4/10
Telephone 0115 847 5587
Address Newdigate House, Castlegate, Nottingham
Open All week, lunch, noon-2pm (Sun 2.30pm); dinner, 7-10pm (Sun 9pm)
Price Around £40 a head, inc wine and service
Menus Lunch, £12.50 for two courses, £16.50 for three
Wheelchair access; no disabled WC
There comes a time in life when being addressed by one's first name by strangers begins to activate the hackles elevator. It's probably one of those signs of nascent middle age that Denis Norden used to find so amusing.
We all moan about the guy from the call centre who rings at 8.30pm to offer an extended warranty on a Sky+ box that costs more than the box, but even in an age of forced chumminess it is unusual to be greeted as an old friend when you ring a restaurant. "All right, Matthew, see you on Tuesday," wasn't so bad the first time, but, "OK, Matt, see you on Monday," when I rang World Service back to alter the booking was pushing it given that my wife has yet to win permission to use the diminutive. One more change of plan, and it would have been, "Wednesday it is then, Matty-Watty".
It doesn't matter that this level of familiarity breeds contempt, since with a restaurant such as this contempt will follow soon enough, anyway. It's more that it raises hopes of a warm and cosy place, a little like Cheers, where everybody knows your name and they're always glad you came.
The reality proved otherwise ... a desultory, charmless and cheerless restaurant in which pretension and mediocrity seem locked together in a desperate duel for supremacy. The sad thing, for those who affect to believe that the foodie revolution has spread beyond London, is that for three years running World Service has been acclaimed the finest restaurant in Nottingham.
Tucked away in a side street off the hideous Maid Marion Way, the bar area at the side hints at the speed of social change. What was once, judging by the honour boards, a British Legion club is now a destination joint for the moneyed in a town centre that's been booming for years.
So much effort has gone into tarting up the bar (baronial fireplace, antique chairs, candelabras, etc) that little was left for the glum, poky eating area. What lip service is paid to global reach comes from animist statues, bowls and wastepaper baskets. The seductive hint of African savannahs and Tuareg campfires is diminished by the view of red-brick office buildings. All it needed to complete the scene of pathos was a lone woman diner reading a cheap novel ... and there she was a few tables away with a Catherine Cookson.
As for the menu, it reads like a pastiche of the vogue for modern British cuisine with heavy oriental influences that went out of vogue in 2001, while the most memorable thing about the cooking is how much it costs. Grilled local goats' cheese with an onion bhaji and pineapple chutney is a perfectly decent starter, albeit not a great test of a chef, but £7.50 is a cheeky mark-up on the ingredients. My "crispy fried" squid (£8) wasn't crispy at all, the batter being disastrously spongy, and far beyond the rescue powers of a perky chilli and grapefruit salad.
The irony, in a place dedicated to overcomplicating dishes with pointless fripperies, was that the one outstanding thing was the fat, chunky and sensationally good chips that came with my friend's adequate loin of red deer (£19.75, if you please) with a celeriac gratin. My main course was styled as "Korean glazed beef" (£19.50), but I haven't the strength for the obligatory dog joke, not least because sirloin of Afghan hound would have had better flavour than this oddly metallic-tasting piece of meat that came in an over-peppered rice noodle consommé with root vegetables deep-fried, tempura-style, twice as cluelessly as the squid. Braised red cabbage looked and tasted supermarket-bought (M&S, at a guess).
Service was competent but a little glacial, a chocolate fondue (£7) was stodgy and bitter, and coffee was poor. We left well aware of the dangers of coming across as metropolitan smartarses, but wondering what the alternative was when the three-time champion of one of our flusher urban centres is such a washout. If it wishes vaguely to live up to its name and escape the confines of undeserved parochial success, World Service sorely needs to do what Charles I did with his royal banner a few yards from its front door in 1642. It needs to raise the standard.
