Flame at the Casino
our review
You often take a gamble going to a new restaurant. Go to Flame and it’s all part of the fun. One of two restaurants within Casino at Leicester Square its function is to provide somewhere decent for the punters to eat and thus prevent them leaving, which of course is not good for the core business.
It’s open to all, although you will have to go through a harmless membership application for the Casino first to satisfy legals, and quite frankly given the number of rip-off tourist trap restaurants in the area it’s worth it. To get to the restaurant you then negotiate a room full of one arm bandits, nearly all manned by tough-faced Chinese men shovelling money in and smoking furiously (but the smoking will end on July 1st 2007), pass the roulette tables and then climb the colour-shifting staircase.
What you get inside Flame is a cosy dark restaurant (there are no windows or clocks in casinos, that way punters lose track of real time) with prints on the walls that suggest a gentleman’s club of Hollywood’s imagination. The reasonably priced menu specialises, as you might guess from the restaurant name, in grills. Sautéed mussels with chorizo and saffron with a Sauvignon Blanc and Dijon mustard jus weren’t bad at all, although I would have liked a few more nuggets of the warm, orange chorizo to mellow out the rather aggressive jus. Thai basil crusted tuna ‘sashimi’ with honey wasabi foam, soy, tobiko caviar was smartly presented, the tuna thinly sliced and square shaped. To be precise, Sashimi should be totally raw but this had been slightly seared on the side to a depth of a few millimetres. I had no problem with that, but a purist Japanese diner might. The wasabi, tamed by the honey, didn’t bring tears to my eyes.
Irish kettyle beef tenderloin with balsamic roasted shallots, parmesan potatoes, sautéed cepes and garlic confit featured a very nice hunk of beef cooked exactly as I rather prissily asked for it – rare just in the very centre, please. A simple, manly, dish, well judged for the clientele. I shouldn’t have had the baby spinach, crème fraiche and garlic oil though, the garlic was overpowering and the dish too rich. Crisp fried Cornish haddock cooked in a real ale batter with fat chips, on the other hand, was really good, clean and straightforward with an oil-free batter and chips so tasty I had to steal most of them off the wife.
Slow baked New York cheesecake with berry glaze and clotted Devonshire cream was a real stomach liner, rich and rather decadent and possibly too much for me. I ate it anyway of course. The wife declined any further food. On the way out I gambled a quid in a fruit machine and won it back in the form of a chit, which I had to cash at the desk much to the cashier’s astonishment. Call me pikey, but a quid’s a quid innit. Flame is well worth a punt.
N.H. - July 2007
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