Telephone: 020 7928 1111
Address: 74 Blackfriars Road, London SE1
Meal for two, including wine and service (but excluding vodka), £80
I didn't have my drinking head on the night we went to Baltic, which is a shame both for me and for Baltic.
If I'd been in the mood to attack properly the fabulous list of flavoured vodkas, served at £2.50 a shot in lovely chilled glasses, I probably wouldn't have noticed the gruesome shortcomings.
But I wasn't and I did. This is the truth: to enjoy Baltic you must be completely off your face, which is possibly the worst thing I can say about any restaurant anywhere.
I used to be a regular at Wodka in Kensington, a fine place with a great line in herrings, pickles and, of course, vodka. Baltic, which occupies a huge space of distressed walls and gnarled beams in Waterloo, is its offspring, but comes across only as Wodka on steroids. There is something bloated and unwieldy about it.
The experience starts with the gloomy waiters in the cumbersome dining area beyond the bar: the tall bloke who looked put out when I refused to choose my wife's bread for her as she was in the loo; the flat-faced one who kept trying to take away our glasses before we'd finished; the frightening one with sharp implements in her hair. Too much of the booze and just looking at this lot would turn you from happy drunk to maudlin drunk.
The food manages to be both OK and very not OK, a neat trick for one kitchen to achieve. Pat's starter of rocket salad with baby beetroot and artichokes was a big pile of leaves with some pretty tasty adornments. My blinis were appropriately soft and pillow-like and came with solidly textured marinated herrings and dill pickles. So far, so Polish, which is to say not high art, but satisfying.
Next, after a gap of, ooh, 90 seconds, come the main courses, except mine is nothing like what I ordered. I send it back. We peer at Pat's. She had ordered roast cod with a saffron crayfish sauce. It comes on a bed of mash. This is odd because the waitress had insisted a side order of mash would be a really good idea. It turns up and we refuse it. I sit gloomily watching Pat eat. The dish is tepid and the crayfish overcooked, but there's a good saffron flavour to the sauce and the fish is well executed.
Naturally, just as Pat has finished hers, my sautéed veal sweetbreads with wild mushrooms and bacon turns up, and she gets to watch me eat. It is a generous portion. The sweetbreads are well cooked and I like the savouriness of the bacon. Two things occur to me, though. The first is that we didn't need the other side dish at all. The second is that the 'wild' mushrooms are almost entirely shitake, which are about as wild as our cat.
It is still terribly early because the service has, impressively, managed to be both desperately poor and desperately fast. Nevertheless Pat declines a pudding. I order a créme brûlée with sour cherries and am rewarded for my stupidity with the worst créme brûlée I have ever eaten: a sugar top as thick as the bottom of a pint glass and a créme which is curdled. Nasty.
The bill for this dismal experience, including two shots of vodka each, is just shy of £90. I consider cutting off the 12.5 per cent discretionary service, but decide not to because they at least apologise for the cock-ups and give us a complimentary glass of strawberry vodka which neither of us wanted.
In the end, though, I wish I had refused to pay it. The cab home, which they book through a company they use regularly, tries to rip us off by charging £15 for a £10 fare. Really, it's enough to drive you to drink.
