Spice Market, 10 Wardour Street, London W1 (020 7758 1088). Meal for two, including wine and service £140
At the southwestern corner of Central Park in Manhattan is a glorious restaurant called Jean Georges, where nothing bad can ever happen. It is the flagship, high-end outpost of the Alsatian chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten's empire and, while it costs about the same as a Portuguese bail-out to eat there, the food is so good it's hard to begrudge the bill. There is a very specific, clean palate to the cooking, which is full of perfectly balanced spice and acidity.
Sadly, this is not a review of that restaurant. It is a review of Spice Market, one of Vongerichten's "diffusion brands" which has just been imported from New York to a flash new hotel on the corner of Leicester Square. Jean Georges is all subtle tones and grown-up elegance. Spice Market is meant to be all lounge vibe, downlighters and open kitchens, the food a Pan-Asian crash and clatter. Or, as the website puts it: "with each new dish patrons are transported to the idealisation of a Vietnamese street market or a Thai food stall". Oh that this were true; time and again I wished I could indeed be transported to anywhere else but here.
It feels as if it is targeted at those crashing the corporate plastic, or the sort of crowd who wouldn't care what they were being fed, as long as they were properly back lit. It comes with the usual stupidities of such places. There was, for example, the refusal to sell me a glass of sparkling water because they only do it by the large bottle. Our table in the downstairs bar area was so low that if I positioned my feet beneath my knees, I lifted the whole thing up five inches. We asked to be moved and were taken upstairs to the restaurant I assumed I had booked into, a space of heavy tables and curved booths filled with scatter cushions I immediately scattered so I could sit comfortably.
We ate one good dish: crisp, warm samosas filled with a lightly spiced minced chicken and a mint raita for dipping. A bowl of ginger rice with a fried egg wasn't bad either. The rest worked on that carefully calibrated scale between awful and mediocre. The worst concoction was a salmon tartar with avocado and radish in a ginger broth. A version of this is a key dish at Jean Georges, where it features tuna. This was a take on it, though only as if realised by someone who has merely read about it. The raw fish needs texture. Here the salmon is blitzed unto slop. It sits on a mush of avocado, surrounded by a dribble of the ginger broth which is one note rather than the operatic composition of the original. Eating it felt like meeting an old friend down on his luck. Yours for £10.50. Four small slices of sea bass sashimi dressed with green chilli, pistachio and mint – £18 – are one long gastronomic shrug.
And so it goes on. I adore laksas – those chilli-spiked, coconut milk-slicked noodle soups from Singapore. A place in Farringdon does a brilliant one for £8. Here it costs £22 and is merely workmanlike. Two giant seared prawns, left to rest in the soup, had gone mushy. Onion and chilli-crusted beef short ribs with egg noodles and pea shoots sounds lovely. Sadly that menu description is the high point. The meat was tender, all right. Then again if you braised me long enough I would be, too. It was completely lacking in flavour.
By dessert we had lost the will to carry on and so ordered their bag of cookies – three very large ones for £6 which, unlike everything else, didn't feel like a total rip off. Plus the bag gave us the option of eating them elsewhere. With a £28 bottle of South African sauvignon blanc, we had run up a bill of over £140. Far better versions of all these dishes can be found at a third of the price elsewhere in London. As we left I consoled myself with a single thought: this is one restaurant I will never have to visit again.
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or visit theguardian.com/profile/jayrayner for all his reviews in one place
