Telephone: 020 7222 2555
Address: Cinnamon Club, the Old Westminster Library, Great Smith Street, London SW1.
Dinner for two, including wine and service, £105.
You can know too much about a restaurant, and I know way too much about this one. I know about the £2.6m it cost to set up the Cinnamon Club and the dozens of staff employed there and the three-year struggle to make it happen. I also know its owner, Iqbal Wahab, and I like him. He's a charismatic and energetic chap who had a brave ambition - to launch a glamorous upmarket Indian restaurant - then made it happen. But all that knowledge must be put aside when it comes to answering the only question that really matters: is it a nice place to go for dinner? Happily, I can be definitive on this. The answer is, sort of.
The Cinnamon Club occupies the site of what was previously the old Westminster library, a grand lump of red-brick Victoriana not far from the House of Commons. Already some commentators have held up the development as a marker for all that is wrong about 21st-century London. A a cathedral of learning has been replaced by one where fat wallets spend their largesse on increasing their largeness. I don't think that's entirely fair. It makes it sound like a gang of crack restaurateurs abseiled down the walls and flung themselves in through the leaded windows before burning the books and proclaiming kitchen rule. It didn't happen like that. Westminster council closed the library and offered up the building to a commercial interest. Iqbal Wahab won the lease. At least it's not another bloody office block.
The conversion is impressive. It's a cool, calm space with a lovely airy vault, fine parquet floors and great stretches of brown-leather panelling. It is, however, a space that I suspect lends itself better to lunches than dinners. It's very hard to bring any kind of night-time intimacy to a room this open, however much clever lighting you use. Perhaps it's simply a matter of developing a sociable buzz about the place, which can only come with time.
On one of the other important elements that make a good restaurant - the waiting staff - the Cinnamon Club scores highly.
That leaves the third and, inevitably, most important element: the food. This is where I have my gravest doubts. It's not that the food is bad - we ate a few impressive dishes. But I don't think the whole proposition yet fulfills the ambitions that the Cinnamon Club has set for itself. There are now two Indian restaurants in London - Zaika and Tamarind - each with a Michelin star. The idea of upmarket Indian food is therefore not exactly old hat but nor is it cutting-edge stuff. To play the game, you have to be very good, and the Cinnamon Club isn't - not yet.
The problem was defined, I think, by the amuse-gueule: a chickpea samosa on a sweet tamarind sauce. It came on beautiful porcelain with a dainty fork which could not penetrate the pastry shell. It was just too thick and heavy. My companion was the Observer political editor, Kamal Ahmed, who, because of the restaurant's proximity to the Commons, may well spend a lot of lunches here, squeezing political contacts until they leak. He summed it up perfectly. 'Nice flavour,' he said. 'Bad texture.'
Things perked up greatly with the starters. Kamal enthused over his chargrilled sea bream with a pomegranate extract. It was a fine piece of fish, expertly cooked - crisp on the outside and yet still tender within. The spice kick came subtly and the sweetness of the sauce played beautifully against it. My selection of scallop, salmon and king prawn was also good stuff. All the fish was perfectly cooked and there was a gentleness to the tandoori spicing that left an impression without overwhelming the flavour of the seafood itself. If everything had been as balanced as these two dishes, this review would be an out-and-out rave.
It was the main courses that let us down. Kamal ordered Goan spiced duck with curry-leaf flavoured semolina. The duck breast was served in the Western style - sliced and pink - and didn't meld at all with the other elements on the plate. 'It needed a different kind of meat entirely,' Kamal said.
I was equally unconvinced by my tandoori lamb sweetbreads and kidneys with vegetable rice. Here, the problem was not the meat. This was a clever piece of cooking that managed to let through its flavour and texture while bringing in the tandoori spicing as grace notes. It was all the other stuff: the less-than-stunning rice and, in particular, a puddle of curried mince with peas, that just seemed a little vulgar. It was not what I wanted from a dish priced £13.50.
The puddings lifted the game. The saffron poached pears with cinnamon ice cream were delicate and soothing. Likewise, my steamed mango rice cakes with wild berry sorbet, while not something to shout about from the former library's roof tops, was soft and pleasing. But it was the memory of the below-par main course that lingered.
We drank a butch Portuguese red from the well-thought-out wine list, and altogether the bill hit £105 for two. For that sort of dosh, there shouldn't be any duff notes at all. It took Iqbal Wahab an awful lot of work to get the Cinnamon Club up and running. To make all that effort worthwhile, I think there's a little more work left to do.
Contact Jay Rayner on jay.rayner@observer.co.uk.
