It begins with a trolley, wheeled to your table carrying a copper ice bucket the size of a baby bath. There are various champagnes on offer, plus a glass pitcher of tomato juice, a gargantuan bottle of vodka and several celery sticks poking from a tumbler. Not a bad start to a Sunday lunch. I ask for a glass of Billecart because I haven’t been able to stomach Bloody Marys since an incident in India during my gap year.
The Connaught Grill first opened in 1955, offering Dover sole and flambé trolleys to genteel patrons not long after rationing had ended in the UK. Drop in for lunch and you might have seen Ian Fleming chewing a steak, Richard Burton knocking back a bottle of Lafite, or Princess Diana picking over a plate of salmon with her architecturally-coiffed step-mother, Raine Spencer. Not all at the same time, probably, but with well-spaced tables and a hushed, respectful vibe, this has long been the place for faces to drop in for a spot of protein. Although you had to order the ‘Ouef en Surprise’ – a boiled egg, wrapped in aspic and ham, topped with truffle and caviar – in advance.
It seemed silly not to order the scotch egg in homage (at £29, is there a more expensive scotch egg in London?), orange yolk bursting, truffle mayonnaise on the side. Plus, a platter of perfect, fat Gillardeau oysters – because oysters don’t really count if you’re about to take down a large Sunday lunch, do they? So slippery, hardly filling at all.
But it’s the meat here, unsurprisingly, that’s the thing. They have it all – veal, lamb, wood pigeon, Dover Sole (obviously), partridge and grouse (if in season), multiple shapes of beef. As it’s Sunday, it would be foolish not to go for the roast beef and the roast chicken. And thankfully, The Connaught Grill, being the Connaught Grill, does not go in for the trendy pub fad of only offering joints of meat ‘to share’. Because what if you fancy beef but your pal fancies pork? You can only pick one. Tiresome.
The Côte de boeuf comes on a silver trolley and the waiter cuts a slice as thick as an index finger. Pink, bloody, fatty, delicious. The chicken has skin as dark as duck and almost as rich. We eat with the knives we picked from a selection box brought to our table beforehand; Japanese made, with Damascus steel blades and reindeer antler handles. Being deeply vulgar I asked the waiter,‘How much do these cost?’. ‘£1200 a piece,’ he told me. And to think I’ve been eating Sunday lunches with boring old kitchen knives for so long.
It is perfection. A great pile of carrots and roast potatoes on the side, crisp Yorkshire puddings the size of footballs, a small but scorching saucepan of cauliflower cheese, shiny gravy, mustard and whipped horseradish – although I prefer mine unwhipped if we’re being absolutely honest.
If you’re visiting London and have deep pockets, this is a terrific spot. You’ll eat like a medieval monarch. My only reservation, really, is that it doesn’t quite feel like a Sunday lunch. Sunday lunches, for me, are either around the table at my house, or someone else’s – everyone reaching over one another for the gravy and squawking about who pinched the last potato. Or they’re in a pub with low ceilings and a fire.
The Connaught Grill is wildly beautiful – individual booths created from walnut wood and that respectful atmosphere of a place where food is taken seriously. It has all the ingredients for the perfect Sunday – proper cuts of meat, proper booze and a pudding menu that includes rice pudding and Eton Mess. But it’s almost too neat and tidy. Sunday lunches should feel more like eating in a Tudor hostelry – although if it’s posh you’re after, you can’t do better. A jeroboam of port comes out as our sticky toffee pudding arrives. You don’t get that at my house.
