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One of the few criticisms of José Pizarro's tapas bar in Bermondsey - in fact really the only criticism - is that it's always far too busy. In Madrid, a place like José would be one of a number of options to pop in and enjoy a glass of sherry and some carved ham in any given area of town, and whilst some would be better than others, the idea is that you spend a happy evening going from bar to bar, never lingering too long in one spot and with the sheer number of alternatives helping to thin out the crowds. No such luck in SE1 - the nearest decent tapas bar once you've done with José is a cab ride to Soho away, and so the only option is to queue, cheek to jowl with other hungry patrons, hoping at some point you'll be lucky and find a seat. It's worth it, because the food and drink is always so brilliant, but you can see why it's not for everyone. What José needs, and what the people of London need, is competition - and unless you manage to get a walk-in at Zucca (good luck with that), there ain't none.
I am worried a very similar fate will befall Soif, the new restaurant from the guys behind the Terroirs and Brawn. There are lots and lots of restaurants in Battersea but with the odd exception they are all absolutely crap, so anywhere that is any good (Mien Tay, the Draft House) is permanently hugely oversubscribed. And Soif is just so much better than anywhere else in this part of town that I can very soon see it turning into the Zucca of SW11 - booked up six months in advance and with a waiting list like a kidney transplant. For now, though, let's enjoy it before the word gets around and you still stand a snowball's chance in hell of eating there.
Lardo di Colonnata, buttery and rich and presented on a marble tray in thin ribbons, was very tasty although when I've had lardo before it's been simply dressed with olive oil and seasoning and I think that helps lighten it slightly. Having said that though, it still all disappeared very quickly and if you don't enjoy the experience of melting bright write strips of pig fat in your mouth and washing them down with the house red there's something seriously wrong with you.
All the food from here on was, without exception, superb. A bowl of clams in butter and garlic was superficially simple but one of those things that's far too easy to get wrong. Bursting with freshness and seasoned perfectly, the only thing better than sucking back the sweet, juicy bivalves themselves was dipping the house sourdough in the garlicky butter sauce left behind - just brilliant.
This cute little pile of surf and turf is a paprika (I think) studded squid balanced on a disc of thick black pudding. The squid had a great flavour and a nice soft texture but the real star here was the black pudding, so thick and powerfully flavoured it was like a solid slow-cooked stew studded with chunks of pork fat.
And the third of the starters, chanterelles and pancetta, very like something I'd had once at Brawn, was a posh - and perfect - mushrooms on toast, with all kinds of strange shapes combining into an addictive mix of crunchy and soft, sweet and salty.
Based on the number of times I've had a dry partridge with flabby skin, it can't be easy to cook these birds properly. But this example was great - roasted golden brown with a fantastic aroma, the flesh beneath the crust was soft and juicy and full of gamey flavour. The sauerkraut (sorry, "choucroute"), despite my initial reservations, actually made a good sharp counterpoint to the meat, and the combination was all the more impressive once the juices from the bird had begun to mix together. But I still remain to be convinced whether it really did need that huge piece of Montbéliard sausage - it tasted perfectly nice but after stripping the partridge to the bone and knocking back a couple of mouthfuls of sauerkraut I barely had space to really appreciate it. Perhaps those with a bigger appetite would disagree.
There was one other main I forgot to take a picture of - a bowl of pig cheeks in cider and winter veg, but it was of a similar standard to the rest of the food - as soft as Christmas cake, rich as foie gras, comforting as a thick porky blanket. And given how much of my main course I had to leave, I'm not sure how I found room for any chestnut cake, but one slice between three people was just enough to send us wobbling on our way - it was lovely though, soft and buttery and lifted by the accompanying crème fraiche.
The bill, with a 500ml carafe of Cuvee Briand (much of the inspiration for the wine list and the food at Soif apparently comes from the Ardeche in SE France) came to £40 a head, which I suppose isn't super cheap but thanks to the generous attitude to portion sizes we were absolutely stuffed and you can hardly claim for food of this standard that it wasn't good value. Anywhere in London, Soif would be a great restaurant but given the standards of the area it's little short of miraculous. And it's for this reason that my hearty recommendation on 2nd December 2011 comes with a potentially ruinous caveat - this is a great value restaurant serving top food and wines in pleasant surroundings, but it's in Battersea, so be warned: I can guarantee that whenever you decide to try your luck, you won't be the only Nando's or Pizza Express exile on the hunt for a some decent grub.
9/10
It occurred to me, in thinking over my experience at Entrée in Battersea last Friday, that I really don't mention service in my posts very much any more. Fortunately - and hopefully - this is because service across London restaurants is now generally of such a high standard that I run the risk of repeating myself ad nauseum if I make more than a cursory mention, although I realise that is desperately unfair to the waiters and waitresses providing it. The cruel fact is, the better service gets, the less you notice it, as attention is quite rightly diverted to where it matters - the food, and your company at the table. Front of house is only seen when it trips up - fluffed orders, missed requests, knocks and spillages; these will be noted. At its best, service is invisible.
But while knocks and spillages, fluffed orders and long waits can be annoying, I reserve a special dark place in my own personal hell for the in-your-face best-friends-forever type of service. I'm sure you know the kind - an American import, and fortunately still far more prevalent over the pond, it's a style most famously employed by the flare-studded denizens of TGI Fridays or other such garish child-friendly chains. Catherine Tate parodied it brilliantly on her show in the form of mindlessly over-enthusiastic waitress "Amanda, though my friends call me Zebedee", and watching her perform that tedious spiel of practiced zaniness and awkward, charmless "banter" brought back many unhappy memories for me. I'm not much of a people person on the best of days, but when someone I'm paying to bring me my dinner starts acting like they're auditioning for reality TV, I just want the earth to swallow me up.
Which brings me back to Entrée. It's not a bad restaurant. You'd have to do a lot more than serve dull, if competent, food in a pleasant enough building and not charge the earth for it (with wine the bill came to £33 each) to qualify as bad. But someone needs to tell the front of house that they don't need to know "how my day is going", they don't need to check if I'm enjoying myself every thirty seconds, and if I need a recommendation, a drink, a life story, anything, I'll ask for it. Otherwise, do your job and leave me the hell alone. I'm sorry if that sounds harsh but what could have been if not a brilliant but at least mildly enjoyable meal was very nearly spoiled by a member of staff determined to regale us with laborious, practiced chatter at every possible opportunity.
But, the food. An "amuse" of piping hot butternut squash soup was quite well done, but as I'm determined to hang onto what passes as a British summer for as long as possible, there was something faintly depressing about a restaurant reminding you that, in fact, winter is on the way. Kudos for baking their own lemon-spiked hot roll though, at least.
I think I did better with my starter than others. Tuna tartar came with a gentle horseradish and radish mixture, and a slick of buttery avocado. The tartar was unseasoned but came with a neat little bowl of salty breadsticks to dip in, and I rather enjoyed it once I'd managed to get all the elements balanced on the crisp together. Scallop and crab lasagne was very weird, like a big fishy blancmange and I really wasn't keen at all, although it went down well enough with the person who'd ordered it. Lamb sweetbreads were a bit mealy but fine.
Apart from a giant, slimy lump of god-knows-what dumped on top of this dish of chicken ballotines and gnocchi, it was otherwise perfectly good, the chicken sous-vided somehow to preserve moisture in the mix of white and dark meat, and the gnocchi full of flavour. The black trumpet mushrooms were a bit woody and I didn't detect much of the foie gras in the "foie gras sauce", but nothing too offensive. Roasted plaice was cooked very well, though, and the fish of the day (Hake) was also moist and crispy in all the right places.
Despite the OK food though, we couldn't wait to leave, just to escape the relentlessly irritating banter from our waitress. I'm sure she meant well, and all the food arrived in good time and she gets points at the very least for offering tap water without us having to ask, but her whole attitude was so constantly, exhaustingly cringeworthy it was almost enough to put me off my dinner. And believe me, that takes a lot. But if nothing else, the experience at the wrong end of service at Entrée just served to highlight the fantastic job most other restaurants do, and how rarely the heroes of London's front of house get the recognition they deserve. So thank God for the teams at Roganic, Galvin at Windows, the Polpo chain, the Crooked Well, José and anywhere else it's possible to enjoy a meal without interruption, irritation or interrogation. We may not often say it, but it really is always appreciated.
5/10
Sorry about the poor photos - it's dark in there.
As I've often mentioned on this blog, it's a good idea to be deeply suspicious of anywhere that, for whatever reason, doesn't have to try too hard to attract custom. I'm not just talking about West End tourist traps like Aberdeen Angus or TGI Fridays, either; anywhere that can rely on a captive audience (airport bars, motorway service stations) or a celebrity endorsement (any number of terrible Marco Pierre White joints, and certain Ramsay gaffs) can also easily fall into the trap of convincing themselves popularity = quality. I was reminded of this rule while suffering a truly diabolical novelty Christmas "pizza" at Fire and Stone Covent Garden last week, consisting of a tasteless semolina flour base, salty (possibly packet) gravy replacing tomato sauce, and a number of ill-advised toppings attempting to emulate a roast turkey dinner. I have many issues with restaurants nakedly courting the pissed-up office Christmas party crowd, but this pizza was just so bad, so completely and utterly disastrously ill-advised and cheap tasting, that the fact the room we ate it in was rammed made my stomach heave with sadness even more than the toppings on the pizza. Definitely not recommended.
But for every Fire and Stone or Frankie and Benny's or Garfunkels there are, at the other end of the scale, restaurants not gifted with the capital to afford a prime West End spot but which nonetheless bravely attempt to attract custom by just cooking nice food. Sometimes these brave outposts of quality and value attract hoards of paying customers to their remote, undesirable locations and end up becoming local legends - think Sushi Hiro all the way out in Ealing, or Pearl Liang, tucked beneath a windswept office block somewhere near Paddington. Of course, it doesn't always work - Bacchus was great but the wilds of Hoxton were a step too far for the fine diners of London and it eventually closed - but there is no reason why an odd or slightly remote location cannot still host a popular and decent place to eat.
And then there is the Fish Place. To call this area of Battersea remote would be somewhat of an understatement. It's almost as if they don't want to be found - typing the postcode on their website into Google Maps points you towards a backstreet near Clapham Junction but in actual fact the restaurant is buried inside a desolate riverside development near the London Helipad - handy for international superstars or heads of state perhaps, but not for anyone else. I spent a good ten minutes pacing nervously around deserted, badly lit footpaths until I happened upon a tiny laminated sign pointing me down an unlikely dark alleyway between two buildings. It was quite a relief when I found the front door of the restaurant and settled my nerves with a glass of house white.
It's early days at the Fish Place so to criticise the house bread for being toasted instead of fresh is perhaps a bit harsh, and there was plenty of it. An amuse of scallop ceviche was fantastic though - citrusy and sweet without losing the distinct flavour of raw seafood.
Dorset crab ravioli was even more impressive. Bringing to mind some of the superb seafood pasta dishes at The Square, fresh crab, excellent pasta and a rich herby cream/seafood sauce sat on top of al dente cabbage. I imagine there would be some people not unlucky enough to possess my battered tastebuds that may consider it rather aggressively seasoned - however, I thought it was perfect.
As an experiment to see if the kitchen was as happy with meat as with fish, I ordered venison for my main, which came with very seasonal (and very nice) roast pumpkin and a little fan of some kind of dauphinoise potato. The venison itself, if I'm going to be picky, was perhaps not the gamiest tasting protein I've ever enjoyed, but the flavour of the meat was secondary anyway to a completely brilliant truffle sauce which was just about the best example of its kind I've had in years. I could just not get enough of it. And yes, in case you're wondering, that is a slice of pear providing sweet counterpoint to the other savoury ingredients.
Just before dessert arrived a very sharp palate cleanser of gin and tonic sorbet, headily (and excitingly) alcoholic and so cold it made the spoon stick to my tongue on every bite.
The biscuit and couli and sorbet elements of this blackberry mille-feuille were very good, but I'm afraid the blackberries themselves were rather bland. I'm wondering, in fact, whether raw blackberries could really ever sit well in a dessert on their own, as unlike raspberries or strawberries they don't seem to have the flavour or sweetness to stand out. However, they are at least seasonal and it's all credit to the Fish Place that all the ingredients made perfect sense for late autumn, and the attention to detail (Sainsbury's teabags aside perhaps) I'm sure went a long way to explaining why it all tasted so damn good.
So, some very good food, then. But none of the things that are wrong about the Fish Place have anything to do with the food. The first thing that may dissuade you is the price - at £45 not including service for three courses this is a restaurant in a very odd location with no particular pedigree to speak of that has, from the get-go, priced itself alongside long-established neighbourhood favourites like Chez Bruce or L'Autre Pied. Sure, it's top quality cuisine - Michelin star standard I'd say - but there's a certain arrogance in assuming that people are going to travel here when there are a number of other places offering these prices (and indeed less) for cooking of at least a similar standard.
And then there's the location. Again, I know it's early days, but there were only three tables of two occupied all night, and although the views from the first floor over the docks were pleasant enough, the journey here and the rather stilted atmosphere in the clinical new building were not. I hope there are enough people nearby with £60 a head to spend on good food to keep the Fish Place in business, as it would be a crying shame for cooking of this standard to go unnoticed, but if I live in Battersea and find the reward of eating here only just worth the effort required to find and pay for it, then I wonder how the rest of the capital feels. For now though, I will have faith that excellent food will find an audience no matter how unlikely the location, and wish the Fish Place the very best of luck.
7/10
I was invited to review the Fish Place
It's not my fault - I was lured into a false sense of security. The last two restaurants to open in Battersea were Mien Tay (excellent local Vietnamese) and the Draft House on Northcote Road (best selection of beers in the area, and decent British grub). I thought we'd turned a corner; I thought we'd finally come to our senses; I thought - I hoped - I prayed - that this would be a triumphant hat-trick of exciting new openings and I could finally hold my head up high and give a confident small handful of recommendations when someone asked me where was good to eat in the area. Alas, I should have known better. The Curse of Clapham Junction - that curious malady that seems to infect anywhere within walking distance of the station with frozen chips and Ranch Chicken and unchanging, laminated menus, has claimed its latest victim.
I've never gone from wilful optimism to pale-faced dread as quickly as when I sat down and read through the Tlalocan menu. BBQ chicken wings, Tex-Mex potato skins, three very uninspiring types of tacos, "sizzling fajitas", some suspiciously inexpensive steaks, a variation on the theme of burger, and a chicken and bacon burrito. It felt like a lazy, populist pub menu, the kind of thing you'd find in any chain bar in any high street in Britain, and hardly the level a new independent Mexican restaurant opening in 2010 should be aiming for. Nowhere deserves another Cantina Laredo, but surely firstly Wahaca and more recently Lupita (an inexpensive and I'm told pretty decent new place near the Strand) have done enough to prepare Londoners for the reality of proper fresh Mexican food? We can cope with more than a sweet margarita and a plate of nachos, can't we?
I started with a sweet margarita and a plate of nachos. Actually, the margarita was pretty good - freshly squeezed limes in a proper glass with not too much salt. It could have been colder (using a frozen glass is a good place to start) and without the couple of small chunks of ice floating in it, but still, not bad. Nachos were out of a packet and covered in horrible soggy sweet pickles, but the carnitas were tasty enough and there were plenty of them for your £5. My companion's calamari were fine, slightly soggy old oil but the batter was thin enough for that not to matter too much; the garlic mayonnaise they came with though was hugely, overpoweringly synthetic.
Mains were more depressing. I'm pretty sure these chicken wings and rack of ribs were pre-prepared - it all had that soggy, formless texture of something cooked a long time ago then reheated to order. They were soaked in an unbearably sweet packet "BBQ" sauce which brought to mind those little sachets from McDonald's. And the chips were appalling, previously frozen and tasting of oil. My friend's beef fajita was equally uninspiring - the beef had no flavour, the bread fell apart into dry clumps as soon as it had to do any work, and although the chicken pieces were kind of OK in an Old El Paso kind of way, it all felt like a lazy way to make £12.
We skipped dessert - and, in fact, a large proportion of the other dishes come to think of it - and got the bill, which came to £25 a head. It's not a fortune, I suppose, and at Cantina Laredo it would get you little more than a cheese-stuffed pepper and a brownie, but as I am wont to do, I couldn't help thinking of how much delicious fresh food you could get at Mien Tay up the road for that amount of money. The whole enterprise just reeked of a cynical, condescending attitude to the kind of food that people are expected to eat in London, and of a terrible lack of ambition. "£5 packet nachos, £12 reheated fajitas, they won't know or want any better, they'll be queuing out the door," they seem to be saying. "Familiarity, speed, chips. That's what the people want". I hope they're wrong - somebody here needs to keep faith in the restaurant going public, but... well, who really knows.
There was something very odd about the toilet arrangements at Tlalocan that at first I couldn't quite put my finger on. I opened the door from the main restaurant to the gents, and there they were, all present and correct, but it was only as I was doing my business that I realised with a start what was wrong; as a fellow diner left the room, there I was, in my rather compromised position, staring out over a good section of the restaurant and bar area. With no corner to turn or double doors to negotiate, these must be the least discreet toilets in London. You have to admire the irony though - I was able to watch Tlalocan take the piss, while they watched me take mine.
3/10
You would be forgiven for assuming that out of the huge amount of restaurants on Lavender Hill, at least a handful would be any good. On the short walk from Clapham Junction up to the police station on the corner of Latchmere Road and down again to the intersection with Wandsworth Road you pass a good twenty or so actual sit-down restaurants - I'm not even including the takeaway joints or kebab shops. In the five or six years I've been living in the area, I think I've been to most of them at least once or twice, endlessly, foolishly optimistic that the next may serve a meal even worth paying for, never mind returning to. There's a mind-numbingly dull, sub-Wagamamas sushi joint, a dreadful overpriced "gastropub", two equally awful Thai restaurants, a terrible fish and chip shop, a handful of middle-of-the-road Indians that could have been transplanted from any suburban high street in the country, and even a Nepalese which I'm yet to visit but which in its previous incarnation as a French restaurant once made me wait an hour for my starter and I left without leaving a tip. There's Donna Margherita of course, which is pretty consistent, and I'll admit I've never stepped inside Nancy Lam's Enak Enak, put off largely by the garish twenty-foot-high personality-cult portrait of a grinning Nancy on the side of the building. But really, more is less in this part of the city.
So you'll forgive me for getting ludicrously excited about the arrival of Mien Tay, a proper Vietnamese restaurant which has been wowing the crowds in trendy Shoreditch for a year or two now and which has chosen this cursed stretch of road, amongst the estate agents and two-for-one cocktail bars, for its second branch. Still in soft-opening phase until tomorrow (9th October), the meal we had was discounted by 10% and you can't yet pay by credit card (necessitating a hasty jog down the hill in the rain to the cash point), but judging purely by the standard of the food served, Mien Tay stands head, shoulder and toes over the rest of the dross in the area.
First of the small dishes to arrive was a heavenly honey-glazed quail, rich in sweet spicing and heady notes of garlic and fresh herbs. Perfectly charred and deeply marinated, it was a joy to pull apart and suck at the little limbs with their crispy coating. And it was as pretty as a picture to look at too - even the garnish showing attention to detail, some pickled carrots being sweet and sour in just the right balance.
Tamarind prawns were perfectly juicy and for £6 there were plenty of nice fat crustaceans here, doused in the tangy tamarind sauce. If I was going to be picky, I am still a bit squeamish about these gloopy sauces thickened with (I assume) cornflour, but this is probably just a personal thing. I still ate them all.
Spring rolls were as good as I've had almost anywhere - just crunchy enough, deftly and greaselessly fried, and containing superbly fresh vegetables. And the minced beef parcels in betel leaves were gorgeous, the thin fried leaves breaking to reveal moist and richly beefy mince. Both dishes were again very attractively presented with huge bunches of fresh herbs and mint.
This Bánh xèo crispy pancake was somewhat of a gamble. One of my dining companions last night had recently been in Vietnam, and her favourite dish she ate all trip was a Bánh xèo somewhere in the south, which she spent the rest of the journey trying and failing to match. The unwritten rule is do not try and recreate your favourite holiday dishes at home, as they will invariably be a disappointment. But the example here was declared "not quite as good as the best, but better than all the others". High praise indeed.
The best, however, was yet to come. A rather straightforwardly presented plate of thin fried lamb and onions was so brilliantly spiced and deeply-flavoured it almost ranked up there with any of Tayyabs' best offerings. It seems odd to compare the light, fresh notes of Vietnamese cooking with the dense and meaty Pakistani grill house, but the parallels here were obvious - cheapish meat, albeit cooked intelligently, with such a brilliant command of spicing that the dish is lifted into another stratosphere.
The bill, a paltry £42 which included a bottle of white wine, came with a final unexpected flourish - a segmented half orange. The love, the care and the passion is in the detail, and Mien Tay has enough to satisfy the most jaded Battersea resident. Anywhere else in London Mien Tay would be welcomed with open arms and would deserve to do very well. By the standards of Lavender Hill, it's as if the culinary gods themselves have shined a light from the heavens and blessed SW11 with the restaurant of their dreams. On a damp Wednesday night, with little to no publicity (it has apparently already been open three weeks and yet most of the foodie publications on Twitter were oblivious), it was full by the time we left at 8pm. It won't be long before they'll be queuing out of the door.
9/10
I was deliriously excited when I saw The Establishment, the gastropub in Parson's Green, had opened a branch on Battersea Rise, not five minute's walk from my house. Deliriously excited because if there's one thing this area needs it's somewhere decent to eat - if your best local restaurant (notwithstanding the excellent Donna Margherita of course) is a Strada then something needs to change. And also because when I visited the Parson's Green branch last year I enjoyed very much - I was served a nicely made martini and a lovely pork dish and left a very happy chappy indeed.
I don't know whether it's pandering to a different locale or just a desire for a change of direction from the guys behind The Establishment, but whereas the menu at Parson's Green was firmly British gastropub, in Battersea they seem to want to be known as a steakhouse, with a special box on the menu listing the cuts of beef (sirloin, T-bone, etc. and whole rib for 2) and proudly proclaiming the 45-day dry-aged product. Well, good luck to them, but I was pessimistic. I have yet to find anywhere in the UK other than Hawksmoor that really do the US-style steakhouse concept any justice. Good quality meat is simply not produced on the scale and to the same level of consistency here as over the pond, illustrated by a recent hugely enjoyable evening at Hawksmoor laid on for food bloggers where we got to try 17(!!) different cuts of steak from all over the country, and where out of only 2 or 3 really good cuts my favourite turned out to be the one they had on their menu already. Those guys know what they're doing.
But more on the beef later. First of all I had a small bowl of shrimp (the British type, as in tiny prawn) and potato salad. The potato was lovely and fresh and the salad was dressed well, but the shrimp tasted of nothing - a real shame. My dining companion that evening, none other than author and food blogger Simon Majumdar of Dos Hermanos, did much better with his Chicken Liver & foie gras parfait, which had a lovely light texture, deep flavour and served correctly at room temperature.
For the main course, I thought it would be fun to have a whole 26oz rib between the two of us, and we ordered it rare. The breed used at The Establishment in Battersea is Aberdeen Angus. There is a very good reason for this - it's consistent in terms of quality, reasonably priced and the supply is plentiful. Unfortunately it doesn't have a great deal of flavour, and although the meat that arrived was cooked very well, with good seasoning and a nice crispy char from a hot grill, the flesh inside was watery and tasteless. It was also very sloppily presented. Compare this similar cut from the Horseshoe in Hampstead Heath last year:
...to that offered at the Establishment:
It's a terrible photo (it was almost pitch black in there) but you can hopefully see what I'm getting at.
I know it seems like I'm whingeing (because I am), but if anything the mediocre beef was just a vindication of my prejudices rather than a shock or disappointment. Aberdeen Angus is a perfectly good breed for burgers or pub steaks, but I have a distinct feeling the choice of that breed was made for commercial and practical reasons rather than flavour. If you have that little faith in your public that you think people won't pay more than £15 for a sirloin and don't know any better, then fine, see how you get on. But thank God there are places in London where flavour, courtesy of gorgeous dry-aged Longhorn cattle, comes first. Listen to me - I'm turning into a beef geek. Hawksmoor, I blame you.
6/10
I should really try to stop getting myself all excited when I hear about a new restaurant opening in Battersea. I don't know what it is about this part of town, but for some reason regardless of concept, skill of the chef or the charm of the front of house, as soon as the doors open to a new eatery in SW11 it's like all the life and joy is sucked out and you're left with a hollow shell of a place serving bland, expensive food to undiscerning punters.
Dos Hermanos, that bastion of independent criticism and flawless taste, had already dismissed Broome and Delancey on Battersea Rise, saving me the trouble of blowing £20 on a burger and chips and hammering probably the first nail in the coffin of the latest reincarnation of this site, which seems to have changed hands about 10 times in as many years. But what was this - The Bolingbroke, another new opening on Northcote Road, doesn't get a panning. It's hardly a glowing review, but it sounds solid and interesting enough for a visit and damn it, it's not like we're exactly spoiled for choice around here and if it turns out to be anything less than terrible I'd consider that a win. So, off I went.
First impressions were good - very good, if I'm going to be honest. They have that Prince of Wales Putney vibe, with a slightly rowdy and informal front room and a more traditional restaurant dining room towards the back, with whitewashed brick walls and a chalkboard daily special. And the menu read very well indeed, "Wild bay Devon crab, avocado, baby gem lettuce and deep fried duck egg" sounds almost worth the fee alone, and along with Ox tongue, slow-roasted belly of pork and roasted mallard it ticked all the right boxes in local, seasonal ingredients. If only the success of a restaurant was based on their skill in putting together a menu, the Bolingbroke would be famous the city over.
Starters were where things started going downhill. Ham hock terrine was fridge-fresh and although would have been tasty enough at room temperature just pointed towards sloppy practices in the kitchen. The "signature" duck egg starter was overcooked so that instead of a lovely runny yolk the insides were solid and cloying. My pigeon was cooked nice and rare and the accompanying mushrooms were lovely, but the foie was cold and solid, like a small lump of butter, a waste of such premium ingredients really.
As far as mains go, the only positive thing I can say is that the daily special guinea fowl confit was pretty good and was eaten without complaint. But the two fish dishes ordered that evening (Dover sole and a Halibut steak) ranked with some of the worst I've ever paid for. My Halibut with saffron sauce was overcooked, completely underseasoned and dressed with some entirely tasteless mussels. There was no sign of any saffron in the creamy sauce and the creamed leeks were as bland as only unseasoned, cheap boiled vegetables can be. But worst of all was the Dover Sole. When done well, this is the king of all fish dishes - my Sole at Scott's last year was just superb, with rich meaty flesh easing off the bone in large, satisfying chunks. Here it was overcooked way past the point of obliteration, the skin burned and the flesh a disgusting homogenous paste. Awful.
We did mention our numerous complaints to the waitress when asked, but apart from a smile and a short apology, nothing else was offered in terms of recompense. We had also asked them - twice - to turn down the music blaring out of the speakers just above our heads, but nothing was done about this either, so we had to endure our main courses (themselves being enough punishment you would think) between yelled conversation or in the quiet few seconds between tracks.
The Bolingbroke is not a good restaurant. Perhaps if I'd ordered differently I would have come away with the impression that it was merely mediocre rather than actively bad, but at these prices, and with competition from pubs such as the Prince of Wales and the Establishment only 10 minutes away, there is no excuse for such poor cooking. For all the fanfare and expense lavished on this building, it seems the curse of Battersea dining doesn't look like being broken any time soon.
4/10
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