Suzie Wong, 16 Old Compton Street, London W1 (020 74373544). Meal for two, including wine and service, £65
Here is a top tip, which I offer free of charge. If you are a newish restaurant - hell, a restaurant of any vintage - it is not a good idea to tell the guy who has come to put up the paintings that it's OK for him to carry on working over lunch. By the time I visited Suzie Wong, a pan-Asian grazing menu place in London's Soho, it had been open for a month without anything on its Burgundy-painted walls. It could probably have remained naked an hour or two more. Instead we were treated to the tooth-rattling sound of loud drilling. And I'm not just talking raised voices loud. I'm talking 'MY EARS ARE GOING TO BLEED' loud; I'm talking 'JESUS CHRIST WHEN WILL IT STOP? I CAN'T HEAR THE SOUND OF MY OWN VOICE' loud. The waiters did nothing to stop it. They merely grimaced and moved on.
It's that sort of place. To our right was the door to the disabled toilet. Helpfully a chair had been placed against it. Our table was so unsteady, you could beat out a rhythm on the floor - perhaps a death march - with the leg. When we asked if something could be done about this, the waitress, who had a very deep voice, scowled at us in a way that made her Adam's apple move up and down, and waved us dismissively to the next table. We should have taken the hint and left. Instead, ever the optimists, we stayed.
The menu is made up of 50 dishes in 'tapas-style' portions, priced at around the £5 mark. Wake up at the back there! I know you've heard about places like this before. They are all the rage, which is what I end up in when I visit one. What I genuinely don't understand about places like Suzie Wong is how they can come up with a menu of dishes from across southeast Asia without noticing that, right outside the door, are a bunch of restaurants that can do every single thing better. For example, the Szechuan restaurant Bar Shu is 90 seconds walk away and serves a spanking dish of stir-fried French green beans with chilli and garlic, which is a volcanic burst of flavour. Here they serve green beans which are hot, but not cooked, in salty water, with raw garlic and chilli. All it does is make you think about the better version across the road. A jungle curry had heat but no flavour or body and made me dream wistfully about the rich stew available at Busabai Eathai two minutes up the road, and roast black cod with Asian pesto was a reminder only of the good things that Nobu can do with this noble fish. Rather than the bad things they do to it here.
Tea-smoked chicken tasted not at all of chicken, let alone of smoke (or tea), and whoever thought of putting the strawberry sauce on the pigeon breast deserves to be smeared in honey, covered in grain and thrown into an aviary with 2,000 of the poor bird's cousins so they can let him know what they think of him. Curiously, the consultant chef here is Ken Hom, one of the original celebrity chefs, though all his involvement made me think is that there is a very fine line between fame and infamy. Some dishes were OK. A pad Thai was fine, though the portion was miserly for £4.95, and their sweet sticky spare ribs were satisfying. But again both of these are available better elsewhere. Which is exactly where I suggest you go to try them.
