Portal, 88 St John Street, London EC1 (020 7253 6950)
Meal for two, with wine and service, £90
I understand how good restaurants come into being. My imagination is rich enough to grasp the levels of incompetence required to make a bad one. What I don't understand is how a restaurant can be both good and bad at the same time. The Observer style book rightly forbids us from using the word schizophrenic to describe a split personality, because it is not an accurate account of the illness. Instead, to give you a sense of Portal, a new Portuguese-cum-French place in London's Clerkenwell, I will quote Longfellow: 'When she was good she was very very good, but when she was bad she was horrid.' Quite so.
Maybe it was my fault for attempting another Portuguese restaurant. After all, it's only a few weeks since I was chewing my way through gristle at Tugga. Still, I can't write off a whole culinary tradition on the basis of one pig's ear. Or at least, not yet.
Unlike Tugga, Portal is elegantly designed, with a sexy, dimly lit bar at the front giving way to an airy glass-walled dining room. We were shown to a tiny table for two and asked for a larger one, but were refused because it was booked for three. Naturally, 10 minutes later just two people were seated at it. After that, service was both lovely, and not. There were attempts to remove glasses before we had finished, wine was double charged for and one waitress refused to answer any questions at all. And yet, most of the time, when we got the right person, service was cheery and thoughtful.
It's the same story with the food. At the start, we were brought a platter which included a pleasing octopus salad. It also had some very unpleasing squares of feta cheese drizzled with a fruit coulis. 'Never trust a people who pickle their cheese,' the food writer Jeffrey Steingarten once said of feta and the Greeks, and I'm with him. Finally, there was a shot glass of nasty carrot soup, which, according to my companion, 'had the rotting vegetable smell of the washing-up water after a dinner party'. But then came three dishes from the tapas menu, and they were great: sweet clams in a wine-rich broth, a platter of perfectly kept charcuterie, some light salt-cod fritters.
Main courses were also uneven.
A very good and gamey caramelised duck breast served pink for her, some over-salted fillets of John Dory, with even more salty fried ravioli of cuttlefish for me. Both plates came with exactly the same chunks of boiled cauliflower and broccoli for no obvious reason, save to make up the numbers.
A mixed platter of their puddings, including a sweet and bitter burnt custard and a dollop of something hot and chocolatey, brightened the mood. This was followed by good coffee and two petit fours each, one of which was good and one of which, naturally enough, wasn't. Oh well. At least there was consistency in Portal's inconsistency.
