Inamo, 134 Wardour Street, London W1 (020 7851 7051). Meal for two, with wine and service, £50-80
My reasons for hating Inamo could be many and various. You just know that, at some point in its gestation, phrases such as "fresh dining concept" and "brand innovation" were bandied about. Sometimes, in my darkest hours, I imagine being forced to sit through wretched presentations festering in this sort of rubbish, only then to visualise the later court appearance where I plead guilty to a lesser charge of grievous bodily harm on the grounds of diminished responsibility. The menu is the most irksome sort of garbled pan-Asian hotchpotch, and some of the food is poor and overpriced.
The problem (for me, if not the restaurant) is that the moment I sat down in the dark, minimalist Soho dining room and got to grips with the proposition, a single thought went through my head: "Ooh, I must bring my 10-year-old here. He'd love it." Because, in a way, I already did.
Inamo's shtick is an interactive menu, beamed down on to your table from a projector above. A waitress explained the idea, but gave us only the skimpiest details, presumably because they think that if it requires too much waiter-diner interaction the whole premise is futile. They are right. Even allowing for one accidental order, it is self-explanatory. You run your finger around a laptop-like mouse pad, which brings up a cursor and a bunch of icons. Click on them and pictures of menu items are projected on to the table in front of you. You order your food. It arrives. What larks. There are other things: a few games, local information, a map of the restaurant (strangely useful; finding the loos is a task about which Homer could have written fine legends). There is even a webcam beaming you shots from the kitchen; it showed us stacks of empty crockery.
With all these bells and whistles, most of the food is about as good as it needs to be. It succeeds best with the smaller dishes and when it sticks to the Japanese end of the Asian repertoire, the one exception being long-braised honey-roasted spare ribs in XO sauce, which yielded up their meat quicker than a male stripper at an Essex hen night. We liked slices of seared wild boar rolled around asparagus and enoki mushrooms. Nigiri sushi of unagi (Japanese eel) were in no way a disgrace, the fish still a little warm, as it should be. Salad of sea bass sashimi was fine and the ponzu and wasabi dressing on single oysters had an eye-widening freshness.
It all fell apart in the larger dishes. Cinnamon chicken brought lumps of bird in a crust the colour of an old scab, and one that was so heavy with cinnamon it tasted like a candle shop smells. Alongside were halves of lime that had apparently been prepped sometime in the last decade. They were so hard and dried out I didn't know whether to squeeze them or exfoliate with them.
Worse, for being sillier, was their take on crispy duck with pancakes. Who, in God's name, thought attempting this dish was a good idea? Unlike those served in Chinatown, the skin on theirs was floppy and sweaty, the meat just a little damp. The sauce had a medicinal back taste. And replacing sliced spring onions and cucumber with bean sprouts was an innovation the world had not been waiting for.
Then there is the price. Royal China charges £12 for a quarter of crispy duck; here it's £16.50. Surely if you've done away with the grisly business of waiters writing stuff down there must be savings to pass on?
Things perked up again with their desserts – a good crème brûlée and a deep green pandan-flavoured macaroon and white chocolate mousse with a lemongrass and coconut sorbet, only let down by tiresomely overwrought presentation.
No matter. Inamo is fun, and if you choose carefully you can eat well. All done, we clicked on the icon to bring the bill. A message was beamed on to the table: "Once you request the bill no one in your group can order any more items." They really should teach that computer some manners.
