school; a lot of wood panelling, deep red leather banquettes and impeccably laid tables. It is very ’30s Paris and you half expect to walk out and bump into Hemingway and Gertrude Stein before sloping off for an absinthe. It was quite empty on our visit, but then it was a Tuesday and Christmas Eve’s eve, so perhaps that’s not surprising—although it didn’t feel sparse; it felt quite exclusive. All of which sets the bar for a steak and chips menu quite high.
Sadly the set menu starter of green salad served with a Chez Boubier dressing, presumably also a secret, didn’t really hit that bar at all. It was nice but only inasmuch as a collection of leaves and a good salad dressing can be.
Next up was the main event; entrecôte and French fries. Full marks for the theatre of serving a steak, this one arrived in a large metal dish placed over a small table-top stove. The meat was flavoursome, tender and cooked exactly as asked. The secret recipe butter was, without exaggeration, a small oleaginous lake that the steak sat in; fondant steak anyone? Heart-cloggingly good, garlicky, rich, full of flavour and absolutely delicious, it was unashamedly French cooking at its finest. Oh okay, Swiss-French cooking. The French fries were also exceptionally good; crisp, hot, full of fluffy potato and evidently freshly cooked. The main course didn’t hit the bar set as much as knocked it over as it whizzed past in a Citroën 2CV.
The dessert menu wasn’t part of the set menu, although with four choices and ice cream it might as well have been. My Paris-Brest was disappointingly not wheel-shaped, as it should be, and was a bit dense and very cold, although it did come with hazelnut ice cream that redeemed it a bit. My companion’s lemon tart was, again, cold and quite hard. Both were obviously prepared too far in advance or simply bought in; in either case not what you expect of a good French restaurant in this part of town.
The very affable waitress chose us a bottle of Red Knot Australian Shiraz that went very well with the heavy, opulent main, and two bottles of the French lager Meteor were a good start to proceedings.
Chez Boubier pride themselves on their entrecôte in the secret butter sauce and they do that exceptionally well. It is really very good. However, it feels like they’ve ploughed all their energy into that one dish and rather forgotten about everything else, which might be considered a risky strategy. Although considering Café de Paris, 26 Rue de Mont Blanc, Geneva has been going for 80-odd years maybe it’s not such a risky strategy after all.
