Telephone: 020 7368 3993
Address: Babylon, The Roof Gardens, 99 Kensington High Street, London W8.
Dinner for two, including wine and service, £130.
There were many incidents during our meal at Richard Branson's new restaurant Babylon which could sum up its awe-inspiring awfulness, but there is one that stands head and shoulders above the rest: the moment when the waiters more or less announced to the table next to ours that the chicken sausage they were serving them resembled a severed penis on a plate.
Be patient, my children. We shall come back to it presently. For now you should know that Babylon sits amid one-and-a-half acres of roof gardens laid out 100ft above Kensington High Street. They were established in the 1930s and, since 1981, have been owned by Branson who has run a members' club there for many years. Presumably the restaurant is called Babylon after the legendary hanging gardens. If so, it is unfortunately apt: spend too long here eating the crass food at ludicrous prices and you may well find yourself glancing upwards in search of somewhere to hitch a noose so as to make a quick, if rather final, exit.
The room is long and narrow and looks out over a decked terrace. Beyond that are the pretty gardens, and next comes the clutter of west London. Sitting on the deck are big pots of herbs which, the literature informs us, the kitchen actually uses. This seems like a very bad idea, although, having eaten what comes out of that kitchen, not a surprising one. Would you really like to eat herbs that have grown sturdy on an atmosphere ripe in the capital's sooty pathogens? No, neither would I.
The service, which is a catch-all phrase rather than an accurate description, is performed by a rabble of scrubbed young people in oversized Nehru jackets who look like they have wandered into a summer job for which they know they have no qualifications. Few things happened unprompted. It took an age to get shown from the bar to our table, to get a wine list, to be able even to order food. Perhaps, unconsciously, they were trying to protect us.
From a menu which could either be called eclectic or splatter gun, depending on your mood, Pat ordered a Stilton soufflé to start. It should get a nod as the one workmanlike savoury dish to grace our table. The pungent soufflé came in the form of a cake, but was crisp outside and soft within. My starter, seared scallops on a butternut squash laksa [sic], was a disaster. The three meagre and over-salted scallops, for £10.50, had not so much been seared as incinerated. They could have been used as hockey pucks, as long as the players were wearing protective head gear. As to the 'laksa', it was nothing of the sort. The word means noodle and refers now to a group of noodle-based soups. This was just a slick of something overly sweet and overly spiced.
Still, at least we didn't order the corn-fed chicken sausage, unlike the table next to us which happened to be occupied by people we knew. As the waiter plonked it down he said, 'I have to tell you, it's never looked like this before.' We all went over to have a gander. 'I told the chef we can't send this out,' the waiter went on, 'but he said it was fine.' Something grey and thoroughly penile (if uncircumcised) lay across the plate. Other waiters craned over the table to have a look. It was clearly now the talk of the staff as they made their way towards us: 'Have you seen the penis on table seven? Really, you must go over and have a look. Penis on table seven. Penis on table seven.' Its recipient said later that it was tough and gristly. No, honestly. She did.
Unfortunately, we were called back to our own table by our main courses. Pat had ordered the Angus Scotch beef fillet at £21.50. It was an appalling piece of meat: distinctly tough and distinctly untrimmed. As to the advertised port sauce, it was viciously acidic, leaving one to question which polluted port - Tilbury? Rotterdam? Odessa? - it had been distilled from. The dauphinoise potatoes were fine. Thank God.
I had ordered the roast rack of lamb. It came with a caramelised sweetbread, which had gone the same way as the hockey puck scallops, and what was described as a 'hay sauce'. Indeed, I ordered it specifically because I thought it my duty to find out what a sauce based on old, dead grass tasted like. The lamb was pink, as ordered. Unfortunately, I allowed them to pour the sauce all over it. It was based on a lamb stock and had been strained, I was told, through the hay. I admire the imagination that conceived the idea. I even admire the practical skill with which what I presume was the desired result was achieved.
But it should never have been allowed out of the kitchen. It tasted of sweaty horsebox. Pat, who had long ago given up on her beef, tried some. 'I'm tasting farmyard,' she said. 'And that makes me think of dung.' I agreed.
The wine we ordered, a good sturdy Argentinean Malbec, managed to take some of the taste away, but also managed to leave another nasty taste all of its own. It retails at £5.49, which means the restaurant bought it for less. Here it was priced at £24.75 to £27.85 with the 'optional' service charge - an outrageous mark-up of no less than 500 per cent.
Is there any reason for going to Babylon? Only the novelty value of the toilets, which boast a void beneath the mirror over the sink, thus linking the men's and women's loos. It means both sexes use the same stone sink. It also means that, should they wish to, women can stoop down and watch the men peeing at the urinals over on the other side.
It's not much of a thrill but, at Babylon, it's the best on offer.
Contact Jay Rayner on jay.rayner@observer.co.uk.
