Seabird, The Hoxton, Southwark, 40 Blackfriars Road, London SE1 (020 7903 3050). Small plates £10-£18; mains £16-£40; desserts £6-£7; wines from £28
There are many delicious smells to encounter in a restaurant dining room. Flaming lamp oil is not one of them. Seabird, on the top floor of the new Hoxton hotel in Southwark, south London, stinks of the stuff, courtesy of the guttering paraffin lamps on every table. It’s not a great start and I’m afraid it isn’t about to get much better. This is unexpected. The new Hoxton hotel is, depending upon your point of view, either a glorious homage to the funky conversions of lower Manhattan’s red-brick warehouse buildings, or a vaguely tragic attempt at the architectural equivalent of an American accent: black Crittall-style window frames outside, lots of bare brick and globe lighting inside.
To match this, they’ve brought in Joshua Boissy and Krystof Zizka, the starry duo behind Maison Premiere, a much-adored seafood place in Brooklyn, to run the restaurant. Expect a raw bar boasting the widest selection of oysters in London and a fish and shellfish menu with Iberian influences. Expect swagger. Expect all the waiters to have beards. We eat some nice things at Seabird. The problem is, restaurants are so much more than the efforts of skilled cooks. Just as it’s possible, courtesy of great service and unforced buzz, to like a place in spite of mediocre food, it’s equally possible to admire some of the cooking while preferring the notion of sticking a fork into the soft part of your hand rather than having to eat there ever again.
And so: Seabird. In contrast to the downlit lobby, the 14th-floor space looks like some faux beachside cabin: floppy palm fronds, grubby, white-painted floorboards, huge raffia lampshades and rickety-looking bamboo-style furniture that makes a man of my size nervous. Music booms around the raw brick, concrete and wood space. The young people here do not seem to notice. We are first shown to armchair-style seating that makes us sink so low, we could shovel dinner straight off the table into our mouths without lifting it. We ask to move to a standard table. They oblige. It’s not as if they’re full.
Which is where we meet our waiter. People complain when I criticise waiters, given the dismal pay and the misery of dealing with people in general and me in particular. I sympathise. We all hate people and I hate me. But service is a part of the deal and if it’s administered with all the grace of an unlubricated colonoscopy, it has to be mentioned. He insists he will explain the menu, which mostly involves telling us what they do not have: such is the way of a seafood restaurant dependent on that day’s catch. I start to order. He looks at me and nods. I ask if he’s perhaps planning on taking notes. He replies with one word. “No.” You’re really not? “No.” Fair enough. The first three dishes land about five minutes later before the wine has arrived. I ask politely if we might have our wine with our food. “It’s coming.”
Later, when the mains turn up, a side dish of warm fava beans with grated egg and herbed breadcrumbs is missing. He looks baffled when I raise this. A suspicious soul might wonder whether perhaps, without a notebook, it had been forgotten. But that’s unfair. He assures us he’d told us it was not available. Both of us tell him he hadn’t said any such thing. He doesn’t offer to get something else. I do understand clams not being available, but what kitchen runs out of fava beans, breadcrumbs and eggs?
As to that food, it brings a casual London violence to the knotty business of pricing: a small plate of sea bream crudo is £18. It’s a pleasant enough plate of raw fish, but reminds me of Coco Chanel’s advice to stand in front of a mirror once dressed and remove one item before going out. It’s decorated with the punch of romesco sauce, the saltiness of black olive tapenade and what they call a pepper tartar, another way of saying chopped up peppers. Two of those would have been fine; three is too many. Half a dozen small crab buñuelos are £12.50. I expected filled spheres of fried dough. These are more like béchamel-filled croquetas. They are light on the crab and heavy on flour that hasn’t quite been cooked out. Salvation comes in the form of French gillardeau oysters that are sweet and meaty and rewarding, as they should be at £4 each.
It’s tiresome when I bang on about price, isn’t it? Sorry, but it’s not going to stop. Plaice on the bone with piri-piri sauce is £26. How much of a fish would you expect for that? We get half a fish. I find myself wondering where the other half is. It comes away neatly from that bone and the big fiery stew with it has just enough kick. Ditto a whole boned mackerel, opened out and dressed with lots of fresh chilli and smoked paprika. It’s a great piece of fish, with defined tension. It stands up well to the big flavours. It’s £18. By now I’m proper grumpy. The music throbs, the beardy waiters rush around looking earnest and the £32 bottle of godello isn’t taking the edge off. It’s the nearest thing to an affordable wine on a list which has massive choice, but only if you spend more than £40.
And so to dessert. A trio of filled, glazed doughnuts are a moment of joy. A gluten-free manchego cheesecake would have been great, perhaps with the addition of gluten. It really could have done with a base. Grating fresh manchego over the top didn’t help. Manchego is rarely the answer to anything. Most weird is a delightfully sharp lemon granita, with scoops of Chantilly cream which, against the ice, are just so much claggy fat. On the side is a shot of Izarra liqueur, the kind of caustic spirit you drink too much of on a cheap summer holiday, before an ill-advised assignation leading only to regret and a prescription for a broad-spectrum antibiotic.
At one point I try to move the stinky paraffin lamp away and burn my fingers on the glass. As I wince, I look up and spot the industrial sprinkler system across the ceiling. My fingers are sore, my ears are ringing and I’m feeling like a shmuck for being here. All it would take to make everything stop is for the menu to accidentally catch alight on the lamp and the system to trigger. That at least would be an entertaining end to the evening.
News bites
For somewhere serving great seafood without the rattling bass line, grasping prices and lousy service, head to Oystermen Seafood Bar & Kitchen in London’s Covent Garden. There, the oysters come naked or dressed: with spicy buffalo sauce and kosho for example, or with smoked bacon, Worcestershire sauce and Tabasco. Follow that with roasted halibut, whole marinated sea bream or get busy with the accessories and have the whole Devon brown crab with aioli (oystermen.co.uk).
Nour Cash and Carry, a venerable shop in Brixton’s covered Market Row, known for its massive range of cheap ingredients serving the area’s diverse community, is being threatened with eviction by new landlords Hondo Enterprises. Hondo, run by wealthy Texan DJ Taylor McWilliams, insist they need the space for an electricity substation, but Nour, which has traded for over two decades, say they have not yet been offered an appropriate alternative. A petition is available to sign in store.
Just three months after he opened Tandem, in Leicester’s Highcross shopping centre, chef Cyrus Todiwala has withdrawn from the business, which has a menu of dishes from across the Indian sub-continent. “Unfortunately, there were differences in vision,” he told Caterer magazine, “I decided it was best to pull back.”
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or follow him on Twitter @jayrayner1
