AQUA NUEVA, 30 ARGYLL STREET, LONDON W1 (020 7478 0540). MEAL FOR TWO, INCLUDING WINE AND SERVICE, £120
Aqua Nueva is a restaurant from a different era – the era that ended a year ago when Arctic winds suddenly blew through the City. Recession? What recession? Look at the Aqua group: they have just invested the GDP of a small African nation in opening a pair of fancy, shiny, look-where-all-the-money-went restaurants, in a space that used to be the top floor of a department store. The result? Two huge, echoing restaurants in a space that looks like it used to be the top floor of a department store. Do they still sell underwear in that yawning gap behind the bar? Are there lost Amazon tribes, living happily in the furthest reaches of the dining room? Who can say. This is Aqua, a brave new yesterday, and in this world of conspicuous consumption anything is possible.
In Hong Kong and Beijing, Aqua run a range of high-end regional Chinese, Japanese, Italian and Moroccan businesses. Here they have filled what used to be a floor of the defunct Dickens & Jones on Argyll and Regent Streets, with a luxury Japanese restaurant and a modern Spanish place serving both tapas and larger dishes. Right now the whole thing feels wilful, a case of doing something because it can be done. They have four silky, black dress-clad women at the front desk, all with perma-white grins in the moody darkness. They have the money for shiny, glass-clad corridors and for a ceiling hung with thousands of wooden carved dangly things which look, depending on your mindset, like children's toys or outré sex aids.
What they don't have is a kitchen or a concept firing on all cylinders. All fur coat and no knickers? Not exactly. I'll allow them a thong, because a couple of the things we ate were impressive. Iberico ham croquettes, from the tapas menu, are usually heavy creatures, on account of trying to get the cylinder of béchamel into the deep fat fryer in one piece. Here, it was practically liquid, an extraordinary achievement. They hand-cut their ham very well and serve it at the right temperature. My starter, a complex if ultimately overwrought dish, brought warm jelly domes of truffled consommé, filled with egg yolk. Clever? Undoubtedly.
Another starter of lobster and crispy pork on a chickpea purée, ordered because the Jews at the table thought the combination of two prime non-kosher items funny (if only we could have ordered it on Yom Kippur) was great on texture but poor on flavour. The lobster, the pork and the chickpeas all managed not to taste very much of themselves, which is irritating for £12, and even more so for the lobster. A tranche of sea bass, accurately cooked, was booted from one side of the plate to the other by an overly salty broth. Across the top lay a thin, transparent flap of jelly, a redundant modernist touch which brought nothing to the dish and reminded me of the fake skin they use in burns units. This is not a good thing.
A plate of 24-hour-marinated, long-braised oxtail with a big orange comma of pumpkin purée looked pretty, all glossy mahogany meat and Technicolor splashes, but either the oxtail had caught fire while being seared off at the end, or the sauce had been left unattended, because there was an acrid, burnt taste to the dish. For £18.50 this slips out of the irritating category and comfortably into the one marked "What the hell were they thinking?"
Desserts were a bunch of pre-prepared things, artfully plated on demand: a mixture of pleasing but unremarkable takes on chocolate; some toy cigarette-sized biscuit tubes filled with banana purée on what was described as an orange cream, but was actually an underpowered orange jelly.
Service was on the stalkerish side of attentive, though not always to good effect. I asked what kind of tuna they used, and when the non-English-speaking waiter finally understood the question, he replied: "The big one, the red one." Not being confident this didn't mean the endangered bluefin, I avoided tuna. By now the Japanese side of the operation – Aqua Kyoto – will also have opened and the answer may become more obvious. At the end I asked my companion a question I often table: would you come back here again and spend your own money? No, she said, because almost every single dish had a problem. I am minded to agree.★
