Tapas 37, 37 Ecclestone Square, London SW1V 1PB (020 3489 1000). Meal for two, including drinks and service: £120
Ten minutes into our lunch at Tapas 37, the new restaurant inside the Ecclestone Square Hotel in London’s Pimlico, the fire alarm went off. It was a vast hacking noise like a goose with bronchitis. Our sweet, eager waitress ran down the narrow dining room flapping her hands while bellowing “It’s just a test” and rolling her eyes with a theatrical shrug, as if to say “What can you do?” Some might wonder why a hotel which has invested money in a new restaurant, including hiring a chef with some big restaurant action on his CV, would then schedule a fire alarm test for the lunch service. Personally, I can’t help but fantasise about how much better a day it would have been for all involved, had the fire alarm been real.
I wouldn’t wish a fire on anybody’s business. But at least if we had been evacuated by a false alarm I wouldn’t have had to eat their food. They in turn wouldn’t have had to read this review. It would have been a win-win.
The Ecclestone Square Hotel is all shiny and polished and black and white. It’s as I imagine Simon Cowell’s hall might be: a touch Athena poster, a touch posh cosmetic surgeon’s waiting room. I didn’t know whether to order lunch or request Botox. Automatic front doors swish and gasp. Shiny, polished staff brood over the front desk to one side of the hall, while on the other side there’s a cocktail lounge with an enormous 3D TV. As I already see in 3D I don’t regard this as a boon. We will be the only obvious punters in the hotel for the first 90 minutes, if you don’t count the woman who appears to have locked herself in the basement toilet. There seems to be just the one for the entirety of the public spaces. I find my companion outside it, frowning at the door. “Someone’s been in there for more than 15 minutes,” she hisses at me. “I tried knocking quietly but a woman squealed. Then she fell silent. Maybe she’s dead.”
We decide to cross our legs and retreat upstairs to our table and the eventual ice breaker that is the fire alarm. The website names the new chef, but I won’t. Apparently he has worked with Gordon Ramsay, Jason Atherton and at the world renowned Arzak in Spain. This is not small stuff. It is why I came. Who knows what an Arzak alumnus might be capable of? Now he’s here with a menu of tapas, inspired by “authentic French cuisine” which showcases “charming little recipes” and is driven by the desire to share “small French family dishes”. These include Spanish croquettes. There are three on the menu. We choose the chilli cheese and the ham and cheese, and mutter shamefully of Findus crispy pancakes. The waitress says the shrimp croquettes are actually the best, so we order those instead of the cheese and ham.
She doesn’t bring them to us. Not that we notice immediately because it takes a while to distinguish between the various fried balls of flavoured béchamel that she has managed to deliver. Eventually we end up with the shrimp ones, too. They all taste nearly the same, varying only on vague back notes of chilli or shrimp. In retrospect they will turn out to be the most edible part of the meal. We will become nostalgic for those darling croquettes.
They’re also our introduction to the kitchen’s version of tomato ketchup, a gummy condiment full of machismo and casual violence. It is shockingly sweet and acidic and has a texture that usually only comes with the application of industrial emulsifiers, which is remarkable given it must have been made without them. It turns up again in a dish listed as “tinned sardines”. It is one whole fish, presented in a faux sardine tin, lying on a plank of oily crouton, smeared with a bitter tapenade and more of the tomato stuff. It is meant, I think, to be witty. It looks like something prepared by a desperate Great British Menu contestant who didn’t quite understand the brief. It looks silly. It tastes worse, a big whack of bitter and salt and sugar and missed opportunities. We leave most of it.
Coquilles Saint Jacques, a single modest-sized scallop for £10.50, looks like a faithful version of the dish. The shellfish should come under a burnished topping of a roux-based sauce with breadcrumbs. Here the sauce had split so that beneath the topping was a watery puddle. It had a lightly bitter back taste. Still, it wasn’t as ill-advised as the “deconstructed” boeuf bourguignon. The centre piece was a lump of untrimmed short rib, complete with connective tissue where it had clung to the bone. It had clearly been braised a while before, then sliced up and chilled. It had only just about been brought up to warm enough before being glazed. For the lardons, there was a sizable block of exceptionally fatty pork belly, so marble white that I thought at first it was potato. It wobbled as I carved. It was too much fat for me, and that’s the first time I have typed those words together. Alongside some button mushrooms were heaps of deep fried breadcrumbs which began to coagulate as the plate chilled. It was, I suppose, a deconstruction of a boeuf bourguignon. It was also the systematic dismantling of all my culinary hopes and dreams.
Next on this menu of small French family dishes: duck spring rolls with bok choi, splattered with another assault by tomato sauce. The spring rolls were thick and heavy and had not spent long in the deep-fat fryer – some of the pastry inside was uncooked. Outside in the hall an industrial strength vacuum cleaner started up because, as we know from the fire alarm episode, at Ecclestone Square housekeeping waits for nothing. Not even lunch in their own restaurant.
The best dish of the day was a slightly overset plug of mango cheesecake with an unadvertised scoop of refreshing blackcurrant sorbet. The three rectangles of pastry in a chocolate and pear millefeuille were dry, tired and under-sweetened. The two lumps of pear were completely unripe. They were hard to the edge of my knife. And that detail sums up the place. Why would an experienced chef, one with time at Arzak on his CV, choose to serve an unripe pear? It baffles me. But not quite as much as the £120 bill we were presented with. Come, friendly fire alarms.
Jay’s news bites
■ Last week I recommended Palomar on London’s Rupert Street. This week go a few doors down to Morada Brindisa, the most recent outpost of the Spanish group. The counter is still the place for the familiar repertoire, but there’s also a charcoal grill oven for legs of milk-fed lamb and roasted hunks of suckling pig with crackling like glass. Just get your order in as you sit down (brindisatapaskitchens.com).
■ From the ‘morally dubious products’ department: Prezzybox is selling a range of ‘booze tubes’ to disguise the alcohol you’re bringing in to, say, a dry festival, as a hair brush, sunscreen or even a tampon. The latter come in packs of five. I am only the messenger (prezzybox.com).
■ Chef Tony Singh, who ran the much-loved Oloroso in Edinburgh before his more recent TV career, is to return to restaurants. He is opening a ‘fun’ venture inside the Apex Hotel in Grassmarket in the city. The menu will include haggis pakora, and ice cream floats topped with penny sweets (apexhotels.co.uk).
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or follow him on Twitter@jayrayner1@jayrayner1
