The Grosvenor Hotel, Terminus Place, London SW1W 0RP ((020 7868 6272). Small plates £5-£16. Large plates £19-£36. Desserts £7-£8. Wines from £27
Dinner at the Soak, inside the Grosvenor Hotel in London’s Victoria, is like a game of battleships. You have no idea whether the dish you’ve ordered is going to be on target or far out in the deep, storm-lashed sea. You can eat well here, in a way which will make you coo and purr. Or the meal can leave you with aching eyeballs from all the rolling. Inconsistent doesn’t quite cover it. At times it feels as if there are two kitchens back there. Cross your fingers and hope you get food prepared by the good one.
That inconsistency extends to the service. When eating there everything is as it should be: attentive in all the right places, but good at disappearing when it’s clear we’re fine as we are. The problem lies with gaining entry to that room. With online booking you trade the intimacy of a conversation with a human being, for immediacy, precision and convenience. Here, when I attempt to book a table, the computer tells me that I don’t have a booking yet; that they’ll confirm within 48 hours. WTF? I want to know now. Actually, I need to know now. Because if you aren’t going to give me a table, I’ll need to book somewhere else. I don’t have two days to spare waiting to find out.
The website tells me that if I need to speak to someone urgently, I should email. Eh? I already have that relationship with my bank; I don’t want it with a restaurant. I try phoning the number on the site. Across 24 hours I try five times, and only ever get an answer machine. Eventually, 28 hours after my first enquiry, I’m told I have my table. Charmed, I’m sure.
Of course, when I get there, the huge, ballroom-like space is close to empty. Happening beats which I really wish were not happening at all ricochet off the high ceilings. There are banquettes along the walls and blocks of curving booths down the middle of the room, overhung by the kind of globe lights that are used to illuminate the pathways to student halls of residence. All of it looks like it could be de-installed and shoved in the back of a truck within 90 minutes if the hotel management finally decides none of this was a good idea. There are moments when I wish they would reach this conclusion soon.
The Soak gets its name from an on-trend interest in pickling, fermenting, brining and the like. At first, when they deliver us a plate of sweet-salty pickled cherry tomatoes, silverskin onions, cauliflower florets and candy-pink sliced radishes I am optimistic. They are crunchy and thrilling without being wince-inducing. It feels like a declaration of intent. The problem is that the kitchen, led by former Tom Aikens chef Chris Zachwieja, doesn’t quite follow through on those pickles. From here on in, everything is understated.
Still, there really are some great dishes and let’s for the moment pretend we were served just those. From the list headed “Jars, cured & pickled” comes a dice of cured venison with a pleasing bite and intensity as if it got halfway to jerky and changed its mind. There are splodges of cured egg yolk and, across the top, a few peppery nasturtium petals. From the same list, lamb belly fritters with a black garlic mayo are a huge hit of meaty lanolin. Some on my table find them completely overwhelming. They point out that this kind of high flavour is why we started serving lamb with mint sauce. I find them irresistible and finish off everybody else’s.
From a list headed “Plants & garden” there is a silky cauliflower soup, bobbing with gnocchi flavoured with Comté cheese, and a dish of smoked kohlrabi laid on a bold pea-green risotto of spelt. From the large plates there is a meaty roasted wood pigeon, served pink, in a deep glossy jus with ribbons of fermented mooli. It doesn’t need the bullying pickled anchovies. Very few things do. We finish with a bright, sharp lemon tart with buttery biscuit base – I know what I did there – and a masterful dark chocolate and honeycomb baked Alaska which deserves and gets all our attention. And with that we went home and everything was lovely.
Except it wasn’t, was it? So, let’s go right back to the beginning. A salad of cider-pickled eggs with hazelnuts and chicory is a grim reminder of 1970s pub food when a boiled egg salad was considered classy. The pickling of the eggs, the only thing which might have made it interesting, is meagre and insipid. Hot and sour pickled prawns with a lime and carrot salad reads beautifully. That’s the only thing it does. It is a dull plate of crunchy, rubbery things. If you’re going to use words like hot and sour, they’d better be. They aren’t.
A plate of tomatoes with basil fregola looks exactly like the spelt dish, but is floppy and underseasoned. The “aubergine tempura” pieces on top deserve to be inside quotation marks. They are an insult to deep frying. They haven’t so much been battered as incarcerated, and leak oil as we bite in. A flavourless fillet of cured trout has a crisped skin, but nothing further to recommend it. Everything else on the plate – the ribbons of fennel, the torched cucumber, the gob of spittle-foam dribbled hither and yon – is equally bland and uninspiring. It feels like the cook responsible for the pigeon dish popped outside for a fag while this one was being knocked up.
Finally, there is a failed rhubarb soufflé. It looks like a cupcake tucked away in a ramekin for its own safety. (I’m now posting the pictures I took during my meal as a memory jogger, over on Instagram under @jayrayner1, if you fancy taking a look). Amazingly, it manages to be slightly better than what they call a rum baba: a dense, collapsed, swamp of substandard sponge in a puddle of vaguely coconut-flavoured water, like something that has wept from a wound. Lumps of roasted pineapple loiter like witnesses at a crime scene.
I find it extraordinary that the same kitchen which produced the glorious baked Alaska, with its glazed peaks and chocolate hit, could also be responsible for one of the worst desserts I have ever been served. For the money spent, which is significant, the whole experience is deeply unsatisfactory. But it’s also something else: it’s just seriously, inexplicably weird. And that is what sums up the Soak.
News bites
Another place with a developed interest in curing, pickling and fermenting is Träkol, the restaurant of the By The River Brew Co, on the Gateshead side of the Tyne. Try cured North Sea trout with fried curry leaf and yogurt, the soy pickled egg with cream cheese and togarashi and, best of all, the middle white pig feasting plate, including half a roasted head plus a 1kg chop, yours for £50 (bytheriverbrew.co).
Research released by caterer.com has found that 97% of school pupils and those leaving education have “written off” the idea of working in the hospitality industry. That may be wise. Another study by the Royal Society for Public Health found that 62% of hospitality workers don’t feel looked after by their employers; 74% have suffered verbal abuse and 24% have required medical or psychological help.
In brighter news, New City College in London’s Hackney is opening a café and restaurant on its campus, specifically designed to give catering students hands-on experience of the industry. OKN1, short for open kitchen and its postcode, starts trading this month and will serve a ‘modern European’ menu.
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or follow him on Twitter @jayrayner1
