Review at a glance: ★★☆☆☆
I didn’t see this one coming. Claude Bosi? New Parisian bistro? Close to home? No point in reviewing: five stars, gold-plated and spit-shined. Surely? Surely. And the thing is, stringing together 700-odd words of unadulterated praise gets tiring after a while; it’s a bit like grinning for a photo while your darling Ma fumbles with her iPhone. So I went in as a punter, off the clock — with Bosi sweetly sending over two flutes of Champagne, which I did not turn away (come on, would you?) — expecting a night of near lascivious indulgence. Treat me like a barrel, I told Twiggy, fill me to the brim and roll me home.
But then the thing started happening — the going wrong thing — and I found myself reluctantly on duty, shelling out £200 and scribbling notes, not roaring with rage but sighing and shrugging and feeling faintly bewildered where I should have been bewitched. Bosi is better than this. I know he is.
Evidence of said brilliance can be found at the original Josephine, in Chelsea, which casts a long and very splendid shadow. It is a poignant eulogy from Bosi to his grandmother, a remembrance of her and his childhood formed as a Lyonnaise bouchon (or it was; the “bouchon” description recently has been abandoned). Heart is not in short supply. It is a handsome room of oxblood banquettes, wood-panelled everything and lamps with cloth covers. Wine is charged by the centimetre — a man comes with a ruler and a calculator. The food? It’s perfect: rabbit à la moutarde, duck à l’orange served without irony, a full stop slice of sausage punctuating a slash of brioche and soaked in red wine sauce. Veal sweetbreads, andouillette. A set menu offers two courses for £24.50 — on the Fulham Road. Were there full-size furniture in the place — Claude and his wife Lucy instead opting to source theirs from a Sylvanian Families extension pack — it might be flawless. But tiny, squished-in tables haven’t stopped it packing out: every night it heaves with gleeful diners getting drunk off pork fat. One person I know has been 14 times.
This, its follow-up — the first of a few, rumours suggest — is the first step of Bosi following the money. And fair’s fair, it would have been remiss of him not to. The man already has credentials — four Michelin stars on the go at the moment, a pair apiece at Bibendum and Brooklands — so why not chase the cash? This is a chain waiting to happen. It will not have escaped Bosi’s attention that the Ivy group is on the market, yours for a billion quid.
And so, a year after conquering Chelsea, Bosi is in Marylebone. I think they put Ozempic in the water here. This is a part of town off-limits to ogres and uglies; this is for people who stage their lives, who curate things rather than just doing them. The restaurant will suit them: it is picture-perfect, with its hand-painted ceiling and abundance of brass, with mirrors everywhere and art in all different sizes. It is almost eerily exemplary: a bit unreal, a movie set bistro. Chelsea, Marylebone… Disneyland?
The menu is one of things like camembert soufflé, pâté de campagne, garlic-soaked snails, chicken in morels, beef fillet in a Bordelaise. It reads like erotica. But its execution was decidedly less seductive. French onion soup with a cheese top like a trampoline was too sweet, jammy, as though someone had tipped sugar in with the beef stock. No sugar faults with the soufflé, but enough salt in it to de-ice a road — almost as much as in the brain-pink tartare. Marengo sauce, usually reserved for chicken, here smothered an inelegant lump of a pork and spinach faggot. Not bad just — okay.
Okay seemed a theme. Joy did creep in: the pâté was perfect; the tartare came with crisp bread coated in more garlic than might be advised in a week. God, was it good. Pommes purée was masterful. But so it should have been — Bosi is a master. This was a night of oddities, of a cock-up with the wine too boring to go into here, and of not much of the heart that marks the Chelsea place. Chasing the mass market has corrupted the original’s charm. Are accountants to blame? Probably. It looks good, but it’s light on feeling; Café Rouge with a bit of lippy on.
6-8 Blandford Street, W1. Meal for two about £160; josephinebistro.com
