Telephone: 020 7404 6114
Address: Kitchen, 10 Covent Garden, 61-65 Great Queen Street, London WC2.
Dinner for two, including wine and service, £70.
There is a striking trend right now to give new restaurants names like Home or Lounge or Living Room. This does nothing for me. When I go out to dinner, the last place I want to be is anywhere that reminds me of where I live. In any case, to be anything like my home, these places would have to boast curtain rails that were coming away from the wall or crusty spots of flaking paintwork. The fact is, they never do look like my pad; they look like the homes of those fashion-victim friends of mine who take wallpaper* magazine too seriously and think there's nothing worth sniggering about in the name of Smeg kitchen appliances.
The latest addition to this crop is Kitchen, the public restaurant at a new members-only complex of bars called 10 Covent Garden, situated in that part of central London. Naturally, it looks nothing like my kitchen. For a start, suspended above the heads of diners are naked human figures - two women guarding one man - moulded, in acute anatomical detail, from fine chicken wire. My companion Tim, the steel-furniture mogul, and I were seated below the humungous nether regions of the male of this trio. Granted, when the wine gets flowing, there's a lot of bollocks talked around my kitchen table, but there's never any hanging from the ceiling.
So we turned our eyes away from the meat and potatoes above us to those on offer on the menu. At the far end of the long, bleached-out room stands an open kitchen with a large rotisserie oven. It is this which dominates. The salads, the crusty breads, the soup all play second fiddle to what comes out of the oven or off the grill. It is, in its well-thought-out simplicity, one of the most appealing menus I have read in a long time. Which is to say that it contains lots of things which I am happiest eating.
For my starter, I went for the toasted focaccia bread with roasted red onions and cheese at £1.95. It was light and crisp and came with a sharp slick of oil and vinegar that lifted the caramelised onions away from the cloying. Tim chose the soup of the day (£3.95), a rustic tomato with cheese, so dense it could have been eaten with a fork. He was offered French bread that turned up on the bill at a pretty unreasonable £1.50. And so, from small beginnings, does the bill begin to mount.
For my main course, I had no option but to go for the roast chicken, for which I am a complete sucker. A few years ago, the chef Simon Hopkinson published a fabulous cookbook called Roast Chicken and Other Stories , which, to me, is a title that gets to the very heart of the sensuous pleasure of eating well. The best dishes are always the simplest ones. This one was listed as 'Herman, spit-roasted English-bred free-range chicken', which I found a little disconcerting: I have a cat called Herman and, while he can be irritating, I don't think I could yet bring myself to shove him on a spit.
Apparently Herman is a breed of hen. The chicken, and all the grills, come with chips or mash and a choice of two sauces from a list of a dozen. Some, like curried lychee with mango, may well have been put there for a laugh. I went for a rich onion gravy and a creamy honey mustard: both had real depth and had been made with some care. As to the half chicken, at £8.75, it was a very good bit of bird but oddly disappointing. It lacked a crisp outer bite and was just a little soft and uninspiring.
Tim chose the fish of the day, a generous serving of grilled sea bass for £14.25, with spring onions, ginger and sesame oil which, he said, was altogether too greasy. A chilli, plum and ginger sauce, which our waiter recommended, was far too strident though a subtle lemon zest, thyme and garlic sauce was more successful. We finished with a lemon tart and a crème caramel, both of which passed muster.
There's a short Ferrari of a wine list which accelerates from house wines at £13.50 to reach £65 in just 10 bottles. We chose a crisp Sauvignon Blanc at £20 which turned up on the bill at £27.50 because the till had been programmed with the wrong price. It makes you wonder how many other people didn't notice the overcharging. It left us with a sense that a place which had promised so much in so unpretentious manner had somehow failed to deliver and that, at £70 for two, it was a lot more expensive than the refreshingly utilitarian approach had suggested. It was a pity, is all.
Our evening had a fitting end. We waved down a black cab and asked it to take us to south London. He refused and, as I remonstrated, drove off while I was still hanging on to the door handle. It came off in my hand and is sitting here on my desk. So, driver of cab 14922, should you want your handle back, you know where to find it.
Contact Jay Rayner on jay.rayner@observer.co.uk
