Veneta, 3 Norris Street, London SW1Y 4RJ ( 020 3874 9100). Meal for two, including drinks and service: £120
On paper, which is to say the menu, it sounded fabulous: a fried “polenta, speck and fontina sandwich”. You’re offering me a ham and cheese toastie, in a fancy Venetian themed restaurant? I’m in. What arrived was two flavourless blocks of carbohydrate inside a breadcrumb shell the colour of a neglected child’s tea. They looked like fish fingers, but tasted like sofa cushions. I pulled them apart to find a meagre smear of cheese and a fragment of ham.
Polenta gum guards aside, Veneta, part of the polished restaurant group behind Opera Tavern and Dehesa among others, is not an actively bad restaurant. The front of house team is professional, dealing artfully with the moment I knocked over my glass. But if you’d asked me immediately afterwards what I’d eaten I’d have struggled. I’d have mentioned a plate of smoked anchovies, which was a victory of shopping, and a winter salad of bitter greens, which was all depth and quiet, astringent menace. In a good way. I long ago stopped taking notes in restaurants, figuring that if I couldn’t recall what I’d had for dinner that spoke volumes. With this one I had to dig out the receipt.
There was wide-ribboned pasta with a goat ragu which was fine and reasonably priced at £7.50; a small pork rib eye was okay for £9.50. Apparently, I also had a dish of a mackerel tartar and another of roasted artichokes, but neither left an impression. I recall the two medium sized scallops with a splodge of sweet pumpkin purée. I recall how quickly they were gone. But my eye can’t help resting on the final tally of £138 for two, pushed up by a wine list which can’t spell bargain let alone offer one.
It’s an unfortunate way in which to end the year. I’ve spent much of 2016 talking about price pressures: about the way Brexit has hit ingredient costs and how young cooks are going underpaid, while the middle-classes whinge about their restaurant bills. I’ve defended restaurateurs and chefs, and then Veneta comes along. I can see where the money went. It occupies a space in a development south of Piccadilly Circus called St James’s Market, which is probably meant to sound like it’s full of hoary-handed tradesmen. Instead it’s an outbreak of brutal, glass-clad blocky offices probably funded by chaps with secret concerns about the size of their genitalia. And so, pushed up by rents, dinner costs £138 and you end up wondering why.
Happily there have been better things this year. Early on I loved the lavish approach to Sunday lunch at Zelman Meats, all rosy pink beef and tumescent Yorkshires (so much so that, at year’s end, I chose it as the place for a works Christmas do). The punchy, Sri Lankan stews at Hoppers, and the exceptionally well managed queue – they text when your table’s ready so you can sod off for a drink – forced me to accept there was a place for non-reservation restaurants. It can keep prices low. The bill of £44 for a meal including dark, peppery pork curries, and fragile lacy dosas, rewarded the wait.
Jun Tanaka’s Charlotte Street venture, The Ninth, proved that serious food does not have to come with armies of serious waiters or snowfields of white linen. Even now I can recall his dish of salted beef cheeks, with morels and bone marrow and a jus that ought to be available on prescription from the NHS.
Outside the capital there were more thrills than not. I loved the food at the catering college restaurant in Cardiff, but still managed to piss off half the city for saying the Welsh capital’s dining choices were meagre. It made the local TV news. (Six months on I’ve had more quiet emails agreeing with me than not).
In Hereford Rule of Tum served me a cracking burger, and I still dream of the Korean pork belly at the Garden House Inn, Durham, all crisp meat and slippery melting fat and luscious chilli-boosted sauce.
My own snobbery was challenged at Mannings in Truro, where I had to go back into the kitchen to check that they weren’t just opening bags of ready meals. The menu was so restless, stretching from Thailand to Japan to the American Midwest and back again that I couldn’t see how they were doing it all from scratch, but they were. Likewise, Maray in Liverpool presented a terrifyingly restless menu and yet delivered on every dish. Go for the falafel. The Bull and Ram at Ballynahinch, Northern Ireland, did outrageous things with the best beef. I could mention Riley’s Fish Shack in Tynemouth again, but that would be embarrassing. Except to say they suffered a small fire recently, nobody was hurt, and by now they should have re-opened.
There were stupidities. There always are. At Tapas 37 the fire alarms went off but not for long enough to stop us being forced to eat terrible food that should never have escaped the kitchen, and Gino D’Acampo proved that being famous is not the same as being a good restaurateur. But then we knew that. The new general manager of the Guinea Grill, Oisin Rogers, confessed to me after my visit that, when I ordered the truffle chips, he’d legged it down to the nearby Westbury Hotel and begged a fresh truffle off chef Alyn Williams because he didn’t think truffle oil would do. It was a wasted effort. I dismissed the chips as “slightly undercooked” though I liked almost everything else.
My off-the-clock eating habits have remained stuck in their groove. I kept going to Chinatown’s Four Seasons in Gerrard Street for their brilliant Cantonese roast duck, though I abandoned the dry fried green beans for the monks beard in sizzling pot with ground pork. I went to Baiwei on Little Newport Street for deep fried pork ribs crusted in cumin, salt, sugar and chilli. I kept returning to Richard Corrigan’s Bentley’s for oysters. I also went to various branches of Yo Sushi, ignored the lousy sushi and ordered the dark, sticky beef teriyaki with garlic and the deep fried chilli squid. Do that and it’s fine. Don’t judge me.
And I rolled my eyes at comments that spending money in restaurants is obscene. If it is, so is spending money on cars or tickets to football matches or tech. I have no interest in those. But I do like restaurants and in 2017 I will continue to travel hopefully. Have a great Christmas.
Jay’s news bites
Located right next door to Veneta, and perhaps rather better suited to the minimalist possibilities of the stark architecture, is the Japanese ‘brasserie’ Anzu. It’s a gentle move upmarket from the team behind the brilliant ramen joints Tonkotsu (oh their chilli oil!) of which I am a fully declared fan. The menu includes king crab and pork gyoza and Label Anglais chicken teriyaki (anzulondon.com).
One for the 2017 bucket list. Chef Kyle Connaughton was part of the team at Heston Blumenthal’s Fat Duck as it won its third Michelin star. He returned to his native US a few years ago and has finally launched Single Thread Farms, in Healdsburg, California, one of the most talked about restaurant openings for years. But you’ll have to save up. Dinner is $294 a head (singlethreadfarms.com).
Further to last week’s terrifying news of the cocoa and rum flavoured crisps from Tesco, comes the bombshell that Lidl has launched negroni flavoured crisps. One taster described them as ‘too orangey’. Question: what is the right amount of orange for a crisp?
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or follow him on Twitter @jayrayner1
