171-173, Bermondsey Street, London SE1 (020 7357 6082) Dinner for two, including wine and service, £120
The first contact I had with Village East was a press release. It was printed on a linen napkin, with the address along the outer edges, so that you had to run the corners through your fingers to work out where it was. I got so frustrated I eventually chucked the thing against the wall, still none the wiser. What were they thinking? If we send them press releases on napkins they'll decide we're ... what? Cotton fetishists? The next missive, thankfully printed on paper, revealed the cooking to be 'modern eclectic', one of those phrases which again has me reaching for stuff to chuck. I translated this as meaning: 'the chef has learnt a whole bunch of dishes and wants to cook all of them no matter how little sense they make together'.
And so it proved, though in truth I eventually decided to go there precisely because of that chef's experience. Martin Caws was once sous chef to Marco Pierre White when he had three stars at the Hyde Park Hotel. He was head chef at the Mirabelle and then at the Balham Bar and Grill, about which I had heard good things. Perhaps he was the kind of chap who could pull off a mishmash of a menu.
Village East sits in the kind of narrow lane in Bermondsey, south London, where people used to go for a good mugging in the days before the hip design consultancies moved in and ruined all the fun. Now all the muggings involve a menu, a chip-and-pin machine and a credit card. The restaurant space itself could be called modern eclectic, but in a good way. It has a number of levels and spaces - bar at the front, dining room at the back - and is moodily made up of different materials: bare brick, a bit of polished concrete, rough-hewn wooden pillars and a shiny, low-ceilinged, open kitchen.
Around this moves a collection of sweet, friendly and rather clueless waiters. Bread turned up after the food and, when it did, was stale. Water, though ordered, didn't turn up at all until we reminded them. And, naturally, everybody who passed kept trying to pour our wine, regardless of how many times we told them not to. (Warning: I will soon start slapping hands.)
The food, as we know, is modern eclectic, which this year means unexpected outbreaks of wasabi and yuzu, as in a starter of ceviche of sea scallops with pickled cauliflower and yuzu juice. For a shade over £8 this was 2.5 uncooked scallops sliced in half to look like five, then drenched in a sauce with a faintly medicinal back taste. It wasn't nice. A pleasant deep-fried courgette flower stuffed with goat's cheese came with some completely unnecessary Japanese cress and discs of tasteless tomato. Most successful was a mound of well-seasoned confit rabbit (which, as it was being served cold and in shreds, I would have called a rillette, though only to be a smarty-pants) with a smooth celeriac puree, ribbons of crisp cucumber and some crunchy pistachios.
There is far less of the wasabi randomness in the main courses, though still very little consistency. A number of the dishes are for two. I've always liked this sort of thing in restaurants: it somehow speaks of generosity (or perhaps just greed on my part; I suspect that, subconsciously, I always hope I will get more than my share). We ordered one of these, a hot shellfish platter for a whopping £44, and it was a thorough disappointment. With something like this, you want variety. You want a few clams here, a few prawns there, maybe an oyster or two. Instead, it was just a combination of two other dishes on the menu, plus a small bowl of passable moules mariniere. So there was half a small lobster in garlic butter, and a couple of soft shell crabs each. Curiously, there is a starter of soft shell crabs with watermelon and wasabi, which we tried to order. They told us it was off. Though somehow there they were on the platter, oily and soggy. Much better was another main course of pot-roast lamb rump with a kicking lamb consomme and some vegetables so baby they were barely off the teat. Intriguingly, it looked exactly like the sort of dish Marco Pierre White would have served in his heyday.
Puddings were of the make, refrigerate and plate variety, and therefore a washout. An orange jelly was so overset it could have been bounced off the walls. A chocolate pot was good, but the portion relentless. Best of all was a block of smooth and crispy nougatine glace, again a dish that Mr White once made his own.
The bill for three people, with one bottle of a Kiwi Sauvignon from the lowest reaches of the list, was a suffocating £160. Even so, I would like to be sympathetic. Village East is trying hard. A couple of the dishes were really very nice, and the room looks good. But for this sort of money you have the right to expect more - and I ain't talking about a free linen napkin printed with the restaurant's address.
