Rextail (Closed)

Address: 13 Albemarle Street, London, W1S 4HJ , United Kingdom
Tel: +44 (0)203 301 1122
Style: Restaurant bar
Food: Set menu

Review

The latest outpost of Arkady Novikov's oligarch-friendly London empire now includes this Green Park brasserie - a meat-led, eclectic mix of ersatz shabby chic with Mayfair style, service and prices. The name? A skeletal Tyrannasaurrus Rex on the menu gives an incongruous clue - a flesh-loving cocktail?

The 120-cover, large one-room basement restaurant (on the bijou side for our Arkady) boasts a small, well-stocked bar with a handful of bar stools. Munch on the big, fat green olives and posh nuts while you peruse a menu containing three pages of cocktails, full of original and inventive couplings, which come well-made and well-presented (as they should, considering they range from £9 to a whopping £27).

The opening drinks programme was marred by the most poorly edited menu. Schoolboy spelling errors include 'Lagavulion' Scotch whisky, a cocktail called a 'French Lavander', Pedro 'Jimenez' sherry (which they'd run out of on our visit), 'Creme the Violette' and 'raspberrys' as well as typographical errors. Plain sloppy - not that most of Rextail's customers will care, but we think it suggests the bar is an after-thought, which seems out of kilter with the London scene.