In the world of food, the margins by which good and bad ideas are defined can be extraordinarily thin. You only have to read any seasoned reviewer venting about how a restaurant has trashed their menu with unnecessary ingredients to appreciate this. In the world of fine dining – or even good dining – anyone serving food has to get the specifics just right to deliver. This is the problem food critics suffer from. One tiny flaw in a book or a film can easily be lost in the work, but in food, you have to look out for everything.
Of course, sometimes restaurants make it remarkably easy for you by fouling up the whole thing completely. Not too long ago, I was in a hotel restaurant in Brighton where I was unfortunately subjected to some of the very worst food it has ever been my misfortune to eat. You occasionally get food which looks like it has been kept under a heat lamp for a while. This stuff tasted like it had been cooked under a lamp from start to finish. There are a few reasons I only focus on London eating with this blog, one of them being that I don't get around outside London enough to warrant a broad enough spread of reviews, but if I did I would be sure to give this particular restaurant the panning it deserves.
The other extreme is where everything is just about perfect and it all works. I feel a bit guilty writing a perfect review (there haven't been many), but it rarely happens so I suppose we don't need to worry about that. The rest of the time, we pick through everything to find flaws amongst great works, flies in the ointment, plastic in the dessert (which has actually happened to me) and so on…
As happens so often in life, I turn to the stunning Frasier to illustrate a point. The perversity of the critic is summed up perfectly by a quote from Kelsey Grammar's character: "what is the one thing better than an exquisite meal..? An exquisite meal with one tiny flaw we can pick at all night."
Back in July I had stopped in at the relatively new Clarendon in Notting Hill, which is branded as "Holland Park and Notting Hill's newest pub, cocktail lounge bar and restaurant." I was already wary of the place with a description like that; they were clearly running the gamete with their introduction. However, it was a Taste London offer, so a friend (whom I owed a meal) and I went in for dinner.
The evening was a cavalcade of small flaws which brought the whole thing down. The first problem with The Clarendon is that it suffers from the same malady as Paradise By Way Of Kensal Green: it doesn't know what it's trying to be. You can tell from the description above (from their website, I might add) that they're trying to cover all the bases, which does not work in general. What you usually get is typified with The Clarendon: a hollow hall of confused nothingness. Which is a real shame because their main room is quite pretty in an earthy way.
The starter I sampled was a double-mistake. Mixing chorizo with scallops is a bad idea. Particularly when the chorizo is as dry as jerky and the scallops have been more or less bunged on the plate with little work. I'm all for simplicity and letting ingredients speak for themselves, but when you're preparing food so clumsily it doesn't work.
We split a chateaubriand for the main course which looked impressive but didn't deliver. Served with a roasted head of garlic, a deluge of red wine sauce and some mushrooms, it should've been fantastic. Instead it was a waste of steak and just about everything else on the plate. Average quality meat, poorly seasoned sauces and very uninspired on all counts. And that really is a shame, considering you're shelling out £45 for this. (You do get two sides with the dish, which is a nice touch, but even then they weren't up to much.)
A passable if dry sticky toffee pudding later and we were ready to settle up the bill. This seemed to require the energy and attention of every single member of the waiting staff and maybe even the manager. I don't know if they'd ever seen a Taste London card before but they appeared pretty baffled by it. Fortunately, we sloped off only having to pay half what the food was worth: I'd have baulked at having to pay full price.
So, far from being a critic's dream, this was closer to a consumer's nightmare. Enticing offers, lengthy introductions and snazzy faux-traditional dining rooms are only good if you're backing it up with real quality on the plate. The Clarendon is falling away here and it is not going to stand the test of time unless it bucks its ideas up. They have a reasonable location, a lovely building and one of the nicest areas in London in which to ply their trade. It's now up to them to get busy making it fulfil its potential.
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