Foley’s, 23 Foley Street, London W1W 6DU (0203 137 1302). Meal for two, including drinks and service: £70-£100
At the start of our meal at Foley’s our waitress fixed us with a big, cheery grin and announced that the restaurant served “beautiful food. You will love it.” Oh dear. If there’s one way to guarantee I’ll hate something, it’s by telling me I’m going to love it. Don’t you dare tell me what to feel before I’ve felt it. Don’t you dare try to force me to have a good time. I don’t do enforced jollity. It is, as we know, always hate that springs most eternal.
As it happens I didn’t hate Foley’s. I could well imagine some people might actually love its food, less a style of cooking than a form of gastronomic bare-knuckle fighting in which the shoutiest ingredient wins. It’s food which can’t spell the word “subtle” let alone express it. The problem is one of accumulation; of different but curiously similar flavours piling up, one atop the other, until they begin to topple. But it took time for me to get there, as it will for you.
Foley’s belongs to Mitz Vora, a former sous chef at Palomar, the Jerusalem-born restaurant over in Soho which has turned counter eating into performance theatre, complete with cooks breaking into song and offering shots to the diners. There may well be an element of that at Foley’s because downstairs in the basement is a Palomar-style open kitchen with a dining counter.
Curiously I didn’t know anything about it until I went for a loo break. I found another dining room full of glossy-haired young people having a fine old time. Clearly the staff took one look at us and decided we were not suitable for the counter. They didn’t even mention its existence. Instead they directed us to the subdued space upstairs, where bass lines thunder and chatter bounces off the brick walls, which were only slightly more distressed than we were.
At Palomar the food plays fast and loose with the culinary traditions of the Middle East. Hummus and fattoush make a showing. At Foley’s, which takes its name from its London street address, the kitchen plays fast and loose with the culinary traditions of just about everywhere. The menu references India and Japan, China and Greece, Thailand, the Middle East and Indonesia. It’s an over-funded gap year of a menu; the sort that could only really exist in a multi-ethnic city at ease with itself.
The curious thing is that taken dish by dish, it works. Peanut crackers, both crumbly and savoury, come with a lightly spiced tomato sambal, which tastes like ketchup’s filthier cousin; the one who learned to smoke and drink before you did. It’s the first appearance of peanuts. If you like peanuts don’t worry. More will be along later.
A dish called “charcoal grilled chicken burnt ends” references the pork rib tips of American barbecue that always end up a little darker than the rest of the meat. These are nothing of the sort, of course, because the ends of chicken ribs would be like Q-tips. These are skin-on pieces of thigh, drenched in a Korean-style marinade and fired up. They are smoky and dark, salty and crisp and compelling.
Cauliflower has also had a good time in the flames, before being dumped on a tzatziki bed, smeared with a pungent tomato relish and pelted with smoked peanuts for crunch. The textural contrasts are fun. It feels like the kitchen has ticked off a list that reads: “salty, sweet, sour, crunchy”. Along comes a “market salad” full of sprouted greens, and acidulated cubes of cucumber, sour slices of granny smith apple, butter milk and – oh look! – our old friend smoked peanuts.
Both of these dishes are striking, but both seem built in exactly the same way. The issue becomes more pronounced with the meat side of the menu. A long-cooked piece of short rib, glazed with something salty and sweet, comes with a Thai-inspired salad of spiralised daikon and cucumber, with crispy shallots and more bloody peanuts. The description of the pork belly dish makes it sound entirely different. It’s “Tamarind BBQ, apple, green papaya, buttermilk, cured red onions”.
This one doesn’t have peanuts. Oh no. Nothing of the sort. It has toasted cashews. So that’s a sweet-salty glazed bit of meat, with a sour-crisp salad and more nuts. I find myself imagining Vora standing back from each dish as it was created and muttering “What this dish needs is nuts!” and then hurling handfuls of them at the plate. Even an octopus dish ends up tasting like the beef and pork dishes. That’s quite an achievement. The hunks of tentacle are slow cooked and charred and served with crisped bits of pork mince, an intense black sesame mayo and their own chilli sauce.
Individually each dish really does deliver a thrilling whack. These are big unashamed flavours, with a serious come-hither pout. They’re also well priced, with most around a tenner or less. Perhaps if I popped in for lunch and had a couple to myself it would be fine. But tasting six in a row starts to feel like being shouted at repeatedly by the kitchen.
Dessert offers a “Fatboy Elvis” but it’s all bravado. There are little pieces of chocolate chip sponge fizzing with bicarb and – you guessed it – peanut honeycomb. Well of course. There’s also something called “bacon crack”, which sounds like it’s applying to be my drug of choice. It turns out to be bacon-flavoured popping candy and less than addictive. Far better are crisp leaves of honeyed filo with crushed caramelised nuts, under a glorious cloud of cardamom-flavoured cream. They could have called it a deconstructed baklava. I thank them for not doing so.
And all this served by one waitress who keeps begging us to tell her which dish is our favourite, and another who asks if she can “tempt” us to another bottle of sparkling water. I’ll be honest. I’ve had more tempting offers. It’s service which puts the “please make it stop” into solicitous. The dessert menu also includes an invitation to purchase a “six pack for the chefs”. Yup, for £6 you can buy the cooks a beer to drink after work. Really? I thought I was already seeing the cooks right by, y’know, paying for the dishes and the 12.5% service charge. Chalk that one up in the column headed “chutzpah”. Foley’s isn’t a bad restaurant. It isn’t a terrible way to spend your money or your time. Some people might even love it. I just doubt I’ll ever be one of them.
Jay’s news bites
■ Maray in Liverpool takes a similar global approach to Foley’s, but is a little more successful for corralling the various regional influences within each plate rather than across them. Roasted cauliflower comes with the Levantine flavours of pomegranate and harissa; an Asian-influenced scallop dish comes with chilli, seaweed and soy. They have also just announced the opening of a second Maray in Allerton in the Liverpool suburbs later this year or early in 2017 (maray.co.uk).
■ Here’s some jolly news. Donald Trump’s two golfing resorts in Scotland made an £8.4m loss last year. That was double the loss of the previous year. It couldn’t happen to a nicer chap.
■ Further proof, for anybody who needs it, that those in the media business are diversifying. The company behind Time Out is to open a new food and cultural market in London’s Spitalfields. It will occupy 20,000sqft, have space for 17 restaurants and two bars, as well as a cooking school, and will have seating for 450 people. It should launch late in 2017.
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or follow him on Twitter @jayrayner1
