Tom's Terrace, Somerset House, The Strand, London WC2 (020 7845 4646) Meal for two, including wine and service, £100
I have been to more tawdry catering ventures than Tom's Terrace, the new al fresco venue at London's Somerset House, but really not that often. Indeed it gives me absolutely no pleasure at all to award the restaurant, officially overseen by Michelin-starred chef Tom Aikens, the title of this year's laziest restaurant concept. The combination of greed, sloth and lack of ambition is frankly breathtaking and all the more dispiriting for the opportunity missed. The long terrace at the back of Somerset House, with its view through the trees to the Thames, is a lovely spot. The open-sided marquee construction is pleasing on the eye. London deserves good restaurants in fabulous locations like this. In Tom's Terrace it most certainly hasn't got one.
Let's be clear. It's not that the food is actively bad. It's much, much worse than that. Aikens has never been afraid of bellowing his ambition, of talking up his gifts and his talents. He draws the ideas for dishes to be served in his flagship Chelsea restaurant in a sketch book. He's that kind of chef. So for a man as mouthy and – let's face it – capable as that, to serve up something as paltry as this is shameful. Were it not for the fact he would have been contractually obliged to come here from time to time, I'd have accused him of phoning the menu in. Or getting somebody else to phone it in for him as he was too damn busy. It feels dictated.
On the left side of the terrace is the bar area and coming here to get drunk may well be the best use for it. On the right, kitted out with cheap plastic tables, is the restaurant. It is the only thing about the place which is cheap. Let's start with the snacks: £4 for a small bowl of "fried and salted soft corn". These are the toasted corn kernels sold for £1.30 a bag (retail price, mind) at Spanish food shop Brindisa. The serving is roughly half a bag. So the mark-up has to be, ooh, somewhere on the scale between colossal and nose-bleeding.
The mark-up is only beaten by the £6.50 charged for a bowl of truffle chips: a meagre portion of thick-cut chips with some curiously sweaty slices of truffle oil-slicked cheese. Initially they forgot this part of our order; having eaten the chips I'm sorry we reminded them. Starters include sharing plates of charcuterie costing an obese £22. The only bright spot, indeed the only sign of the kitchen credentials of the man whose name is above the door, is the hummingbird-light texture of a curl of foie gras parfait. Everything else – some under-seasoned rillette, a little thinly cut ham, slices of cured duck breast served fridge cold – were the words "one born every minute" expressed as food.
And so to the main course options: a burger, a steak, a chicken salad, a salmon salad. It's a crap wedding buffet in Basildon. What it isn't is worth prices in the mid to high teens. The best that can be said is that those responsible have occasionally done some nice shopping. They use good caper berries. The salmon – the ubiquitous Loch Duart – isn't bad. Served with a soft-yolked, hardboiled egg that could be passable. But not when said egg is, like the ham, stone cold, and the leaves underdressed. The chicken salad is an edible cure for insomnia. The one bright spot in an otherwise miserable meal was the lemon curd and blueberry pavlova, assembled from very good meringues. But even then the £8 price tag– roughly the same price as the desserts at Bar Boulud, a restaurant which has things that Tom's Terrace doesn't like walls, central heating and ambition – seems grasping.
Just so you know exactly who to blame, my credit card statement tells me Tom's Terrace is operated by Leith's Restaurants. Clearly Aikens needs to make money. He put the holding company for his businesses into receivership a year or two back, leaving suppliers out of pocket, and started afresh. I'm sure a quick consultancy like this seemed like a good idea at the time, but it isn't when it leaves people thinking you really just don't care.
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or visit theguardian.com/profile/jayrayner for all his reviews in one place
