Any prejudice based on the colour of a person's skin is repugnant. If the people of Chigwell, in the (gold) sovereign state of Essex want to be orange – a David Dickinson, on the self-tan scale – that's entirely their affair. Likewise, mocking a suburb's taste for carriage drives, porticos and ancestral lions formed out of genuine concrete is lazy, cheap and unkind.
Unfortunately, in the right circumstances I am more than capable of being all three of these and a visit to Sheesh, housed in a hunk of 600-year-old Tudor pub, is the right circumstances. My only defence is one of provocation, beginning with the life-sized statue of an Ottoman warrior atop his steed that dominates the car park. I squinted at it. The face looked familiar: the pubic stubble, the furrowed brow. Could this be a monument to Alan Sugar, lord of this domain, on account of the fact he owns it?
Across the terrace, go past the vintage MG roadster, the open boot of which serves as a waiters' station, and you're inside what might be called a seriously classy space – if you were 14 and had drunk your bodyweight in Advocaat. Everything is bound in fake crocodile skin-style chocolate leather: the floors, the chairs, the banquettes. It's like being trapped inside Lord Sugar's wallet. Through the gussied-up pub and you come to an open-kitchened modern extension full of shiny tables, over which hang gold chandeliers so big and pendulous you don't know whether to turn them on or suckle from them. Upstairs is a bar where the fake crocodile skin turns a Baileys shade of cream and the chairs are covered in cow skin. Sheesh is completely bonkers. If the decor hadn't tempted me to fantasise about torching the place their refusal to admit children under 11 would have sealed it.
The virtue of this sort of design – I use the term loosely – is that they could serve almost any food here: French, Chinese, a selection of roast cats. At the moment it is, as the name suggests, Turkish, which is no bad thing. Having just returned from a holiday on the southern Turkish coast I found the menu familiar. It is full of the dips, salads and grills which are the portion of Turkey's repertoire tourists generally get to experience.
The Sheesh aubergine salad is smokey and fresh. The minced lamb topping on their lahmacun, a kind of Turkish pizza, may lack zest and brio but there's no doubting the quality of the flat bread. The squid in a tomato and garlic sauce is better than most of the squid dishes I tried in Turkey, not having the texture of bus tyre.
The main courses are equally solid, down to the side dishes of buttery rice with vermicelli noodles, the pickled red cabbage and the raw-onion salad sprinkled with sumac, the ubiquitous citrus-flavoured spice. A mixed grill brought more than serviceable lamb and chicken sheesh and a particularly good adana kofte, the highly spiced meatball formed on a flat iron skewer before grilling. More impressively, grilled monkfish hadn't been cooked to death. The baklava, however, being served warm, was grounds for a letter of complaint from the Turkish ambassador.
And the cost of all this? Well, a ludicrous amount if you compare it to what you might pay in Fethiye or, being more reasonable, the Turkish grill houses of north London. Then again, those grill houses do not have mammarian chandeliers, banquettes in faux crocodile skin or gold leaf. And, of course, there are no sculptures of Alan Sugar. Those sorts of things won't pay for themselves. You will have to be the one to do that. But the tangerine self-tan is optional.
