Nopi, 21-22 Warwick Street, London W1 (020 7494 9584). Meal for two, including wine and service £110
I stared down the long, shiny dining room of Nopi, Yotam Ottolenghi's new, flash, rather grown-up restaurant, named a little clumsily for its position North Of Piccadilly. All those white splash-back tiles. The glossy marble floors. The gold-trimmed bar and sconces and the coat hooks. It reminded me of my Jewish brethren in Stanmore. Their bathrooms look just like this, although obviously theirs tend to be larger. It is all shiny and clean, from the lettering outside to the Arctic spread of blinding white paper tablecloths inside. If anybody has a nosebleed in here, it will seriously screw up the design concept.
Of course, Ottolenghi is known for white. His north London deli-cafés (and the cookbooks they have spawned) have a cool, clean fresh look which serves only to act as a frame for the vibrancy of his food. His big, crisp salads, his punchy flavours, the way he channels the heat and the sun and the spice of the Israel of his birth, lends an absolute logic to food which, in clumsier hands, could easily seem unfocussed. The menu here, a small-plate affair, represents all of what Ottolenghi is very precisely and, as a result, raises one bald question: what is Nopi for?
Don't get me wrong. The service is slick. The room buzzes. A lot of what we ate was very nice indeed. And yet I couldn't work out how all that gold trim, that shine and polish, took the essence of Ottolenghi on anywhere new. This is mostly because what he already does at the delis is so perfectly poised, in such damn good taste, that it's tricky to see how it could be elaborated on. If you already love Yotam Ottolenghi's cooking you will not find a better version at Nopi.
But you will be served it all by nice people, and you will be able to linger. The menu is divided into veg, fish and meat and, perhaps not surprisingly, I found myself less drawn to the latter. Ottolenghi is brilliant at arguing against the imperative to eat meat, so one heads away from there. That said, sweet anise-flavoured croquettes of long-braised beef brisket were outstanding; a few rounds of braised lamb belly less so.
More thrills were to be found in a salad of braised artichokes with broad beans and the mediated sharpness of preserved lemons, in a plateful of wobbly, fresh burrata – young mozzarella – with blood oranges and coriander seeds, and in a special of shredded brussels sprouts with wild mushrooms.
We loved fat seared scallops with a slick of umami-rich chilli jam alongside (shredded) green apples and pickled daikon, and some equally big prawns in a tomato sauce flavoured with fennel and feta, that simply demanded to be spooned straight from the dish. Far less successful was a stodgy baked stilton cheesecake, a quiche by any other name, and not a very good one. No matter. At the end there was a scoop of chocolate ganache with crunchy peanut brittle and a cooling dollop of crème fraîche. Better still was fresh churros – long, deep-fried Spanish-style doughnuts – with, for dipping, a hot chocolate sauce and a saucer of sugar, blitzed with fennel seeds. It's a variation on a classic which is touched by genius.
Though no plate costs more than £12 the bill can still mount up. The wine list, while intriguing – here a Cretan wine, there something from Slovenia – is both too short and unbalanced with an awful lot of choice (far) north of £30 and nowhere near enough below that. These are the criticisms. Still, as with everything Ottolenghi and his business partner Sami Tamimi have done, Nopi is an exceptionally assured new business. And somehow, despite the intense high-end bathroom cues, I managed to fight the temptation to take off all my clothes and have a shower. For this they should be grateful.
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or visit theguardian.com/profile/jayrayner for all his reviews in one place
