Capital Hotel, 22-24 Basil Street, London SW3 (020 7589 5171) Meal for two, including wine and service: £150
Sitting in the wood-panelled, primped, buffed and depilated dining room of the Capital Hotel in Knightsbridge, I began to feel as I do when I go window shopping at posh estate agents'. I look at those pictures of minimalist, cokey penthouse flats or stuccoed, Doric-infested mansions and imagine myself happy there. Quickly, though, I drift away, certain that I've confused me with someone else. I know I wouldn't really be happy there. Likewise I was able to study the clean lines of this dining room, with its mirrored seahorse sculptures, and admire the elegance. I could smell the money spent. But I quickly knew deep in my animal bones that it was not a place to which I would ever return.
I feel the same way about the cooking, which surprises me. The first time I ate Nathan Outlaw's food, in the Cornish town of Fowey, I thought it a thing of beauty. It was drenched in technique, but also robust. It was decidedly masculine, the sort you expect from a huge man with killer sideburns like Outlaw. I don't understand what's happened to him since. I know he's moved his main restaurant across to Cornwall's north coast and opened a seafood place, of which this is the London outpost. He has received accolades.
But in all that travelling and garlanding he appears to have mislaid something. It's still heavy on the technique. The man knows how to cook fish proteins. Sauces are ineffably light. Knifework is so precise I'd let his kitchen brigade take out my appendix. But there's something literally and figuratively bloodless about it all. This is a seafood restaurant without a hint of shell. None of the fish here have heads or tails or eyes. You will never need a finger bowl.
I studied the clientele: the pinched 60-something woman who had endured the sort of cosmetic surgery that can only make her look older; the greying chaps who express their flamboyant side by wearing a shirt that isn't white or blue; the executives gently discussing a business manoeuvre that someone else will regard as hostile. These people do not want food that distracts. They require it only to be precise and momentarily impressive.
In short, this is a seafood restaurant for people who don't like seafood. All the essentials – terrific breads, salted butter, crisp fishcakes – are present and correct. But the edges have been smoothed away. Starters are tiny. There is a minuscule piece of perfect lemon sole, on top of a (perfect) breaded deep-fried oyster in a cucumber sauce of a pale shade picked off a Farrow & Ball colour chart. Slices of scallop, balanced between cooked and raw, have a light praline topping and a field-green herb sauce that is more colour than flavour. These cost £10 and £15 respectively.
The cheapest main course, at £19, is a mackerel dish. The fillets arrive skin on and it's a shocking sight, as if someone had sprayed graffiti across the plate. I'd almost forgotten fish had skin. A few lightly pickled vegetables. A quenelle of smoked mackerel pâté. All exacting. All one long sigh. A boisterous fish has been hushed to a whisper. Another perfect skinless fillet of brill comes with mussels pulled from their shells and some chargrilled leeks. Bang goes £30. Desserts are much better. There is a fine treacle tart with crunchy pastry, and a clementine posset that is a sudden assertive whoosh of flavour.
The wine list is long and of the sort that demands your eye scan only the column of numbers on the right with an increasing surge of panic. The cheapest I found was a £27 bottle of rosé, but locating that took forensic examination. Service has a sense of the clicked heel about it. I understand that some people want all this. I imagine that some even claim to like it. But none of those people are me.
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk. Follow Jay on Twitter @jayrayner1
