Ooze, 62 Goodge St, London, W1(020 7436 9444)
Meal for two including wine and service, £60
Here's what I want to know: why didn't somebody stop them? Why didn't one of their investors, hearing the name for the first time, say, for God's sake no! Ooze is a bloody awful name for a restaurant. It's a dog of a name. It shouts seepage. It bellows muddy outflow. Infected wounds ooze. Please try again.
It is no better, really, when you know the name has been given to a restaurant dedicated to risotto, not least because in their declaration of intent, the Ooze team say they are against risottos 'loaded with butter and Parmesan', the ingredients which are likely to give a risotto the creaminess they are trying to evoke with the very word ooze. You can ask for Parmesan to be added, but it isn't part of the credo.
In his gargantuan new book, Made in Italy, Giorgio Locatelli dedicates more than 70 pages to risotto and talks at length about the importance of the mantecatura, the final beating in of butter and cheese, which gives a good risotto its luscious qualities. Clearly the Ooze team don't agree with Mr Locatelli, and this tells you almost everything you need to know. Because the biggest failing of Ooze is not the lousy name, or even the concept, but that their risottos aren't any cop.
I feel bad about this, because the sense I got from my visit was of an enthusiastic team, who are really going for it. They think they have come up with the concept that London needs. (I'm sure that somewhere in their business plan was a line about how carb-light, Atkins-style diets are going out of fashion, creating an opening for a restaurant with a carb-heavy, rice-based menu.) Our waiters were eager to please and there is a clean, utilitarian feel to the space that lends itself well to a weekday lunch. But there is no matching understanding of simplicity in the food. If only there had been a straight-up saffron risotto on the menu, or one with wild mushrooms and nothing else. Instead, everything is overworked, and the risottos - priced from £8 to £10 - become less a medium than a base. The wild mushroom risotto comes inexplicably with cherry tomatoes. There's sea bass risotto with more cherry tomatoes, olives and basil. There's a chicken, tarragon, leek and grain mustard risotto.
Or there's the one I tried (so you wouldn't have to), the all-day breakfast risotto: loose and watery (rather than creamy) rice, mined with fatty chunks of undercooked pancetta, two small Spanish sausages on top, and piled off to the side, a heap of warmed but not cooked cherry tomatoes. Buried inside was a poached egg which, when split, only added to the wateriness. Or there's the other one we ordered: a red wine risotto with no depth of flavour, topped with undercooked red onions and slices of sirloin steak. It's a bad idea to start with, made worse by the cooking of the steak to a uniform grey.
It was a rare moment of overcooking, because as with those tomatoes on my risotto and the red onions on my companion's, there was a distinct lack of enthusiasm for heat: a starter of grilled vegetables was undercooked, as was the cold, less-than-toasted bread in some mediocre bruschetta. Still, they do serve a good crumble - apple, sultana and mixed berries on the day we went - and I rather liked my (under-) burnt Alaska. But the reason for being there completely missed the mark. There may well be a case for a dedicated risotto restaurant in London. Sadly, at the moment, this isn't it.
