45 Tothill Street, London SW1 (020 3301 1400). Meal for two, including wine and service: £120
Not far from the Blue Boar Smokehouse, which is a smokehouse much as I am a prima ballerina, is New Scotland Yard. And so it was that I spent much of lunch – less eating, more pushing platefuls to one side – wondering whether there were any statutes under which it would be possible to prosecute the place. Sadly, I concluded that shameless bandwagon jumping, grievous bodily harm to an entire culinary tradition and atrocious cooking are not yet criminal offences. Oh, that they were. This country would be so much the better for it. Make me prime minister. I'll sort it.
The Blue Boar Smokehouse is a grotesque marketing conceit, realised in acres of dark wood veneer, hefty linen and glassware. It occupies the back room of a corporate hotel for businessmen, dreaming only of an in-house movie and a handful of tissues, and feels like two hours of death by PowerPoint, presented by a lifestyle trends consultant who once went to Hoxton. You can imagine the pitch: "dirty food" is cool; people like pulling their pork, whatever that means; fried chicken isn't just for sink estates in Peckham; making this kind of crap is easy and cheap. Fill yer boots.
Or don't. Their ribs arrive dangling out of a mini bucket. Ah yes. I've seen things like this before; it's like experiencing a vicious flashback before you've taken the drugs. The sauce is at first as sharp and acidic as a cheap packet of salt and vinegar crisps and then as sweet as a six-year-old's confection stash. If the meat has spent any time in a smoker, I'm afraid it will take a more acute palate than mine to detect it. My mouth had been brutalised by the sauce. On issues of smoke it had nothing to say.
The least offensive of the main courses is the crab, baked in the shell under a Cajun mayonnaise gunk. It looks like a hefty sneeze into a shell, after a long swim in the sea to clear a cold. To be fair, the first forkful is just about OK. After that it goes from cloying to "please stop" in easy steps. The accompanying chips would have proved a moment of nostalgia for anybody who has ever worked in a fast food joint emptying the freezer bag into the deep fat fryer.
From the list of pulled meats we order the suckling kid: a heap of something tired and drained, violated and one-note sweet arrives on a wooden board next to glazed onion rolls made from a dough so overworked that tearing them open offers the chance to burn all the calories involved in eating them. The dish is completed by a motorway service station coleslaw.
Worse than this is the "southern fried chicken", which must never be granted freedom from within those quotation marks: a tube of breast and a reformed leg, clumsily coated in bright orange crumbs the colour of the cast of TOWIE, fried off so limply that those on the bottom come off on the plate. Underneath lies a banana ketchup which has the honour of being the worst thing I have put in my mouth since the incident with the washing-up liquid when I was seven. It tastes like those sweetshop bananas, blitzed with the remains of someone's forgotten 1970s spice cabinet. It looks like something you would treat with antibiotics.
The dessert menu includes an Eton Tidy for £7, which is not merely a violation of ingredients but also of the English language: splodges of strawberry purée, hard, dusty meringue, flaps of crumbly gel, artfully draped. It's the sort of thing that would get a Professional Masterchef contestant sent home in the quarter finals.
As to wines, a waiter had to be called back to deliver a full measure of the glass I had ordered. Shortly, I expect to receive a press release announcing the relaunch of the restaurant at the Intercontinental Hotel, Westminster. I'll regard that as a very good day for London.
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk. Follow Jay on Twitter @jayrayner1
