Given what happened last time I put a blogpost subject up for public vote (you utter bastards), you may be wondering why I'd put myself through the same ordeal again. It's a fair question.
But I'd be a fool to think most of you aren't only reading these pages for the occasional sadistic pleasure of seeing me spend my hard earned on a diabolical meal, and there's always the chance you might send me to Le Gavroche or Pollen Street Social instead of the Clapham Junction branch of Wimpy. So instead of pre-populating the poll with nice places I actually want to go to like last year, I'm going to call your bluff and start you off with a list of real shockers. Then hopefully, thanks to a clever bit of reverse psychology you'll add your own nice options and I'll end up somewhere good.
Here's a question for any of you that might call yourselves Londoners: Have you ever been to Buckingham Palace? I don't mean cycled past it on the way to work or seen it blur past from the back of a black cab at midnight; I mean actually stood outside those gates, watched the changing of the guard, asked a stranger to take a photo of yourself grinning like an idiot and throwing a double "peace" sign. No? What about Madame Tussauds or the London Planetarium? The London Dungeon? Have you ever sat on one of those big lions in Trafalgar Square or congregated around the statue of Eros in Piccadilly Circus?
I have never done any of these things. I can tell you the best place to grab a cocktail in Shoreditch or the quickest way of getting from Holborn to Victoria in rush hour (walk down to Temple and get the District Line; the queues to get into Holborn station are crazy now they've shut down one of the Piccadilly Line escalators) but I live my life so far removed from "tourist" London that the two may as well be in a different continent. If you live here, you will avoid the Big Sights partly because they're so bloody expensive (each of the paying attractions above is likely to set you back at least £20) but partly because you just think, well, they're always there, I'll get round to them eventually. And somehow you never do. There is London and there is Tourist London and never the twain shall meet.
The Rainforest Café sits in the very money-grabbing, souvenir-pushing, cynical heart of Tourist London, physically (it's right underneath the Trocadero, steps away from Piccadilly Circus) as well as metaphorically. At least at the otherwise execrable Hard Rock Café you are only strongly encouraged to wait for your table in the gift shop next door; here you must navigate vast piles of lurid furry toys and tubs of bouncy balls and oversized pencils before you even get so far as the bar. The bar, by the way, contains only nailed-down plastic stools shaped into the bottom half of different animals and are rigidly contoured so you are forced to sit in a particular direction - the effect of which is a winning combination of both humiliating and uncomfortable, though still not quite as humiliating and uncomfortable as paying £7.50 for a sickeningly sweet Margarita containing premade sour mix.
It's probably about time I spoke about the décor. Whilst most "themed" restaurants are content with a bit of vaguely appropriate tat on the walls and dressing their staff up in silly costumes, the Rainforest Café resembles the queuing area of a 20-year-old family-friendly ride at a faded seaside resort, complete with animatronic animals, sound effects, water features and various misshapen fiberglass sculptures attempting to mimic tree trunks and rock formations. At one time, presumably not long after it opened all the way back in 1994, I imagine it would have looked, if not attractive in the traditional sense, then at least impressive - animatronic gorillas don't come cheap, and neither do aquariums or fake waterfalls. Now, though, the plastic foliage hanging from the ceiling is grey with 18 years of accumulated dust, a good number of the oversized butterflies have stopped flapping their wings, and the water features emit a strange, sad smell of chlorine and school showers.
Of the food, I wish it had either been a lot better, so that I would have felt more comfortable about the bill, or a lot worse, so that I could have at least had more fun writing it up. As it is, most was just very standard Brakes Bros commodity reheat-and-forget things like chicken wings and burgers, none of it inedible but none of it anywhere near worth the money. The best was my steak, which as you can probably tell even from my rubbish photo, was precisely medium-rare with a good crust, well seasoned and a nice thick slab of decent enough cow. Fries were just oven chips with an odd taste, and all the salads seemed to have been "dressed" in nothing more than BBQ sauce, but the beef itself was fine and I even didn't mind the packet peppercorn goo. £22, mind.
By way of a contrast, the worst dish that arrived at our table was a "Mexican Quesadilla", at £14.95 probably the most expensive cheese and bean wrap in the country, no better than anything you could pick up from Pret for a couple of quid and tasting of wallpaper paste in between two pieces of cardboard. And a lamb shank (£16.95) was yet more frozen meat, slow cooked for aeons just so people can say the meat "fell off the bone" as if that's anything to be pleased about.
But the Rainforest Café, I hear you say, isn't for me. It's all very well sitting there taking pictures and moaning about the wipe-clean tablecloths but surely the real test of a theme restaurant is if its real target audience - children - enjoy it. And indeed the happy gaggle of under-12s we brought along last night certainly seemed to enjoy themselves at the time, colouring in their menus and racing around the robo-Gorillas and fish tanks between courses. But once it was all over and we had escaped the fake thunderstorms and furry toys, even these impressionable young minds couldn't stay convinced with the food - ribs were "good but not chewy enough", in "way too much BBQ sauce, which was too sweet". Jelly (desserts were included in the £12 kids menu, about the only thing at Rainforest Café that even nodded towards good value) was "too sweet and too thick", and the vanilla ice cream on top was "horrid". Burgers were better ("I like burgers") and there weren't as many complaints about the Sundaes as the jelly, but even so, I got the very strong impression they'd have been just as happy if not happier at McDonalds, which wouldn't have cost £200 for 3 and 4 halves.
Ah yes, the bill. The food was poor and expensive but the real sting in the tail of last night was some truly eye-watering mark-ups on alcohol. A teeny 125ml glass of watery house chardonnay was £5, and a bottle of 3.8% Carlsberg was an incredible £4.50 - that's more than the cost of a pint of export-strength lager even from a West End pub. And perhaps we could have gone a little easier on the booze but you try having a meal in the middle of a dusty fiberglass rainforest and see how long you can last before gasping for a drink. Each of the adults had one main course, shared a portion of mediocre chicken wings and had 4 drinks each and managed to spend £50 a head. As we paid up and left, I couldn't help noticing how the shrieks and hoots of recorded jungle noises increasingly sounded like jeers and mocking laughter.
This is an Olympic year - it is not just depressing but potentially incredibly damaging that, with the world's spotlight on London, places like this continue to trade. I know I'm repeating myself and I know we've been here before, God knows I've shouted myself hoarse about Aberdeen Angus and Hard Rock Café and they're both still making a killing so you may ask what's the point in getting worked up about it again. The fact is though, along with every other sentient being that takes the slightest bit of pride in the city he's chosen to call his home, I care about what our guests think of our food, and I want as many people as possible to eat well. And Rainforest Café and their ilk are nothing more than vast confidence tricks specifically tailored towards naive visitors who haven't the energy or the resources or confidence to go anywhere else. I'm one of the lucky ones - I crossed over to Tourist London for one evening, hated it, and scurried quickly back. But what if Tourist London was all you ever saw? Can we really blame the UK's poor reputation for food on lazy tourists, or is this like blaming landmine victims for not looking where they're walking?
I don't really know what the solution is. Short of standing outside the Rainforest Café with a sandwich board reading "Go Somewhere Else", we can't stop the uninformed spending their money there, just as we can't stop people going to see films starring Matthew McConaughey or voting Conservative. In a free country and a free economy, people are free to make a living ripping other people off - always have, always will. But it doesn't mean we have to like it, and it doesn't mean we shouldn't scream from the highest rooftops when we see such things going on. So this is my rooftop and, Rainforest Café, consider yourself well and truly screamed at.
1/10
Many thanks to Esme (12) and Elia (10) (and father Osh), and Mathilde (7) and Fred (11) (and father Bob) for subjecting themselves to Death By Fiberglass.
With many of the best new restaurants in London not taking reservations, the grumbling of discontent amongst people who prefer to eat their dinner on a guaranteed table at a guaranteed time (and of course I can appreciate where they're coming from) grows ever louder. A few years back it was only fast food joints or tourist traps like the Hard Rock Café that didn't take bookings, and nobody gave a damn about those. But since the influx of no-bookings restaurants that served food people actually wanted to eat (a group that essentially contains all the current rock gods of London dining - the Polpo group, Burger & Lobster, Pitt Cue, MeatLiquor, etc.), the question of To Queue Or Not To Queue has split opinion quite dramatically.
Needless to say, I am a tragic restaurant geek that will happily queue for hours in the freezing cold for the best St. Louis ribs in town, but I still have some tricks to make my chances as good as possible. One of them is to hit what industry types refer to as the "shoulder hours" - the gap in between lunch and dinner around 3-5pm, where the stragglers for lunch have yet to properly overlap with the early birds for the evening. Also, if you can bear to wait that long, even the legendary queues at MeatLiquor tend to calm down by about 9:30/10pm ish, so that's another period you're quite likely to score a walk-in. Possibly. Alright, maybe not on a Friday. Or Saturday.
The point is, I know how frustrating it is to not know when you're going to eat or where - or even if - you're going to sit, and I've heard all the arguments about how the system is all about convenience for the restaurant and not the consumer, and how it tends to create a transitory atmosphere of people who got lucky rather than a steady culture of friendly regulars. But the fact is, a no-bookings policy coupled with a reliable stream of punters allows a restaurant to charge less for better ingredients, and if the upshot is that you can eat an entire steamed lobster with chips and a salad in the middle of Mayfair for £20, well, I'll grin and bear it. And judging by the massive popularity of many of these places, so can many others.
But what if somewhere makes you queue for half an hour and then still serves overpriced, mediocre rubbish in a charmless corner of a shopping centre in Stratford? You probably won't believe me if you've read my post on Barbecoa but I really wanted to like Jamie's Italian; the guy knows good food when he sees it, and coupled with all the willing investors he must surely be able to magic up with an internationally famous profile like that, you'd think he'd be able to hit all the bases of decent Italian home cooking and use economies of scale to get hold of decent ingredients. Instead, he seems to have created a slightly more expensive version of Zizzi's, and as anyone who's ever been to Zizzi's will tell you, this is not a good thing.
In the interests of fairness, I should say that the drinks from the bartenders at Jamie's Italian Westfield Stratford were pretty decent. My Negroni was tiny and warm but had all the proper ingredients in proper proportions, and my friend's Florence Fizz, containing shocking pink pomegranate juice, was just about refreshing enough to justify the £6.25 price tag. Also they seem to have constructed themselves a worthwhile wine list by most chain Italian standards, the house chardonnay from Puglia being unexpectedly lovely for a paltry £15.85. I still would have quite liked to have been brought the actual bottle though, rather than have it from a big glass vase - not that I don't trust them, of course...
But, oh dear, the food. Sirloin steak, ordered medium, came disastrously overcooked to well done and was a laborious task to eat. This is a shame because I have a feeling, based on rolling a piece of leathery beef around my mouth for a minute or two, that the raw product wasn't bad at all - and it was at least seasoned well. Accompanying "funky" chips (kill me now) were diabolical - soggy and bland and a strange orange hue that brought to mind deep-fried slugs, they were the kind of thing that made you angry anyone even considered them worth sending out of the kitchen. My Turkey Milanese did at least arrive with a faint hint of truffle, albeit far less than the picture below would indicate as the fungus itself was pretty cardboardy, but the turkey was nothing more than a huge sponge of bland meat transporting (I'm guessing) about two litres of cooking oil. The best thing about this plate of food was the fried egg, and even that wasn't very nice.
It's a good job we drank more than is usually wise of a Saturday lunchtime because without the calming effect of the alcohol I'm not sure I would have left with my sanity. And before you say anything no, we didn't complain - just think of all the reasons you've ever had for not complaining about a mediocre meal, and pick one; we were trying to enjoy ourselves, we didn't want to make a fuss, we wanted to just get out of there and go home. And get out of there we eventually did (attracting the waitress being a surprisingly hard task in a restaurant so full of staff), £60 lighter and each of us - I from the turkey, my friend from her soggy chips, and both of us from the overwhelming stench of ripoff - really quite queasy.
There's a good way and a bad way of going about treating paying customers if you run a no-bookings policy. Either queue 'em up and pack 'em in but give those lucky enough to reach the front of the line mind-blowingly good food at stupidly low prices (see paragraph two), or use your high profile and backlog of good will to charge a huge number of people way over the odds for crappy food. As much as I'd kept an open mind for my meal on Saturday, and as much as I'd love to say that here was a new chain that could finally lift high street dining in Britain above its current desperately poor level, it was very soon obvious that instead of something that will beat the groaning corpse of Zizzi's, Ask and Carluccio's into the ground where they belong, the Jamie's Italian model is actually just more of the same - commodity ingredients, cooked badly, served for the highest possible profit. How thoroughly depressing.
I really like the idea of a Belgian moules frites restaurant. I'm sure a good moules frites restaurant would be a wonderful thing - after all, I like mussels and I like chips and I'm very much on board with the concept of combining both in one meal. Unfortunately, whilst we can probably all agree that the idea of moules frites is a Good Thing, for some reason the reality of actually eating the stuff in London has proved remarkably elusive. Belgo used to be good, at one time, before the original owners left and their replacements devoted their energies to expanding the chain rather than serving good food. And you can certainly order mussels and chips in various bistros in the smarter areas of town if you feel like throwing money at the problem, but what we are missing is a dedicated moules frites specialist, informal and not too expensive, where you can drink strong Belgian beer and splatter yourself with seafood gunk and still walk away with change from £20.
At first glance, brand-new Léon de Bruxelles on Cambridge Circus seems like it might fit the bill. It's informal, bright, attractive, populated by pleasant staff and boasting a clear and reasonably concise menu. True, £14 for a bowl of mussels and chips isn't the world's greatest bargain, but for this month only there's 50% off the mussels dishes (why just this month I'm not sure, but I guess that's up to them) and if they taste good enough then even full price they'd be worth a punt. I sat down with high hopes, assuming that a dedicated moules frites restaurant stood more of a chance of getting it right than anywhere else, and ordered the "Léon mussels".
The bread was good, I suppose. A nice crusty French baguette with a moist inside, it almost definitely wasn't made in house and would be completely unremarkable in the context of almost anywhere else but as the rest of the food at Léon de Bruxelles was so mediocre it's only really the bread that I remember as having any flavour. The chips, were example, were awful - bland, floury tubes of empty carbohydrate, like oven chips only not as dynamic or noteworthy. They were totally unseasoned, too, which I realise is only a case of having to grind your own salt on, but does indicate a lack of attention to detail.
Worse, though, was the bowl of "Léon mussels". Fresh, plump and generously numerous mussels were tragically abused by a thin white liquid so insipid it tasted of nothing more than skimmed milk. There was the odd chunk of boiled celery knocking about but I didn't detect any shallot, and ploughing through the huge bowl was a grim, entirely unrewarding slog. In an effort to make the poor wee blighters taste of something - anything - I tried adding my own salt, but only ended up with salty milk and mussels. This was a very poor dish, one that wouldn't have survived even the briefest of taste tests from someone in the kitchen; I can only assume nobody bothered. That, or Léon de Bruxelles really did mean to serve hot mussels and milk, and neither scenario puts them in a very good light.
There is also the matter of the beer. Given the astonishing variety and quality of beers from Belgium, I can think of no reason other than naked, exploitative profit-mongering that Léon de Bruxelles would unironically place Stella Artois next to Duvel on the menu, and grace it with an entirely fictitious tasting note. I guess "Malty with a pronounced hoppy bitterness" is nicer to read than "all the flavour of heavily diluted cat's piss" but it doesn't make it any more true.
A mild saving grace came in the form of the bill, which was only £7 thanks to the half-price offer and my decision to drink tap water. But from the end of the month that bowl of mussels a la dishwater will be a sickening £14, and will have graduated from disappointing-but-cheap to a genuine good old-fashioned Covent Garden rip-off. If Léon de Bruxelles want to be the Garfunkels of moules frites then good luck to them, but it doesn't mean I have to like it. Perhaps it's not worth getting worked up about - after all this is only another superficial, overpriced tourist-trap in a prime location, hardly the first of its kind and almost definitely not the last. But it's also another chance for our visitors to have their prejudices confirmed about food in the capital, and I really just wish it wasn't there.
There are few restaurateurs that have had as dramatic an impact on the way this country eats than Alan Yau. The man who created an impressive number of famous restaurants such as Michelin-starred Chineses Hakkasan and Yauatcha, and plush Japanese Sake No Hana in St James (though not still involved day-to-day with very many of them), he is perhaps best known for being the founder of the extraordinarily popular Wagamama chain, which has so many branches now up and down the country - and around the globe - that they're almost as almost as ubiquitous on the high street as Boots or Marks & Spencer. To be honest, I'm not a fan of Wagamama - it's timid food served as quickly as possible, and the bench seating is infuriating for a number of reasons - but then I'm a snobby Londoner with access to places like Koya and Chilli Cool; I can easily see why they've been so popular elsewhere.
So the guy has a decent track record. And he has been very successful, perhaps thanks to the very clear set of expectations crafted by his restaurants. So far, each has filled a certain specific role; Hakkasan is posh Cantonese, Yauatcha is posh dim sum, Saka No Hana is posh Japanese. Similarly, Wagamama is budget Japanese and Busaba Eathai is budget Thai. So presumably Cha Cha Moon is budget Chinese except - what's this on the menu - Dolly mee goreng is Malaysian isn't it? And Fujian style udon is most definitely Japan. There's Thai chicken curry, Sichuan chicken, Singapore fried noodles, Indonesian satay, baby back ribs!? - geographically, it's all over the place. And if you think that pan-Asian restaurants are doomed to mediocrity because no one kitchen can master such a wide range of styles of cooking, Cha Cha Moon is unlikely to change your mind.
First thing to arrive - dishes are just brought out as and when they are ready - was a warm crispy duck salad. I suppose the duck was technically crispy in that it had been deep fried to near-oblivion, but thanks to the shredded flesh soaking up the fryer oil like a sponge, it was unbelievably greasy. The salad itself was dressed in what I can only assume was simple syrup as I didn't detect anything other than sugar, and while ordinarily I'd compliment their generosity on such a large portion for your £7.90, in this case it just meant there was more sickly, greasy gunk to wade through. Hideous.
Singapore fried noodles were better, but then so is driving a ten-inch cook's knife through your thigh. It was a bit sweet, a bit bland and despite being marked on the menu as "spicy" we couldn't detect even the slightest hit of chilli, but at least it was fresh and just about edible. Still, this was the kind of thing you could get from any High Street Chinese takeaway in the country, absolute bog-standard fare, and was £6.90.
These spring rolls tasted exactly like the ones you can get in the plastic cartons from Tescos. That's not to say they were in any way inedible, I just have this old fashioned notion that people visit restaurants to eat food they can't reheat themselves in the oven for a quarter of the price. They came with some kind of tamarind-based dipping sauce that made them taste of tamarind-based dipping sauce instead of spring rolls. We used up all of the sauce.
I can't begin to tell you how awful the baby back ribs were. The cloyingly sweet sauce (described coyly as "tangy" on the menu) they came soaked in wasn't enough to cover the appalling smell of commodity pig and the meat was so overcooked and formless it was like eating rancid pork-flavoured blancmange. Unspeakably bad, and although perhaps nothing can quite beat the ribs at Hard Rock Cafe for sheer catastrophic terror, these weren't far off. Pitt Cue in Soho is still the only place in town I've eaten ribs of any kind worth paying for.
We drank sickly lychee-flavoured cocktails and cheap white wine, as you tend to do in these places, and after gamely working at the more edible elements of the food, scurried off wondering what on earth just happened. Alan Yau has dropped so many balls with Cha Cha Moon the streets of Soho could be used to film a Sony Bravia commercial. With its directionless, geographically vague menu, timid and incompetently prepared food, and piercingly loud room fitted with those dreaded communal bench seats, it's hard to find anything even remotely positive to say about the place. Oh - the staff were very pleasant and there were lots of them so you never had to try to hard to get their attention. But for God's sake, even the toilets were shoddy - Alan Yau's places are famous for always having nice toilets, even the budget ones. It's baffling, and my meal was miserable, but all said and done, this is Soho and alternatives are hardly in short supply. Eat somewhere else. Eat anywhere else.
Last night I went to the Hard Rock Cafe and enjoyed a tasty, reasonably-priced meal served promptly by honest and obliging staff in comfortable surroundings.
Ha ha! April Fool!
Before we go any further though, perhaps I should explain what I was doing there. It all began with an email from their PR people to a friend of mine, inviting her to their famous Piccadilly flagship restaurant. Being of sturdier moral constitution than most, she politely declined but mentioned that a friend of hers would happily whore himself out to any old ethically-bankrupt tourist dive as long as there was a free burger in it (me). For whatever reason (and I'm sure they had theirs), my invitation never arrived, but by now my interest was piqued - I had often pootled past the place on the bus and marvelled at the queues that on summer evenings stretched around the block, and no less than top restaurant critic Charles Campion rated their burger as one of the six best in London. So, I managed to persuade said friend to come with me largely on the promise of a boisterous and tacky but hopefully entertaining evening, and very much assumed we'd find if not the greatest food in London then at least a decent night out.
It may sound like I'm saying all this merely to defend myself against accusations that I've deliberately picked an awful restaurant in order to give it a gleeful battering on the blog. But I can only assure you that honestly, neither of us were expecting anything less than a tasty burger under a case containing Eric Clapton's guitar, and to this day I have never gone anywhere actively hoping for a miserable time. I may be a glutton, but I'm not a masochist, and the abject misery of a bad meal isn't worth any number of extra blog visits.
I'll say this for the Hard Rock Cafe though, it is definitely popular. On arriving at about 6:45pm, we were told by the friendly doorman that it would be up to an hour wait, which, lubricated by if-not-great-then-not-horrible dry martinis in the small terrace out the front, actually went by fairly quickly. I probably shouldn't have looked too closely at the barman's mixing method though; it wasn't so much the fact he chilled the glasses by dumping in then discarding handfuls of ice and soda water - this happens a lot in places short on freezer space - but he then crafted a lemon twist by taking a pre-cut wedge of lemon and ferociously scooping out the flesh from the inside, the end product looking like something fished out from the bins at a tequila bar. It was such a difficult job though and he had taken so long doing it, I didn't really have the heart to say anything.
Before we knew it, the little remote pager thing they'd given us started bleeping and flashing and shaking quite insistently, and we were led inside to a tiny table beneath the bar. The menus were huge, laminated and depressingly familiar in that International American Chain kind of way - think TGI Friday's or Tony Romas - and the first scintilla of doubt had begun to set in, but we'd waited long enough by now and weren't about to go anywhere else, so ordered the LEGENDARY 10 OZ. BURGER and a rack of hickory smoked ribs.
I'll tell you about the ribs first, and briefly, because I've just had my lunch and want to keep it down. Over-marinated, overcooked to oblivion and drowned in a fiercely sweet and vinegar-sharp sauce, they were that rare combination of tasteless and over seasoned, like someone had dunked the Yellow Pages in a bucket of Tesco Value BBQ Sauce. The meat was cardboardy and stringy, of desperately poor quality with no pork flavour whatsoever, and came with an even more hideous side order of what I can only describe as "sugared bean paste". Chips were frozen but if I'm being perfectly honest not completely inedible, and coleslaw was OK, but this was not a pleasant plate of food. It cost SEVENTEEN POUNDS.
And then we have the "LEGENDARY" burger. In many ways of course, being literally the worst burger I've ever eaten in my life, its legend will definitely live on. Where do I start? Perhaps with the onion rings, and a breadcrumb casing that shattered at the slightest touch and left you to fight with a slimy grey tapeworm of chewy onion inside; or perhaps with the buns which were splintered and desiccated, as flavourless and insubstantial as polyester sofa cushion filling. But no, let's talk about the meat itself - grey, crumbly and bitter thanks to disastrous overcooking, accompanied by a square of salty carbon I can only guess had once been streaky bacon, and yet topped incredibly with a sheet of largely cold - and uncooked - cheap cheddar. You have to admire their technique, to produce a beef (presumably) patty so cremated it was like eating coal and yet somehow present it with a rigid slice of cold cheese - the timing involved must have taken years to perfect. It cost FIFTEEN POUNDS.
So, as you might be hoping, we complained. And very shortly the manager - a smart young woman in black trousers (and not the joke-shop "sexy nurse" outfits that the more junior members of staff are forced to wear) turned up. I'm not the best complainer, I tend to get very nervous and worry I might offend someone, but as politely as I could I explained about the overcooked burger and the woody ribs and wondered what the story was. The ribs, we were assured, were bought in raw and smoked in their own smokehouse(!!) in a dry rub marinade for 24 hours, before being finished on the grill and doused in the sauce. We must, of course, give them the benefit of the doubt, and I have no reason to believe she was fibbing on this point at least, but we were still aghast - how could they go to all that effort, their own smoke house for heaven's sake, and end up with something so poor? They could have bought in some Brakes Bros budget cuts and achieved the same effect. On the burger, she was more defensive.
"You should have told your waitress you wanted it more medium."
My heartbeat increased. "She didn't ask!"
"Your waitress tells me she came over and asked you how everything was and you said it was fine."
That was a complete lie. I looked over towards my friend, who was pale with rage. "No, she didn't. In fact we haven't seen her between when she brought the food and now - we had to flag someone else down to complain."
"Well perhaps it just wasn't to your taste."
They'd tried defence, now they were trying condescension. Great.
"This is not just a matter of taste. That burger was burned, and the ribs were horrible."
But we weren't getting anywhere, and by now we were feeling so wound up by the manager's attitude we just wanted to cut and run. She did, as a conciliatory gesture, offer free drinks, but we were definitely not in the mood to hang around and I suggested could she take a round of drinks we'd already had off the bill? "No, we can't do that." Of course. We paid up, £30 each for one of the most miserable experiences in a restaurant I can remember, and left.
When I got back home, emotionally drained and shell-shocked from the evening's events, I loaded up the Hard Rock Cafe's entry on various different aggregate review sites to see if others had had as bad a time as us. It was somewhat of a relief to find that, by and large, they had, but amongst the various 1/10, 2/10 and 3/10 star reviews one in particular caught my eye, a 10/10 score from a name matching the initial PR invite all those weeks back. It's gone now - the as-ever switched-on guys at London Eating have quite rightly taken it down - but I don't know which is more laughable, the idea that someone in PR would use their own real name to shill a client on a review site, or that anyone would ever consider the dross churned out at the Hard Rock Cafe worth shouting about at all. But then, perhaps that's how it survives. It's a vacuous, sneering noise of a place, the worst kind of corporate gastro-swindle, and yet with enough money pumped into falsifying reviews, unfortunate punters will just keep on turning up. Hard Rock Cafe have obviously long since decided, why go to the effort of being good, when some well-placed propaganda will do the job just as well?
Annoyingly, given the events that were to follow, Degò took quite a bit of finding. Although the address was given as 4 Great Portland Street on the website and on Google, it was only after systematically counting all the buildings up from Oxford Circus that we eventually noticed it tucked down a side street on Market Place. From the outside it looked smart enough, busy and with attractive high ceilings, although you'd be doing well to find a wine bar a few steps away from Oxford Circus that wasn't rammed on a Thursday night. Popularity, as anyone who's ever eaten at Aberdeen Angus will tell you, is no reliable sign of quality, and the meal we endured at this restaurant last night is as fine an example of this rule as almost anywhere else in the capital.
The first and only sensible thing we did last night was order a bottle of prosecco. This was all anyone else seemed to be doing, and very happy they all looked as a result, despite the slightly cheap and uncomfortable red and black décor that was probably aiming for L'Atelier de Joel Robuchon but felt rather more like a provincial nightclub. Anyway, our prosecco (a 2006 Franciacorta Brut if anyone cares) was very nice, and although it's a bit naff the geek in me liked the hole in the table they'd hollowed out for an ice bucket. It's just a shame that before too long I was thinking of less sanitary ways of using it.
"Our bread is homemade and baked daily," the waitress announced unprompted as she placed the tray in front of us. If it is, they either have an unearthly attitude to what constitutes a "day", or they consider "baking at some indeterminate point in the past and then reheating" technically the same thing. It was all horribly stale - the buns were chewy and tasteless, the breadsticks as fragile as thousand year old bones, and worst of all was the Foccacia, which was so dry and crumbly it pretty much collapsed into dust in my hands as I tried to pick it up. They were all so bad in fact that, breaking with my usual tradition, at the end of the meal I mentioned it to the same waitress, who while looking genuinely surprised didn't offer much more than a muttered apology in way of compensation.
I'm not sure how "Italian Style" these Tramezzini are, although I should say in fairness that my companion last night, who spent many years in part of the world, tells me that even back in Italy they are generally just straightforward thin-white-slices with ham and mayonnaise inside, and to that end, they were probably not far off. That's not to say I particularly enjoyed them, though. A heavy hand with the mayo meant they all just tasted like something from the shelves at Pret, and bizarrely, every other slice of bread seemed to be stale. Why every other? Had they been made a while ago and stored one side up, uncovered? Perhaps I'd rather not know.
You could have constructed a better cheese course, and for less money, by "sourcing" from ASDA. A blue goats was bitter and unpleasant, something claiming to be Robiola was cold and bland, and a lump of something that I missed the name of tasted like supermarket cheddar. A jam-like substance on a spoon was just formless, sugary gloop, and a separate tray of sliced meats was better but still deeply unadventurous - mortadella, Parma ham, and something more fatty which would have been nicer had they trimmed the inedibly solid skin off it. One of them was also ever so slightly fizzy in the mouth which was a bit worrying - I'm still here this morning though so it was just unpleasant, not actually physically damaging. Phew, right?
If all that wasn't bad enough, two items from the restaurant menu downstairs appeared that, earlier in the meal, we had ordered with the kind of mindless optimism only possessed of those who have not yet eaten at Dego. The first called itself a burrata, but this was as far from the heavenly, creamy version at Polpetto as you could possibly imagine. A rubbery prophylactic of cheap mozzarella contained semi-skimmed ejaculate which squirted out belligerently as I prodded it with my fork. It sat on a bed of tasteless chunks of tomato and was garnished with some soggy, fatty deep-fried vegetables of unknown origin and some ludicrously elephantine ears of stale crispbread. And yet, unbelievably, worse was yet to come.
It's difficult to describe just how rancid this dish of braised octopus smelled, but try and imagine a tin of tuna in brine, opened, left for a week, then eaten and expelled by a cat with Crohn's disease. It was revolting, and I was convinced it was off, but startlingly my companion claimed it was "fine" and to stop being such a pansy. I couldn't help noticing, though, that while I refused to touch it at all, she barely took more than a couple of mouthfuls before queasily declaring herself "full". Talking of pansies, you will have noticed the restaurant's entry to next year's Chelsea Flower Show in the picture above. I don't mind the odd teeny edible flower but I draw the line at being asked to eat a herbaceous border.
So not a great success, then. I should have known, when in that busy room on a Thursday night I noticed that we were the only people ordering food, that perhaps Degò's strengths lay in a different field, but quite how low the standards dropped was a constant source of morbid fascination throughout the evening. By the time I held aloft that sad, grey sack of mozzarella on the end of my fork and watched it drip thin fluid into the bowl, I was merely nauseous. After the arrival of the Fishy Pansy, I was hysterical. "At least," I remember thinking, as our pleasant waitress took back the barely-touched food, "the service has been nice", but Degò couldn't even leave me that scrap of comfort. The bill arrived, £80 for two bad enough, but with 12.5% service added and a space to add an extra tip. And with that left any last scrap of goodwill I ever had towards the place.
