Does St John deserve the hype?

When the World’s top 50 restaurants are published each year St John is always near the top of the list. This year it’s number 14 but is it really the fourteenth best restaurant in the world?

The idea of course is as absurd as the idea that the River Caf is the world's best Italian restaurant as was proclaimed a few years ago. But the list is drawn up, so far as I understand, by chefs and critics who naturally want to be seen endorsing places their peers respect. Like Ferran Adria and Heston Blumenthal, St John's chef-patron Fergus Henderson has become an icon - and is also a very good bloke. The judges know their judgement won’t be questioned if they nominate it so it always gets a huge number of votes.

I hadn’t been for a couple of years but my past experiences have been mixed. I remember having some of the best roast pork I’ve ever tasted and also some of the toughest, bloodiest, most undercooked partridge.

On this occasion I took my son, a restaurateur himself, who’d never been before. It has to be said we’re a picky pair always analysing every aspect of a meal but if you judge St John from the more normal point of view of someone eating there for the very first time - perhaps for a special occasion on account of its reputation - you can’t help but feel they might be asking themselves what the fuss is about.

Two dishes exemplified that particularly: a mismatched starter salad of brown shrimps and shredded cabbage in which the flavour of the cabbage totally overwhelmed the delicate flavour of the shrimps and a slightly leaden dessert of parsnip cake and sliced oranges (note to self: parsnip doesn't work as well as carrot or beetroot in cake). My boy's main of snails, sausage and chickpeas looked like a student supper and was just a bit dull.

On the credit side I had a warm salad of mussels, leeks and celeriac (above) which was absolutely lovely - fresh and seasonal - followed by a perfectly cooked slab of roast beef, with beetroot and horseradish (though both it and the plate it was served on could have been warmer) accompanied by - sheer genius - a side order of perfectly seasoned Welsh rarebit, the highlight of our meal. And even with the boom in artisanal baking over the last few years the sourdough bread is still the best in London.

The all-French wine list is also very much to my taste though we drank modestly (a couple of glasses ofchampagne, and a glass of Domaine Olivier Pithon,'Mon P'tit Pithon' Vin de Pays des Cotes Catalanes 2008 which rubbed along fine with the beef).

The unevenness in the cooking, it strikes me, stems from St John’s - maybe Henderson’s - constant desire to create new dishes which sometimes overwhelms basic good sense. You always see dishes on the menu you don’t find elsewhere and that’s a virtue but sometimes they strive too much for effect. In the 15 years since it opened St John has always been an innovator - from its pared down, white-painted warehouse decor, the bone marrow, the offal, the homely nursery puddings, the feasting menus - all trends picked up by other restaurants (as I suspect the rarebit will be).

The problem is that the accolade of being 14th best restaurant in the world creates expectations that it’s almost impossible for any restaurant to fulfil so don’t go with the idea that you’ll have one of the technically dazzling meals you’ve ever had in your life and you won't be disappointed. What you will unfailingly have is a fascinating experience that pushes the boundaries of what restaurants can offer. Everyone who's interested in food should eat here at least once.

St John is at 26 St John Street, London EC1M 4AY. Tel: 020 7251 0848 (email: reservations@stjohnrestaurant.com)

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