Wasted Calories and Ruined Nights

by Jay Rayner

  I said: ‘But I’m fifty-one.’

  They said: ‘No exceptions.’

  After all that effort, we had to go. It’s on a side street. You’ll know it by the cordoned-off queue, waiting to be taken through a metal detector, for their ID to be scanned and their faces photographed. I also got frisked. I can’t lie. If there’s one thing that really encourages the appetite, it’s being felt up by a total stranger with meaty hands. Apparently, all of this is a requirement under a late licence from Westminster council – though why anyone would willingly run a business that involves setting up what feels like a small Eastern European state at the height of the Cold War beats me.

  Down the stairs, past the cloakroom – £2 an item – and you’re into a nightclub space with video walls of exploding fireworks, back-lit bars and a low stage with two baby grand-shaped digital pianos, attended by two young chaps fondly murdering Adele’s back catalogue. We are shown to our table, graced by two champagne flutes. But this being under Westminster council’s licensing laws, they are crafted from beautifully moulded plastic. Likewise, when we order a bottle of wine it arrives pre-decanted into a plastic carafe that has gone that cloudy colour from a few too many runs through the dishwasher.

  The plastic flutes are filled with cheap prosecco. This is part of the deal. Or as the T&Cs put it: ‘Each of your guests is required to have our set menu, which includes two small cones, two large cones, a side cone, dessert and a glass of prosecco for £25.’ So, it’s less dinner, and more of a contraflow on the A1 just past Scotch Corner.

  We’ll come back to that food. I have to talk about it, to ease the pain more than anything else. But it would be utterly disingenuous of me to continue like this without getting to the nub of it, which is to say: Studio 88 is brilliant. I’d go back in a heartbeat. Yes, getting into the place is a Kafkaesque nightmare. And yes, the food is that killer combination of appalling ideas and dreadful execution. But at 8 p.m., those two pianists are joined on stage by a gang of other musicians to form one of the tightest house bands I’ve seen in years. And I’ve just come back from New Orleans, where every damn bar has one.

  Armed with the GuitarTabs app, and a serious repertoire, they took requests and executed each one with wit and precision. Sometimes it required whichever pianist was leading the band to call the chord changes through the song, but they didn’t break sweat. From Stevie Wonder to Chaka Khan, ‘Uptown Funk’ to ‘Valerie’, Queen to Macy Gray, they killed it. And credit, too, to the management, which clearly recognises that musicians like this cannot be flogged to death. Four pianists worked the keys when we were there, in shifts.

  Likewise, the service is terrific. Managing table service cheerfully when 80 per cent of the room is on their feet dancing, as they were from about 8.10 p.m., is not easy. This lot managed it with grace and professionalism. What’s more, they had to do so in the face of adversity, which is to say, the notion that putting food in paper cones, placed in spindly holders, is a good one. It isn’t. Each time they served us with a cone they made a point of putting it directly into our hands.

  It took me a while to work out why. If they put them on the table they would invariably fall over, as the only one they placed down did, spilling its contents. Sadly, they replaced it, which meant we got to try their take on salmon tartare. It involved avocado, olives, currants, coconut and despair. Mine. If someone had made this for me at 3 a.m. from what was lurking at the back of the fridge, I’d have understood. But to pay someone to do it seemed to me like a terrible error of judgement.

  What’s amazing is that it wasn’t the worst thing we were served. There was the sticky, gelatinous vegetable summer roll in its coagulating rice dough overcoat, which my companion said felt like ‘holding a flaccid penis’. (There are certain things that, once said, cannot be unsaid.) There was a cone full of quinoa gravel, burying the tiniest fragments of meat, which the menu told me was miso-glazed pork with black beans and spicy coconut yogurt. Without that seemingly random assemblage of words, I wouldn’t have known. It was a debris through which you had to pick in search of survivors. Sadly, there weren’t any.

  Crab croquettes were mostly potato and had a ‘Mum’s gone to Iceland because she hates me’ quality. They were served completely tepid, which is unsurprising given they were in a paper cone. The worst of these tepid dishes was an extra sharing platter of dim sum at a shocking £20, which reminded me of those sold in a well-known Asian supermarket chain. They’d been allowed to cool and coagulate until they were stuck to the slate they had been served on. Maybe they were trying to save us from eating them. We pushed the slate aside and leapt up to dance to ‘Don’t Stop Me Now’.

  I know what you’re thinking: what exactly did I expect? It’s a dance bar off Leicester Square. Of course the food is going to be a disaster of a calamity of a travesty. Except that my experience at Albert’s Schloss in Manchester recently taught me never to make assumptions. There, the superb live music was matched by the cracking food. Why shouldn’t Studio 88 be the same? Surely it’s in my favour that I travel so damn hopefully.

  None of this lousy cooking detracts from the things Studio 88 does well. The band are superb. The staff are great. I really would go back. Just don’t make me eat anything.

  What happened next: Within days of the review’s publication I was emailed by Alan Lorrimer, who owns Studio 88. He told me he had enjoyed reading the review and went on to say he totally agreed with me about the licensing terms they had inherited. It was clearly driving him nuts, but there was little he could do about it. The dance bar is extremely popular, especially at weekends. For now, the ‘cones’ menu remains in place, though Lorrimer said he was reviewing the situation.

  Circus

  London, 26 June 2011

  *

  We had been at Circus a short while and had only just received our food – I use the term loosely – when a young woman in black bra, hot pants and fishnets came and danced by our table, with flames burning upon copper dishes laid upon her upheld palms. If only she’d tripped and set fire to the curtains. Apart from the fact that we might briefly have been able to glimpse what was on our plates through the Stygian gloom – what exactly were these ingredients, and what had they died of? – it would have brought the evening to an early close, which would have been a relief all round.

  To be honest I was predisposed to hate Circus before a single piece of food had arrived. Then again sometimes taking an instant dislike to something can save time. It wasn’t just that they did not return my phone call requesting a table – I’m waiting still – or that, booking online, they demanded a credit-card number. There was also the less-than-charming announcement as we arrived that we had to give the table back in two hours. Maybe the receptionists had tried the food and were trying to be kind.

  It is not the concept of Circus I dislike. Dinner and a show is a great idea. You just have to do both bits well; here neither part of the equation works. This is not to reflect badly upon the performers, who give it their all, or would do if they were given enough time and space in which to do so. But Circus is a messy compromise, built around the need to keep moving the punters in and out, to keep hosing them down with over-sugary cocktails – think type 2 diabetes in a glass – and pelting them with over-priced platefuls of what might make great props in a freak show but, here, pass for main courses. The room is simply too small for the promise of the name to be realised.

  During our meal, there was a chap who dangled gymnastically from a fold of cloth above the wide central table which doubles as a stage, while trying to keep his feet out of the salads, followed by the dancing girls with the flaming palms. There was also a woman who stripped rather briskly down to polka-dot pants and bra before removing the latter to reveal tasselled nipples. My companion had to take my word on this. A waiter obscured her view, while delivering main courses nobody could possibly have wanted. ‘Look,’ my friend said, ‘if someone’s going to get their kit off the least she deserves is people being able to see.’
The upside of the four-minute performances is that when they start, shutters come down on the kitchen hatches, meaning that for a while no food can be delivered.

  Ah yes, the food. Sticky concoctions, summoned from the gates of hell, or the kitchen, whichever is closer. It’s the kind of thing you’d get at a Harvester, only with less subtlety and more cynicism. A sharing plate to start brought crappy deep-fried squid, really crappy chicken satay skewers with a sauce that made the word ‘suppurate’ dance across my mind, a truly crappy hoisin duck salad, which amounted to hard, dry bits of meat hiding in a hedge, and astonishingly crappy deep-fried beef pasties. They used the word ‘empañadas’ to describe these; I would use words that aren’t allowed in a family newspaper.

  The main courses both cost me around £23 and my innocence. Hard, dry duck confit laid on overcooked peas and mint in a sickly-sweet Thai red curry sauce isn’t just a bad idea or bad cooking. It’s also really bad manners. Large scallops and prawns were grotesquely over-seasoned and served with a saffron and sour cream sauce that had the authentic tang of something with which you’d clean a bathroom sink in an attempt to hide bad smells. With the side dish of jalapeño onion rings, we were back thinking about a Harvester and wishing we’d gone to one of those instead.

  On the grounds that we’d suffered and spent enough, we decided to forgo dessert. In any case our time slot was up, though our waitress invited us to wait and watch the next act, a camp Elvis impersonator with lots of gold hula hoops, bigging up the gay subtext to ‘Jailhouse Rock’. He was good. And that’s what is most depressing about the whole business. The staff really are doing their damnedest. They are giving it their all. They are friendly and charming and attentive. And they are also completely and utterly wasted.

  What happened next: The sickly-sweet, quasi American menu has been entirely replaced by a Pan-Asian affair, with emphasis on Japan – think sushi, sashimi and gyoza – overseen by an experienced executive chef called Andrew Lassetter. Circus has traded very happily since this review, and has overwhelmingly positive customer feedback on both Time Out London and Google.

  2

  Lost at Sea

  Lands End at Sunborn

  Royal Victoria Dock, London, 1 March 2015

  *

  In naming this week’s restaurant Lands End, the operators of Sunborn London, the superyacht hotel which houses it, were almost right. It is indeed the end, though not of land. It is the end of hope, of good taste, of ingredients which deserved so much better. Generally, bad places have a redeeming feature or two: a dish that passed muster, a sauce that made sense. The meal served aboard the Sunborn was remarkable for having not a single one. That old gag about stopping for chips on the way home? It is no longer a gag. That’s exactly what I did. There was a burger, too. I was hungry.

  Some will regard this as a cheap shot. We all know you shouldn’t eat in restaurants that boast about the view, that rotate, or sit on water. It will never be about the food. It will always be about the view or the rotating or the water. But this one looked different. From the outside the Sunborn, moored by the ExCeL exhibition centre in east London, looks like a gargantuan torpedo; it is every high-end, high-polished white kitchen appliance you’ve ever perved over, its lights twinkling prettily off the oily waters of the Thames. It’s a greased Kanye West music video waiting to happen. Who wouldn’t want a go on that?

  And then there was the menu. It wasn’t poetry, but it had a pleasing narrative thrust. It mentioned coriander shoots and salt-baked beetroot. There were porcini ravioli with the beef cheek and cornichons with the duck rillettes. It listed enthusiastic prices: starters at £12, mains at £25 or even £30. If they were charging that sort of money it should at least be adequate? Adequate, aboard a superyacht that looked like the setting for a Kanye West video, could be loads of fun. Couldn’t it? In this I am an idiot; a sweet and trusting one, but an idiot all the same. Mind you, my failings are as nothing against theirs.

  We embark via a lift that opens from the quay. It takes us up two floors and back thirty-two years to 1983, when all metalwork was fake gold, all staircases swirled upwards in big curves, glass panels were etched with images of ferns and carpets looked like someone had thrown up on them. It looks like late Elizabeth Taylor realised as interior design.

  Up those stairs is a reception desk, above which a faulty light bulb flickers in a way news anchors have to warn epileptics about before screening reports containing flash photography. Beyond that lies a dining room that makes the foyer look classy and subtle. Almost everything here is clad in shiny brass-coloured planks, including the ceiling. I like my own image as much as the next narcissist but this is ridiculous: it means the terrible time I am about to have will be reflected back at me from every surface. The waiters, who for the most part do a valiant job in terrible circumstances, wear name badges, unreadable in the shimmering gloom. For this they should give thanks.

  And so it begins. A bottle of water is warm. Bread rolls look like they arrived in the kitchen part baked, and in need only of finishing – in which case the kitchen failed at their one job. They are undercooked. Garlic butter tastes old and slightly rancid. No matter, there will be starters. Eventually. The only thing that can make bad food worse is being forced to wait for it. We have enough time in which to all but finish a bottle of Albarino, one that can be found on wine lists all over London at no more than £30 and here costs £39.

  The alcohol doesn’t blunt the pain. A black pudding cake, looking like an emotionally neglected hockey puck, arrives under a glass cloche. It is removed and a moat of gluey chive and mustard velouté is poured on. To say it tastes watery is an insult to a chilled glass of water (something they cannot manage here). It is a sludge of nothing. The black pudding cake is hard and compacted and tastes mostly of salt. It is carelessness and disregard, fashioned out of wasted calories. Citrus-cured salmon gravadlax with daikon, pickled cucumber, watercress and yuzu, brings half a dozen small cubes of salmon that taste of malt vinegar, and an £11 addition to the bill.

  The half-eaten plates are cleared. We are not asked why they are half-eaten. That would be intruding on private grief. Time stretches out, restlessly. We are brought warm glasses of pinot grigio to apologise for the long wait. By now the main courses feel less like a promise than a threat. It turns out not to be an empty one.

  The thinnest piece of turbot arrives so over-cooked it crumbles on to dry, distressed borlotti beans. There are tangles of chewy meat which the menu says are bits of ham hock, and more of the rancid butter from a beurre noisette that has solidified on the plate. It’s a dish in need of antidepressants. Arguably, my beef cheek is worse. It is hard and solid. It looks like a growth of the sort that might feature on a Channel 5 programme about embarrassing medical conditions. The tumour sweats under a blanket of sticky, over-reduced sauce that has the brutal hit of Marmite. Porcini ravioli are undercooked, leaving the pasta hard. A side dish of sautéed mushrooms tastes of raw garlic, salt and hypertension.

  This food isn’t just poor compared, say, to a roast swan I had the other week. It isn’t me being snooty and prissy and overly demanding. It is a blistering display of incompetence; of cack-handedness and cynicism and bad taste. My companion asks if we have to stay for dessert and I agree that we don’t. Even utter perfection fashioned from salted caramel could not save this evening. Over barely touched plates I ask for the bill. Our waitress notices the debris. She asks if there is something wrong with the food. I give it to her straight. Something wrong? Nothing is right. She comps the bottle of wine.

  Outside, a perfect evening is capped by threats of casual violence from a man who accosts us with stories of having been arrested and who now wants money. We shake him off and get into a cab. I give the driver directions to the burger place we need; and with relief, we head towards a place where I know the food will not hurt us.

  What happened next: Not much, to be fair. The menu has changed very little, and currently includes a 6oz fillet steak for £36. The various cu
stomer review sites all award it four out of five stars. That said, in September 2017 the Daily Mail sent their self-styled anonymous ‘Inspector’ to give it the once over. He criticised the prices, the ‘faux poshness’, the slow service and awarded it one star out of five.

  The Red Duster

  Isle of Wight, 23 September 2012

  *

  Words never fail me, but occasionally the will does. Sometimes when dinner has let me down, I close my eyes and try to find my happy place, the one with all the food that makes sense in it. For a few days after eating at the Red Duster in Cowes I struggled with how I was going to write about it. I considered bigging it up as a work of postmodern genius, a culinary game to rank alongside the moment in Mike Leigh’s film Life Is Sweet when budding chef Timothy Spall declares his new menu will include black pudding and Camembert soup, liver in lager and pork cyst. I quickly realised that would be tiresome. Anyway, the kitchen at the Red Duster thinks it’s OK to sauté potatoes in Marmite. In the face of that, whimsy and satire scribble a despondent letter of resignation, and leg it.

  The Red Duster looks like a cross between a bordello and a Torquay guest house. There are fountains of red napkin exploding from the glassware, church pews to perch on and on the walls, paper embossed with a leaf pattern in scarlet. No need to look at that for too long, for the menu descriptions are there to distract you. I especially liked the cannelloni made with ‘basil-enthused pasta’. How does one enthuse pasta exactly? Do the chefs run around the kitchen tickling the dough with fronds of the stuff, shouting: ‘Cheer up, mate, it might never happen’?