Martha’s, 56 Wardour Street, London W1D 4JG (020 3982 8377). Starters £7.50-£12; main courses £10-£28; wines from £26
If Martha was a friend of mine, I’d be begging her to get her shit together. I’d be telling her she has buckets of potential, but that it won’t come to anything if she carries on like this. Get some sleep. Stop winging it. As it happens, Martha’s is a restaurant in London’s Soho, and this is still the speech it needs to hear. Because hiding beneath the posturing and the chaos and the unflamed dessert – we’ll get there – are the beginnings of a terrific night out.
It looks the part. Martha’s describes itself as a slice of American night-life pie. There are curving, dark leather banquettes and booths to slouch in until you have a spinal disorder, and the walls are hung with shimmery deep red silk. There are blow-up photos of models who look like they’ve stopped to strike a pose en route to rehab. There are cabaret club lamps on the tables and there is greenery. There is an awful lot of greenery. If the word “louche” wasn’t scribbled on the design mood board, you know it was implied. They promise live jazz and drag queens. Given I make part of my living playing the former, I’m always going to be up for that.
If I can get in. The recorded phone message insists they don’t take bookings for dinner. The website doesn’t agree, swiftly offering me an 8.30pm table. I am delighted, if confused. Then the digital neediness starts: a confirmatory email 24 hours out, followed by a text 30 minutes before the allotted time, announcing that if we don’t arrive punctually, they’ll give our table to some of the other “fabulous” people who are desperate to get in. I don’t need to tell you that it’s never more than half full, do I.
Still, when the nice chap on reception manages to break away from the conversation he’s having with his colleague, we are seated and handed both a food and drinks menu. The latter is a joy. First, the paper leaflet looks like its been soaked in water and then dried out on a radiator. Secondly the cover has been printed one way up and the contents another. Ach, don’t stress the little things.
Our table is attended by two very lovely, very shiny, very young people. It turns out that she is just three hours into her first shift and is being mentored. The chap mentoring her, hovering just behind, has been here a magnificent four days. Together they tell us that Martha’s fried chicken with honey truffle sauce, the one dish they’ve been hyping all over their socials, is off. You might have enjoyed looking at the Instagram pics, but don’t you dare think about eating it. Suddenly another waiter turns up to take our order. He does so without a notebook. I ask him if he’ll remember what we wanted. “Sure”, he says. He goes away to the till. He returns to say “Can I just go through that with you…” I tell him cheerily that it’s cheating; he can’t bottle it now.
We place an order and I get up to pop to the loo downstairs (signified by “Arthur’s” and “Martha’s”). As I leave, my foot catches in the lamp’s cable. It goes flying and I almost hit the deck. Our waiter looks on. He says, “That keeps happening.” I say, “You might want to sort it then.” He says, “Yes…” with a long final sibilant, like the notion needs to bed in.
So, anyway, the waiter gets the order right and some of the food is great and some is calamitous. Crab croquettes are nothing of the sort. They’re much better than that. There is no supporting creamy medium like a bechamel. They are almost entirely fresh crab, with lots of chilli, which is exactly what you want. Rings of calamari, by contrast, are rubbery, bouncy tooth-flossers from which the breadcrumb coating sloughs off, as if it’s the skin of a snake that has places to be. An iceberg wedge with blue cheese and bacon is a reminder that this much maligned lettuce still has a role in our lives.
Main courses are equally hit and miss. The hit is the New York Strip, a seared sirloin steak served the right side of both pink and Old Testament bible thick. It comes with a creamy peppercorn sauce which appears to have been completely blitzed. There are no peppercorns. Instead there is a massive hit of white pepper. It’s astringent and weirdly compelling. Unlike the cauliflower risotto, which is a salty, acrid mess of failed vegetal matter. As I taste it, I can hear the slap it’s going to make as the uneaten remains hit the black bin bag in the kitchen.
We have finished a bottle of rosé, so we order glasses of pinot grigio to kill the taste of the risotto. This time the notebook-less waiter doesn’t get away with it. They bring us more rosé. He clocks that something is wrong, brings us the wine we wanted and doesn’t charge us for the first two glasses.
Desserts include a banana split that is a mighty victory of tinned squirty cream and a lemon meringue pie, which the menu says will be “flamed at your table”. Well we just have to do that, don’t we, because the promised floor show hasn’t materialised. There is no live jazz. A couple of chaps in Diane von Furstenberg-style jump suits, with impeccable smoky eye makeup and pageboy wigs, flounce around the tables, giving it fabulous.
A waiter plonks the lemon meringue pie on the table. We say, “Will it be flamed now?” He looks baffled and wanders off. No floor show for us, then. It is exactly as you might imagine a lemon meringue pie that arrived in the restaurant in a white cardboard box might taste.
And yet, while dinner at Martha’s made me despair, it didn’t make me hate the place. Towards the end I looked around and clocked that a whole bunch of tables were singing along to Macy Gray’s I Try on the sound system, and by that time of night it seemed like a great place to be. Some of the food does the thing, and while the dear staff might not quite be getting the direction they need, they meant well. Yeah, I know. These really are the excuses we make for a much-loved friend, whom we know is a car crash. Oh come on Martha; please just sort yourself out. You have it in you to be very special.
News bites
For a reliable slice of New York try Joe Allen, just off London’s Strand. Recently it was forced to leave its home of 40 years after a group led by Robert De Niro announced plans to turn the building into a hotel. The hotel fell through but Joe’s had already moved, taking the original wooden bar with it. And it still does the thing. It serves one of the best Caesar salads in London, the burger remains off menu and it understands pecan pie (joeallen.co.uk).
The gloriously funny George Egg is returning to the Edinburgh fringe this summer, with a new show about the joys of makeshift cookery. After demonstrating how to make dinner in a hotel room with only a kettle and a Corby trouser press, Movable Feast is about cooking on trains, planes and automobiles (anarchistcook.info).
All change in the hotel business. At Brown’s in London, the poorly reviewed Heinz Beck is out and Adam Byatt of Trinity in Clapham is in. Meanwhile in the Lake District, Simon Rogan, who has closed Fera at Claridge’s in London, is opening Henrock at Linthwaite House on Lake Windermere.
Jay Rayner will be appearing in a special Guardian Live event at London’s Cadogan Hall on 9 September. In My Last Supper, the show accompanying his soon-to-be-published book of the same name, Jay examines our fascination with last meals and tells the story of his own. Click here for tickets.
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or follow him on Twitter @jayrayner1
