Cocoon
65 Regent Street, London W1 (020 7494 7600).
Lunch for two, including wine and service, £110
Cocoon feels like it was specifically designed with me in my mind. Specifically designed so I would hate it. Let's create the kind of place Rayner would loathe, they might have said to each other. There has to be a market for that. And so it has proved. On the night we went, this long, curving room on a first floor overlooking London's Regent Street was heaving with lipstick-slicked women wearing berets at a jaunty angle and men in mid-thigh jackets. Some of the men even had ponytails. How I regretted leaving the cattle prod at home.
Listing all the things I hated about Cocoon might seem indulgent, but hey, that's the kind of guy I am. So: I hated the thumping music; I hated the wispy flounces of net hanging floor-to-ceiling which, like shower curtains, reached out to grab you; I hated the ceiling centrepieces of red ruched fabric pushed into a central hole, which looked like cat's arses; I hated the clipboard hardman at the front door, and the bar area with its crumb-crusted seats and the floor walkers with their earpieces who ran around like headless chickens when we tried to get shown to our table.
But most of all I hated the food. Like so many places in London this year, it is pan-Asian. It therefore says things like 'The tastes we prepare have no prescribed order' and 'We are here to guide you towards following your own path', quotes from the Bumper Book of Over-conceptualised Restaurant Bollocks. The menu is cluttered and fiendishly difficult to read in the moody half-light and includes sections covering Japan, China and Thailand. I like eating the food of all those places, but not at the same time and certainly not when it's done with so little accomplishment. Why eat bad Thai food here when you can eat it so much better across the street? Why eat lousy Japanese here when you can get the real thing round the corner?
Even the good stuff didn't make an argument for the place. A basket of very fresh steamed mixed dim sum at an ambitious £12.50 showed there is someone in the kitchen who knows what they are doing. The scallop shumai and Chinese chive dumplings had a real clarity of flavour. We also liked a hybrid salad of seared beef, with very tender meat and a good selection of leaves, but £10 seemed to be pushing it.
The rest was lacklustre. Nigiri sushi, around £6 for two pieces, was very average. Salt and pepper pork had a soggy batter which suggested it had hung about in the kitchen. Pad Thai, £7.50 worth of it, was watery and bland. Baby spinach steamed with garlic was under-seasoned. And a Japanese-style foie gras roll with a slick of sour but flavourless plum compote was one of the nastiest things I have eaten in a very long time. The pËtË needs to be partnered with crunch - brioche, toast - not the mush of rice.
All of this is irrelevant, of course, because nobody who comes to Cocoon comes for the food. They come for the scene and to be seen. They come to hang their nimble legs off the bar stools and to sip overly flavoured Martinis in such number that, by the time they get to the table, you could serve them one of Charlie Chaplin's old boots and they would be happy. Slap them with a bill for over a ton and they would still hug themselves with pleasure. Cocoon? Personally, I think they should have stopped at the first syllable of the name. They would have had it about right.
