Suka, The Sanderson Hotel
Address: 50 Berners Street, London W1
Tel: (020 7300 1444). )
Price: Meal for two, including wine and service, £175
It takes a special kind of incompetence to create a restaurant with dysfunctional tables. At Suka, a new hipper-than-thou joint in London's Sanderson Hotel, which does to the noble culinary traditions of Malaysia what the Romans did to the Sabine women, they have managed it. Most of the seating is at long, wide, refectory-style tables that are so high you have to sit around them on tall bar stools. It means the waiters can only reach one diner at a time, and if you are seated against the dividing wall, as we were, waiters have to walk 15ft down one side, across the end and back up again, to get from one guest to the other. Any attempt at conversation - 'God I hate this place. How can they live with themselves,' etc - kept being interrupted by waiters trudging off into the distance and back again to deliver cutlery, water or the bad news that dinner wasn't over yet.
The one advantage of this set-up was that the waitress was so far away from me, and the music so loud, I couldn't really hear her recitation of the menu's 'concept'. No great loss; I hate these speeches. If a menu needs explaining, rewrite it until it doesn't. Anyway, having eaten there, I can sum it up myself: 'We are now going to extort as much money from you in as short a period as possible for as lacklustre a meal as we can get away with.' I got the measure of Suka when I just managed to hear her announce that tonight she was recommending the Singapore black pepper mussels. Why? They are on the menu every night. Was it just that usually the kitchen buggered them up and now they had got them right? Or was it that, at £15, they were one of the most expensive starters?
We ignored her. Instead we ordered the marinated rib-eye and foie gras skewers - satay by any other name. The meat itself was good, but at £15 for just six cubes of beef, each less than an inch square, with three tiny nuggets of liver, it felt like a mugging on nice crockery. A grilled tiger prawn salad at £16 brought only two, clinging to each other for support against a viciously overdressed lentil salad. Worst of the lot was a curried crab laksa, which was a bastardisation of a fantastic dish. The broth was a one-note battering ram of chilli oil, with no layers of flavour, not improved by a quickly soggy fried crab cake boasting the texture of a sponge.
The main courses are dominated by platters for two, which come at a staggering price: Vietnamese mint-glazed lamb at £55, Sarawak peppered rib-eye at £60. We ordered the suckling pig, at a mere £44, and for our money got a plate of slightly dry pulled pork, with the occasional nice piece of crackling, surrounded by the accompaniments to Chinese crispy duck: pancakes, sliced spring onions, hoi sin sauce, etc. All it did was remind us how nice, and what good value, crispy duck usually is and how this plateful was neither. A side of broccoli with salted fish was simply unpleasant.
We drank two glasses of wine from a list which starts at £26 a bottle. I also ordered a non-alcoholic version of one of their cocktails and was startled to see, when the bill came, that they had charged the full alcoholic £9.50 price. But it wasn't as startling as the total bill - for £168.36.
The restaurateur responsible for Suka is a New Yorker and convicted felon called Jeffrey Chodorow, who recently took out a full-page advertisement in the New York Times to complain about a review of one of his restaurants by the paper's critic, Frank Bruni. If Chodorow would now like to take out a full page ad in The Observer bearing the words 'I'm just so bloody sorry', I'm sure we'd accept the business.
· Tim Atkin's wine column returns next week
