55-57 Exmouth Market, London EC1 (020 3122 0047). Meal for two, including drinks and service, £90
It started with a phone call. Perhaps it should have stopped there…
Me: "I'd like to book a table."
Her: "Ehm… the system's down. Could you call back tomorrow?"
Me: "I just want to book a table."
Her: "But the system…"
Me: "Couldn't you just write it down on a piece of paper?"
Her: "I might lose the piece of paper."
Me: "How about you write it down on a piece of paper. And don't lose it?"
Her: "Oh, hang on then. I'll… reboot the iPad."
The first Bonnie Gull in London's Fitzrovia describes itself as a "seafood shack". This one, in Clerkenwell, is apparently a "seafood café". They like to say they are revisiting the simple pleasures of the British seaside holiday, only in the city. I remember those simple pleasures. Those were the ones that didn't involve rebooting bloody iPads so someone could take a booking.
To be fair, when I eventually got there, service was fine. But then again, there's no point pretending there isn't a difference between some anonymous bloke on the phone and me turning up at the door, with this hair and these feet. The blue and white decor has the vaguely ragged air of somewhere knocked together on slender margins; you can imagine the owners getting down on their hands and knees and helping to bang the last nails into the slats that make up the curving banquettes.
It also involves a lot of rope, to reinforce the nautical theme, thick whorls of twine pressed into a frame against itself to create seafaring images. If they were very, very down, the team here would certainly have enough rope with which to hang themselves. There's no need. They do a good enough job of hanging themselves with their cooking.
It's a crying shame. The ingredients are very good, as are the intentions. What's not to like about an unfussy place serving the very best seafood? There are native oysters from Carlingford and Loch Ryan and rocks from Mersea in Essex. There are clams and cockles, plus fish-finger sandwiches. Order the whole crab and it comes with its own hammer; I suspect this sort of thing, the stuff which hasn't been interfered with in a way that might attract the attention of social services, is the best way to go.
The problem is that this corner of the London market has become rather crowded of late. There's the deft expansion of Wright Brothers to Spitalfields, with their shimmering lobster tanks. There's the surf and turf bi-curious menu at Hawksmoor Air Street, alongside stalwarts like Bentley's, Scott's and J Sheekey. True, Bonnie Gull costs less than these, but that's not an excuse for doing the same job worse. Far better to charge a little more and get it right. And anyway, it's hardly cheap.
The problems are mostly clumsiness rather than anything truly awful. But it does all mount up. Deep-fried queenie scallops arrive in a soft, floppy batter. They needed hotter oil. They needed to be more like those at Hawksmoor Air Street, those moreish seafood bonbons you can't stop troughing. These are greasy and relentless.
A starter listed as "grilled Dorset crab, avocado, brown meat on beef-dripping toast" doesn't deliver on its promise. It's just perky crab on toast. There's no evidence of it having been grilled from above, or having been laid on rendered cow fat below. When the menu writing is better than the dish it describes there's a problem.
And then there's the razor clams. Anybody who has seen them alive in a market, the business end peeking shyly from the shell, will know that any phalocentric gags are redundant in the face of their reality. Razor clams are the shameless hussies of the seafood world. The way to mitigate this, to make them look vaguely appetising, is to take out the substantial cylinder at their heart. That's the bit you want. Discard the rest, the flanges and wobbly flaps. Slice up the cylinder and present it in the shell, properly sautéed in a little garlic butter. Here the things are left whole. The proteins are set, but only just. There is something pallid, dreary and slimy about these. They look like they could benefit from a broad-spectrum antibiotic. We give up halfway through.
Of our mains the best is the lemon sole, which is beautifully cooked so that it slips willingly off the bone. It is ill-served by both the accompanying logs of undercooked asparagus and the liquid on the plate which is either a beurre blanc that has split catastrophically, or just a really lousy idea. The worst dish of the day is the "baked crock of Dorset shellfish" which is accurately named for being a total crock. It tastes of raw tomato purée, with that metallic bitter tang that sets teeth on edge. We eat less than half of it. Skinny fries with rosemary salt have the uniformity of chips that have seen the inside of a freezer bag, an effect which must be very difficult to achieve in a kitchen such as this.
And so wearily we move on to dessert. By now we had low expectations. The kitchen more than lived down to them. An apple tart brings slices of fruit lying on top of mostly raw pastry. It does not crack under the spoon so much as squeak and fold. We scrape off the apple, study the uncooked pastry, sigh and stop eating. Which leaves us only with their homemade "whippy" ice cream cone, delivered to the table in some plywood contraption of the sort I might have knocked up in Year 9 woodwork, to my mum's endless delight. The ice cream tastes exactly like Mr Whippy. Which raises the question: why bother? I consoled myself with the smattering of space dust and the mini flake.
The short wine list has a reasonable choice in the mid-20s, but we weren't drinking so had nothing with which to dull the pain. No, it wasn't calamitous. It wasn't an outrage against good taste. It was just deflating and costly. Great ingredients and a great idea had, through a very special sort of alchemy, been turned into a desperately mediocre lunch.
And, all of a sudden, I began to wish that the waitress had never powered up the iPad; that she had indeed taken a note of my booking on a piece of paper; that the piece of paper had been lost.
Jay's news bites
■ For more trustworthy seafood action, head to the black-and-white-tiled Ondine in Edinburgh, perched above Victoria Street. All the staples are in place. There are oysters and langoustine, a sustaining Cullen skink and a classic French fish soup. But the must-have is the roasted shellfish platter. Oh my! (ondinerestaurant.co.uk).
■ We're all used to Googling restaurants; meet the restaurant that will Google you back. According to New York's Grub Street blog, Justin Roller, maître d' of Eleven Madison Park, Googles every guest. "If I find out a guest is from Montana, and we have a server from there, we'll put them together," Roller says. The restaurant that stalks its own customers (elevenmadisonpark.com).
■ From the "restaurants we don't need" dept: despite the recent closure in London of US steakhouse Palm, the US steakhouse chain Smith and Wollensky has decided to open in the capital. Apparently they will fly in lobsters and make sides and pastries "by hand". Instead, we assume, of making them with a bloody great machine (smithandwollensky.com).
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or follow Jay on Twitter @jayrayner1
