Heard of the Cassia Oriental? Perhaps not. Have you heard of China Jazz, then? No to that one, too. Ah well, never mind. I mention China Jazz because that was the former name of Cassia Oriental.
China Jazz opened last year with a good deal of hype and at a cost of at least £3 million. At least, we were told it was £3 million, although apparently the then owners couldn't get an air-conditioning system that worked, which was something of a disadvantage in a restaurant that was supposed to be ushering in a new era of glamorous Chinese fine dining and dancing. Sadly, the fine diners and dancers didn't cotton on to this splendid concept, and China Jazz went down the Swanee. A few months later, Cassia Oriental arose from the ashes of receivership with a different owner, different concept and different food. And, having missed China Jazz's brief meteoric course across the horizon, it was to the Cassia Oriental that I went with Madame Feng Shui for dinner.
I'm not sure how much of the original is left, but the whole thing is a sizeable operation, with a large bar for drinking, a sushi bar for raw fish and a dining room that will take around 100-plus, all quite flash in a dun-coloured kind of way. It has something of an upmarket spankers' den about it.
I'm not sure who was in charge or, indeed, if there was anyone in charge given the headless nature of the service. Even so it takes a peculiar kind of genius to place a table of two next to a table of eight in a room where there were scarcely any other diners. Actually, the table of eight weren't diners in the strict sense of the word, because they didn't eat. They drank and talked - loudly and incessantly. I have nothing against other people having a good time. I have nothing against people with voices that you could hear with absolute clarity from the other side of Wembley on Cup Final day. I just don't want to sit next to them. Madame Feng Shui or I would get halfway through a sentence and then lose the thread as the vocal equivalent of a chainsaw sliced into our thought processes. That kind of thing tends to put me on edge, and makes me look with a beadier eye at the fuller experience.
The menu has something of the bazaar about it. Bizarre as well as bazaar, I should say. There is a bit of China, a bit of Vietnam, a bit of Thailand and a bit of Japan. The bits weren't fused together. They were pretty much unreconstructed and pretty much a disgusting mess. It didn't help that I ordered the Vegetarian Oriental Combination and got the Cassia Oriental Combination of Thai fishcakes (greasy rubber), agedashi tofu (slime), mashed prawns on sugar cane (a taste-free zone) and crispy smoked chicken (chewy chips of stale fat).
That set me up for a second course of Tom Yam Goong - "THE REAL THING! Thai prawn soup with prawns, squid, mussels flavoured with lemon grass and fresh basil", as the menu had it. It made me question the nature of reality at Cassia Oriental. It was the nearest thing to industrial effluent that I have attempted to eat in years. Although there was a generous number of prawns, scallops instead of mussels and a piece of old flannel that might have been squid once upon a time, this dish left my mouth seared as if by cleansing fluid.
Madame Feng Shui didn't do much better with Peking duck. She is something of an expert on Chinese cookery, and by the time she had run through the deficiencies of this version - cooked wrongly, cut up wrongly, cold, leatherette pancakes - there didn't appear to be anything right with it, except that it was undeniably duck. Actually, she didn't get much to eat at all, because her beef teppanyaki wrap ("pan-fried thin slices of sirloin beef rolled with garlic and enoki mushrooms garnished with asparagus and served in a teryaki sauce") that came next proved to be nigh on inedible: the slices of beef were thin all right, and fibrous like damp linen, and they were wrapped around bundles of rubbery enokis, but that wisp, that hint, that vestigial shadow of taste defied analysis. Then I remembered the skin on a pan of hot milk. That was it. But it wasn't enough for poor Madame Feng Shui. After poking at this travesty for a few minutes, she gave up the struggle and waited for me to finish my slow-roasted oxtail with white radish mouli in a sesame, bean and soya sauce.
Well, I don't know about the sesame. The sauce tasted pretty strongly of star anise to me, not that that's a bad thing. The oxtail had been cooked to a point that it was almost edible, although the overall notion of long cooking was slightly undone by the chunks of virtually raw pepper. But considering what else we had had to contend with, this was positively a triumph.
By this time the raucous braying from the next table was being given stiff opposition by what appeared to be a karaoke session at the bar, unseen figures serenading each other in sounds not unlike those of mating seals. By this time, we'd had enough. I paid £65.30, which included a bottle of something red and American at £19 from a curiously likeable list, and we left with what dignity we could muster. I'd have paid five times the sum not to have endured the evening in the first place. But after a few weeks of living pretty high on the hog, it's as well to be reminded that there is another world out there. I would avoid it, if I were you.
