Theo’s Simple Italian, 34-44 Barkstone Gardens, London SW5 0EW (020 7370 9130). Meal for two, including drinks and service: £110
Lunch at Theo’s Simple Italian is like my eyesight in middle age: it fails slowly. It started out fine. It started out encouragingly, full of sunshine and possibility, but bit by bit that early promise gave way to doubts, furrowed brows and eventually proper irritation and peevishness. But those lay at the end, not here at the start, where everything is a ball of sweet, untested potential.
The Theo in the name belongs to Theo Randall, once head chef of the saintly River Café. Randall is the nice, normal-looking one on Saturday Kitchen; the chap you could take home to meet your nan. A decade ago, he opened his own restaurant in a windowless room at the InterContinental Hotel on London’s Hyde Park Corner. Just as at the River Café, he specialises in rustic faux-peasant food for plutocrats. It has always been very good rustic faux-peasant food – the sort that looks terrific photographed in glossy magazines, served up on misshapen plates, randomly, in the middle of a gnarly Tuscan orchard at dusk. At the InterContinental, there’s lots of wood-oven roasting and silky pastas with long-cooked ragus and outbreaks of bottarga. Main course pasta dishes often cost north of £20, with meat and fish dishes around £35.
Any means by which to experience Randall’s robust, grown-up cooking at knock-down prices should be embraced. And so to Theo’s Simple Italian, which looks as if it was unloaded into this space from a shipping container then Allen-keyed together. It occupies the lobby of an anonymous hotel near Earl’s Court, but they’ve strained every muscle to convince you otherwise. There are curving leather banquettes in olive green and caramel, and some light ‘“herringbone” wood panelling. There’s parquet, and a bit of ceramic tiling in a light turquoise, and shelves for produce. Obviously the products they are selling are Italian, but they could be Spanish or French and change the proposition accordingly.
It feels like a proof of concept: any country, any food, any time. Let’s see what works. It’s as if they are searching for a space in the market somewhere above Carluccio’s. Main course pasta dishes are £15 or more. A sirloin steak will set you back £28. It is Theo being simple, in quite a complicated way.
The day we go, the restaurant is all but empty, which is never good. If you want efficient service, go to a busy restaurant. In busy restaurants, waiters have a reason to circle the space, eager to have their eye caught. Here, they lurk behind opaque dividing walls or by the tills, staring intently at their screens. Lunch takes a while.
When it finally arrives, that lunch is a very good thing, at least at first. There are greaseless calamari, a proper knot of minute tentacles with a lemon aioli for £3.50. For £3 there is a heap of chips fashioned from deep-fried polenta. They are crunchy and sweet and salty, and given heft by the bashed-up anchovies spread across them. I try to forgive the board they are served upon. Meatballs made with a loose mix of veal, beef and pork arrive in a light, bright tomato sauce with a cooling bolus of burrata, milk’s nearest cousin in the cheese world. Even the £9.50 charged for a carpaccio of beef – first marinated to give it a light salt-sour tang, under fragments of aged parmesan and rocket leaves – feels like value. A few bits and pieces like this, a £6 glass of Prosecco each, and you could congratulate yourself on having found your way to something approaching a bargain.
The £15 for wide ribbons of very good pappardelle with a powerful beef shin ragu will feel less so. A similar pasta dish over at the InterContinental is £18, but the extra three quid buys you all the dip and curtsy of that sort of over-sconced and downlit hotel. At Carluccio’s, you have to order the lobster spaghetti to get anywhere near that price. There may well be a space in the fast casual market above Carluccio’s; it’s unlikely to be occupied by very many people.
At Theo Randall’s mothership, his fish stew was always a thing of wonder. All sea life was there. Here it’s a shadow of the original dish, as cast by underpowered light. The liquor has the depth of flavour that comes from slow-cooking then blitzing fennel, carrots and onions, but the seafood element is meagre: two prawns, one white-fish fillet, a bucket of bargain-basement mussels. The thick crouton at the bottom feels less like a vehicle for sauce than a way of bulking things up.
As the mains are cleared, we note that we didn’t receive the zucchini fritti we ordered. Hardly surprising; the waitress insisted on taking our order without a notebook (see gripes and whines, passim). If you can do the memory trick, then fine. Go notebook-free forever. But please don’t forget to bring us everything we asked for.
We order an Amalfi lemon tart, for which Randall has long been famed, and a chocolate and raspberry cake. We barely start, let alone finish them. The waiter asks how they are. I say: “Not your finest hour.” He says: “A bit dry, yes?” Yes, indeed, the chocolate cake was dry. And if you knew that, why the hell did you serve it? The implication – that these are yesterday’s cakes making an appearance today – is backed up by the lemon tart’s pastry. It is soggy and damp.
And then comes the bill. They have taken off the desserts and those zucchini fritti remain forgotten. Instead it includes both an “optional” service charge and a place to leave a “gratuity”. I question this. The waiter waves airily at the hotel reception desk behind us. “Is just something the hotel does.” Eh? I’m not staying at the hotel. “Is not us,” he says again. I am talking to a brick wall, albeit one in a nicely cut suit. I’m not convinced, because everything here is them: the good snacks, the lacklustre fish stew, the forgotten zucchini fritti, and the apparent attempt to tap us down twice for the tip. It’s your restaurant, mate, serving your food according to a deal you have made with the hotel operators. Asking for two tips – gratuities, service charges, call them what you like – is either crooked or incompetent. It’s your call. Be a little bit crap if you like. Be a bit slack. But at least take responsibility for it. Theo Randall’s good name deserves better than this.
Jay’s news bites
■ Cucina Asellina, on London’s Strand, describes itself as a New York Italian, and there is something to that, especially in the big flavours, from the deep-fried olives stuffed with veal and parmesan through to platters of well-chosen charcuterie and cheeses (asellina.com).
■ First came news that New York chef Marcus Samuelsson is to open a London outpost of his restaurant the Red Rooster. Now comes the announcement that Aquavit – the Swedish restaurant in the same city where the chef made his name – is also to open here. Aquavit London will occupy a site in the new St James’s Market development south of Piccadilly Circus (aquavitrestaurants.com).
■ Not content with crowdfunding his new restaurant, Sticky Walnut chef Gary Usher – who recently raised seed funding for his third place – is also trying to crowdsource its location. The original property in Chorlton, near Manchester, has fallen through. He’s now asking people to keep an eye out for suitable properties. Reach him via Twitter @stickywalnut
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or follow him on Twitter @jayrayner1
