77 Curtain Road, London EC2 (020 7729 2966)
Meal for two, including drinks and service £110
I like the name of this week's restaurant. Beard to Tail could be a dodgy website catering to niche tastes, and that's always going to make me snigger. I also liked reading the menu. It's as filthily written as Beard to Tail sounds: bourbon BBQ ribs, baked bone marrow with soft herbs, wild-boar faggots, braised pork cheeks, offal salad, meaty beans. Beard to Tail is the literal translation of the French phrase that gives us the word barbecue. You get its shtick. And now you'll know why I booked a table. The menu could have had a subhead that reads: "We wrote this for you, Rayner – get here!"
Reading is probably the only thing you'll enjoy doing at this joint. After eating there I wanted to nick the menu and give it to someone with enough talent to realise its potential. It is one long masterclass in disappointment. It's a wretched indictment of a gruesome kind of Shoreditch hipsterism which turns perving over dirty burgers into a spectator sport. It's all "pimp this" and "drool over that". It's the ballad of saturated animal fats, which is a song I like to sing; sadly, this lot cannot carry the tune. They've made such a bloody effort to be on trend – the website booking, the 90-minute table allocations, the Greenwich Village bare-brick walls, the industrial fittings, the stygian gloom so dense you think you've developed macular degeneration between the door and the table – and have forgotten the one thing that matters: cooking properly.
We arrive for our 9pm table to be told they can't do the crispy pigs' ears or crackling and that they've run out of trotters stuffed with bacon, sage and onion. All the extremities are off. So we order a half-rack of ribs, which come with a thin, bitter dipping sauce. In a town which has finally got a handle on real barbecue these are a dismal offering: a big whack of sweet and salt and not much else. If they went near a smoker rather than the oven, it's not obvious. The bone marrow dish is much worse. The marrow/herb mixture is so dry and powdery you don't know whether to eat it or snort it; the mix is stuffed inside lengths of sawn bones which are clearly reused time and again. Worse still is a feeble portion of overcooked and under-seasoned duck livers on toast from what looks like sliced bread.
The nadir of the meal is a main-course offal salad with bubble and squeak. It is a "salad" in the sense of an assemblage, but not in the sense of containing a leaf or frond. It is full of overcooked, black, massacred and unidentifiable things, save for grim kidneys. We can identify them. I like a bit of uric tang as much as the next offal freak, but this was pure essence of NCP car park stairwell. The bubble and squeak is a cake of mashed potato with absolutely no sign of having been seared to crisp in a hot pan. It is laziness made out of food.
Far better is a sweet-cured pork chop, sensitively cooked with even the occasional sign of a char. But it's only better relative to everything else. The meaty beans do at least match their description. It's a solid, hearty bowlful utilising leftover bits of animal. A side of "allotment-box mixed vegetables" is, however, the most grotesque bit of grandstanding. Look at us, the big groovy city restaurant with our veg-box account. Now watch as we boil the contents until it's a deathly mush to be consumed by a victim of acute gum disease who's misplaced their dentures.
Then come the "double-dipped fat daddy chips". Which is another way of saying "we can't be fagged to cut up the potatoes properly". They are pieces of undercooked potato the size of sofa cushions. We do not eat them. They do not ask why. Desserts are a burnt English cream with the heavy crème patisserie texture you usually get from adding cornflour to the mix, and a cheesecake of the sort you can buy in a 24-hour convenience store at 3am when you are totally bladdered. And suddenly I wish Beard to Tail really was an obscene website; I would probably have got more entertainment out of it.
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or visit theguardian.com/profile/jayrayner for all his reviews in one place
