Boisdale, Canary Wharf

It used to be so easy. The rule was, unless you could help it, you avoided Canary Wharf completely, and left those windswept concrete canyons to the suits and skirts who worked there. Even today, hardly anyone is traipsing around its soulless "streets" out of choice - you're there because you have to be. Recently though, if you have found yourself unlucky enough to be in Canary Wharf and out of the office long enough to enjoy a lunch or dinner, the choice is no longer simply between the nearest Pret or Eat, Cafe Rouge or All Bar One. The place still has as much style and charm as a multi-storey car park (and plenty of truly awful restaurants still do a depressingly good trade), but there is a slowly growing number of fairly decent places to dine, even if they do all somewhat conform to the city-boy stereotype. The latest branch of Goodman, which opened here last week, should find a very appreciative audience for its premium steaks and wine list, and despite not enjoying everything I ate at Camino, it's big and noisy and flash enough to fit right in. And now there is Boisdale, a place so unimaginably huge and lavish the only place in the capital it could conceivably exist, and at least conceivably break even, is here in the docklands.


It really is hard to fully convey the scale of the place. Split over two floors, each holding a good few hundred people, downstairs boasts a central bar with enormous seafood presentation, with lobsters and oysters and huge legs of Alaskan crab interspersed with the odd bucket of Beluga caviar. Upstairs, an even bigger space has, stretching down one side, a bar the size of an articulated lorry with a good 600 or so different bottles of Whisky. At one end of this room is a substantial stage featuring live music every night, and behind a number of wood-panelled doors are various extra private dining rooms and conference rooms, a huge outdoor terrace, a sealed smoking (sorry, "cigar tasting") room and a climate-controlled walk-in cigar humidor. It is absolutely vast, and quite overwhelming, and yet despite all the very obvious expensive showpieces like the whisky bar and cigar room there is still that rather corporate Canary Wharf vibe that hangs heavy over the tartan carpets and spotlighting. It's partly the size and shape of the place - it's nowhere near small or cosy enough for the member's club atmosphere they're presumably trying for - but it's also the clientele, all of a very specific middle aged demographic and awkward 'office night out' groupings. This may be sheer prejudice talking, but if I notice it there's a good chance you will, too.

The menu is, in keeping with everything else about the place, vast and expensive and rather overwhelming. It's also slightly confusing - there are no 'starters', just something called 'Small Plates' which included recognisably starter-y things like whitebait and foie gras terrine next to snacks like dry-fried broad beans. There were 'Salads', though only two, and a section for 'Sandwiches' although burgers appeared under a different heading 'The Grill'. Roast haggis was listed under 'Large Plates' while sausage and mash was under 'The Grill' next to the selection of dry-aged steaks. Finally there's a showy 'Shellfish' section where snacks, starters, small plates and large all gathered together as long as they have a shell and live in the sea. In fairness, all the individual items looked tempting, it just took us half an hour to work out where it all was.


Native oysters, in this case "Duchy of Cornwall No.3", were absolutely superb - fresh and crunchy and literally impossible to fault. Which is just as well, as at £18.50 for 6 they were also bleeding expensive. They weren't even the top of the range either - that honour went to some Maldon No.2 which came in at an astonishing £25 a half dozen. Maybe they all came with pearls.


Crab tian was lovely, too - perfectly dressed fresh crab with a smooth avocado puree, daintily presented, and so nice that at £12 it seemed like a relative bargain. It was a relief to discover that attention to detail in the kitchen hadn't been lost amidst the gazillions spent elsewhere on stocking a cigar list and sourcing caviar.



A 12oz fillet on the bone was £38 - silly money, but actually it was almost worth it, cooked perfectly with a great beefy taste and aroma. I hardly ever order fillet but this was at the recommendation of our waiter and as you don't often see bone-in fillet on menus curiosity got the better of me. The texture is the best thing about this cut; slicing through it is like carving butter, but so often the extraordinary texture makes up for a lack of flavour - not in this case. Even the béarnaise was good, although I wasn't quite as keen on the skin on chips - if I'm paying the best part of £4 for a bowl of fried potato, the least you can do is be bothered to peel them first.


After the food, we shifted upstairs for an awestruck audience with the world's biggest whisky bar (probably) and a fascinating Whisky "flight" - 6 quarter measures of some really interesting rare blends and thick, peaty single malts. I don't smoke, so I can't offer my opinion on the cigars (though I can say the room they came from smelled fantastic), but anyone with even a passing interest in whisky could easily spend a happy evening here, not to mention quite easily burn through their life savings if they accidentally picked out a bottle of 1946 Glenmorangie from the line-up.



The bottom line is, Boisdale is a good restaurant. The food is good, the service is good, there are enough nooks and crannies to cover every event from a quick bite to a multi-course slap-up seafood feast to a long evening in chugging cigars and sampling vintage whisky and everything in between. It's huge, but somehow the sheer size of the place allows a variety of ways of spending your time, and doesn't just feel like a cynical method of covering all bases for the maximum possible profit. What it isn't, though, is cheap - God only knows what our bill would have come to had we not been invited, but I'm guessing somewhere in the £100/head mark - certainly serious Event Meal territory. And it's simply this question of value that means Boisdale may not quite be a reason to visit Canary Wharf by itself. It may, however, be a good enough reason not to avoid it. And that, at least, is progress.

7/10



I was invited to review Boisdale

Camino, Canary Wharf

For all the North London vs South London debate, the merits of the grill houses of Whitechapel vs those of Tooting, whether you prefer a Vietnamese from Kingsland Road or a Turkish from Green Lanes, there is one thing I think we can all agree on - Canary Wharf is a hideous, hideous place. Born out of the throws of 80s excess, an attempt to build a capitalist haven in a previously dilapidated area of the docklands, what we have ended up with in 2011 is a soul-less concrete shrine to banking, populated by American Psycho types in smart suits and neat haircuts - it's an area with as much character as a breeze block. Worse than this though, from my perspective, is the choice of places to eat and drink. All Bar One, Pizza Express, Slug & Lettuce, EAT, Pret, GBK, this tedious line-up of dreadful high-street chains turns an already depressing area into one to actively avoid, and avoid it I most actively do.

In the context of this location, then, Camino is not a bad restaurant at all. They cook proper Spanish food in an attractive room with wonderful views of the river, and the staff are as cheery and enthusiastic as you could hope for from people forced to spend their working days and nights in Canary Wharf. And although the food was hit and miss, I can see how you could enjoy an evening here, if only because the alternatives are too horrible to contemplate. Apologies for the flash photography in this post, but it was so dark nothing would have come out otherwise, and as we were the only diners in the restaurant for 90% of our meal last night I don't think we were annoying too many people. We started with Anchoas con pimientos, anchovies with sweet peppers in a sherry sauce.


I liked the bold flavours in this dish - the peppers were incredibly sweet and slimy, the anchovies salty and some sliced spring onions provided crunch. It wasn't a vast amount of food for nearly £6 perhaps but good anchovies aren't cheap and these at least were of decent quality.


Grilled octopus tentacle was very good - a single huge, meaty tentacle coiled around a blob of decent mashed potato and seasoned with a generous sprinkling of paprika. The grill had been used to good effect to get the outside of the octopus nice and crispy and the flesh inside was firm without being chewy.


Chipirones were less successful. The squid bits themselves were nice and moist, but although the batter was crunchy it was a little thick and overwhelmed the seafood. And the aioli wasn't very nice at all - bright white and synthetic, with no real hit of fresh garlic, I don't know for sure whether Camino make their garlic mayo in house but it didn't taste like they did.


And so to the main event, and the reason I'd been invited to Camino in the first place, a huge 32oz rib-eye on the bone. It certainly looks the part, doesn't it? Beautifully charred on the outside, confidently rare inside (we'd asked for medium rare but allowed them this because this would count as medium rare in Spain) and served sliced into neat strips, the only fault you could pick with the presentation was the tiny wooden tray it was served on, which had no area to catch the juices from the beef and so just dripped greasy beef fat all over the table over the course of the evening. Someone at Camino really knows how to grill beef, though, as in terms of seasoning and timing you couldn't fault this at all. Unfortunately, what did let it down was the quality of the beef itself which had hardly any flavour and a strange greasy texture making eating it all a bit of a chore. At £45 for two people, it would be a reasonable price to pay for such a lot of meat but only if it actually tasted of anything. There was, even more strangely, no smell either - none of that wonderful metallic, meaty aroma which hangs in the air in places like Hawksmoor or Goodman. Call me a beef snob if you like (guilty, I imagine) but if you grill beef this well and it still tastes like plastic it all points towards problems with your supplier; if Camino ever got hold of some decent cow they'd be on to a real winner.


With a bottle of very nice Descendientes de José Palacios Bierzo Pétalos 2008 for £30 ish (I know, check me out talking about wine - it was a really good one this though, fruity and rich and a perfect steak accompaniment) it came to £50 a head, which is actually fairly decent considering the view and surroundings, and would have been something approaching a bargain had that steak been any good. And service was brilliant - attentive, friendly, flexible when we couldn't make our mind up between a couple of dishes and not afraid to suggest alternatives. But I'm afraid the over-riding memories I will have of my meal won't be the tender octopus tentacle or the lovely wine, it will be that flavourless beef and the desolate, windswept journey to reach it. It would have to be a very special restaurant indeed to tempt me back to this part of town for my dinner, and I'm afraid I will have to leave Camino to the Patrick Batemans and Gordon Geckos of Canary Wharf.

6/10



I was invited to review Camino

Smirnoff Black cocktail evening, Plateau, Canary Wharf

I have an instinctive reaction against anything mass-produced or corporate. It is, I fully admit, largely snobbery, but it's also a case of familiarity breeding contempt - I get bored of seeing the same row of bland high-street spirits behind every bar in London, or the same menus and bloody curly fries on every pub menu, and I'm cursed with a voracious foodie appetite for the new. There are, of course, some mass-market products that I will happily recommend. That Nando's Piri Piri sauce, for example, always has a place in my food cupboard even if the chicken and chips at their restaurants is less than great, and I couldn't call myself a proud Englishman if I didn't enjoy a Heinz beans on toast every once in a while. But usually I will go out of my way to avoid "brands" and will rebel against corporate homogeneity even if it means traipsing hours out of my way or (more usually) spending far more than is sensible.


Perhaps what I really admire in a product is honesty - take, for example, rum. Havana Club Rum 3yr is an old favourite, and I happen to think it tastes lovely. I also happen to know that it is still made in Cuba and although these days you see it in more and more places in the UK it doesn't seem to have affected the taste. Bacardi, on the other hand, which is quite bland in comparison (even the slightly aged golden version hasn't got much going for it) hasn't been a genuine Cuban brand since shortly after the revolution in 1959 and is in fact now produced in Mexico. This despite the grossly misleading advertising campaign and the text "company founded in Santiago de Cuba in 1862" on every bottle. I don't know why I prefer Havana Club only because it tastes better or also because I know I'm not being lied to. Maybe it's an insecurity thing.


Given my issues with international drinks brands, I was therefore rather apprehensive on being invited to a Smirnoff cocktail evening in Canary Wharf a fortnight ago. Smirnoff, stalwart of every pub and bar in Britain, mass-produced in staggering numbers by evil giant corporation Diageo, is not a vodka I would ordinarily go out of my way to drink, to put it mildly. But this evening was about Smirnoff Black, a small batch vodka produced in copper stills and therefore taking on an interesting, minerally flavour. Mixing the drink into some rather tasty and interesting cocktails was Tristan Stephenson, who also writes a very comprehensive drinks blog and seemed to really know his stuff.


It was a lovely evening, but I defy anyone to not have a good time in a room decorated with fake snow and fur-covered furniture with views over the Canary Wharf ice rink and being served premium vodka. Smirnoff Black does genuinely taste better than its cheaper cousin Smirnoff Red, but that shouldn't be a surprise - the production process is more careful and controlled and the end product more refined - and more expensive. There's a part of me that thinks that maybe it's about time I revisited my prejudices and started trying to appreciate food and drink without worrying about some vague notion of authenticity and heritage. Authenticity is important - but authenticity of purpose, honesty of intent. It doesn't matter which faceless corporation is financing the deal as long as someone with enough knowledge, skills and passion has responsibility for the stuff that reaches the shelves. This vital link between supplier and consumer is the single common factor across all good products, whether it's bottles of vodka or prize-winning cabbages or restaurant meals. Keep an eye out for Smirnoff Black, you may be pleasantly surprised. As for me, I'm off to buy a Big Mac.

Photos courtesy of Tiki Chris