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Review: Rosi at the Beaumont
Proper pork pie is just one of many nods to the past at this playful, inviting Mayfair eatery, says Dan McEvoy
Renowned chef Lisa Goodwin-Allen, renowned for her work at Northcote where she is currently chef patron-director, is helping a former boy’s club discover its feminine side in her latest position as culinary director of Rosi at the Beaumont Hotel, Mayfair.
Rosi is a cosy space, and the redesign sets the stage for this welcoming, nostalgic venue. The walls are panelled with Luke Edward Hall paintings that evoke New York in the 1930s; pastel pinks and sage greens are all around, creating a space that is elegant and inviting, with the two-tier space lined with plush banquette seating.
The staff are charming, full of useful tips for wine pairings and tidbits of information about the history of the menu and various items on it. Rosi is named after Rosemary Saïd, wife of businessman and philanthropist Wafic Saïd, owner of the hotel, and several of her favourite dishes are reflected in the menu alongside constant nods to classic fare. The selection is full of anachronisms, like chicken Diane and blancmange (more on those below). And the menu itself – that is, the physical one you hold in your hands – has a playful design with curling pink calligraphy, the sort of thing you might find in a high street chain. It’s disarmingly casual, all designed to put you at ease while enjoying a seriously good meal.
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To start, one of the ostensibly less-sophisticated options: a proud, no-nonsense slab of old-fashioned pork pie (£19) – fine dining meets a Great British picnic. There’s an audacious attitude about this starter, in that there’s only so much you can mess about with a pork pie before it stops being a pork pie. So rather than try to refine it (or, even worse, ‘deconstruct’ it), Rosi’s is served by the slice off a great brick-like loaf, and presented with no other fanfare besides an elegant trio of piccalilli, salad cream and really top-drawer pork scratchings – salty little disks of perfection. It works a charm. Every element of the pie is as it should be; the pastry is soft and flavourful, the meat is dense and there’s a sumptuous layer of jelly between the two. Plus, sweet pickly vegetables and mustard-sharp salad cream to elevate it all. If it sounds like I’m just describing a very, very good pork pie, well, yes, that’s the point.
I also sampled the beef tartare (£28), but this is prepared at the table to your liking, so there’s little point in me trying to describe the flavour of it here, other than to say you can’t go wrong with plenty of Worcestershire sauce and Tabasco.
Given that the restaurant’s ethos is about harking back to a bygone era of food, I felt it would be wrong not to try the corn-fed chicken Diane (£36). All in all, it’s very good: the chicken comes out perfectly moist and tender, and the Diane sauce is gutsy with mushroom and a hint of sweetness. The mushroom stuffing layer in the chicken is mild and pairs nicely with the sauce. It’s a very accomplished dish, but I was more impressed by the halibut (£44). This flakes apart at the gentlest prompting of a fork, and is accompanied by a silky verjus, a herb oil and little cylinders of cucumber and sharp, sweet grape that cut through the creaminess of the rest of the dish. Inspired. I could eat that all night.
(Image credit: Rosi at the Beaumont)
Onto dessert. Black cherry blancmange (£10) seemed another one of those culinary throwbacks that I simply had to try. It was perfectly good – bouncy and deeply fruity. But, sadly for the blancmange, I also tried the Mayfair millionaire tart (£10), and I’m afraid this is the point at which I stop describing food and just descend into a heap of spluttering, dribbling praise. It is salted caramel chocolate in its ultimate form: gooey and indulgent. It’s one of those desserts you eat so quickly you don’t even realise how rich it is until it’s all over, and you’re sitting there wishing there was more, knowing it’s probably a blessing in disguise that there isn’t. Against very strong competition from the halibut, this was my dish of the night.
There is far too much to explore on this menu for a single visit – among the ones that got away were chicken Kyiv (£46) and John Dory fish fingers (£38) as well as a Neapolitan pizza (£19), but the dishes I did try tell me that this is exactly the sort of place for anyone who, like me, wonders what happens when culinary genius sets its mind to elevating down-to-earth, familiar dishes.
Dan McEvoy was a guest of Rosi at the Beaumont.
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Dan is a financial journalist who, prior to joining MoneyWeek, spent five years writing for OPTO, an investment magazine focused on growth and technology stocks, ETFs and thematic investing.
Before becoming a writer, Dan spent six years working in talent acquisition in the tech sector, including for credit scoring start-up ClearScore where he first developed an interest in personal finance.
Dan studied Social Anthropology and Management at Sidney Sussex College and the Judge Business School, Cambridge University. Outside finance, he also enjoys travel writing, and has edited two published travel books.
