Degò, Fitzrovia (revisited)

I'll save you the effort of getting up to speed with this blog's tortured relationship with Degò, and attempt a quick summary. I visited a relatively new Venetian wine bar around the back of Oxford Circus with a friend in October 2010. After suffering an evening of stale bread, bland cheese and dishes that tasted like cat food soaked in olive oil, we were presented with a substantial bill that included service and still left a space for an extra tip. In short, absolutely nothing was right about the place, particularly the strange strip-joint decor, and we hated it. And I said so. And there the sorry little episode would have ended were it not for certain mysteriously partisan comments that appeared not just on my post but on various other London restaurant review sites, all in a suspiciously overly defensive vein and, despite being under different names, often containing the same turns of phrase and same little anecdotes.

Then, as if that all wasn't surreal enough, a comment appeared from their own PR, self-proclaimed "restaurant guru" Luisa Welch (other client: the Spaghetti House chain... I'm saying nothing), who decided the best way of negating bad press was to leave an entertainingly prissy rant about my spelling of "focaccia" and attacking my knowledge of Italian food and cheese in particular. In fact, Ms Welch may have had very good points, I just question the logic of saying so, under her own real name, on a negative review of her client. But hey - I'm not the expert here. Either way, the belligerence of their PR only helped to vindicate my initial opinion and very soon my experience at Degò faded like a bad dream, never to be spoken of again.

Fast forward twelve months, and Degò, very understandably, has new PR. And not just any old PR either - Lotus PR, who also handle Heston Blumenthal, and presumably know a bit about creating good press, and who responded to my cheeky "well you can't do any worse than the last lot" by bravely inviting me back to see how things had improved. I don't know what it says about me that I didn't take too long to decide to accept - I suppose either dear old Luisa Welch was right all along and I really don't know anything about food, or the meal will be just as bad, in which case it's a fairly miserable evening but at least I get to say I was right in the first place. Who can resist the temptation of a lose-lose situation like that?

My opinion's unchanged on one thing at least from the first time - the decor at Degò is utterly hideous. Back in 2010 we had spent the evening upstairs in the wine bar area, a room decked out in black Formica with scarlet red detail that brought to mind a cross between an MFI kitchen showroom and Spearmint Rhino's. But downstairs, incredibly, is even worse - more of the same trashy black and red but with two huge flat screen TVs bolted above the bar showing pointless silent looping videos of vineyards, and darkened low booths whose uncomfortably deep leather seats meant that you had to either sit bolt upright and unsupported to eat or slump right back with your legs in the air. I'm told they're losing the TVs soon but I have a feeling they'll have to do a lot more than that to make this a comfortable place to eat your dinner.


But, some things have changed at Degò. The house bread, so stale and tasteless the first time, was now very nice; even the focaccia (note spelling) which crumbled like old cake before was now bouncy and moist and perfectly seasoned. The selection of house meats, bland and badly butchered then were now attractively presented and full of flavour, and I only tried one cheese this time but it was a very interesting mix of three milk types (cow's, sheep's and goat's) and the contrast with the tray of boring lumps of cheddar-a-likes from 2010 couldn't have been more sharp.

"Ah", you're thinking, "but before you visited anonymously and paid for yourself. Of course you're going to be presented with fresh bread and with greater care taken over sliced meats and cheese when you're sat having dinner with their PR guy". And if my meal had ended here, I'd agree with you - it's not difficult to make a bit of extra effort with the charcuterie when you know you have to, and it shouldn't be above any restaurant to improve from the horribly low standards of the house bread from my last visit. But things were about to get a lot more strange.

Steak Tartare, using Jack O'Shea's fillet steak freshly minced tableside (a nice, if admittedly quite pointless bit of theatre) was quite lovely - powerfully flavoured cow mixed with a good balance of sweet and sour and crunchy elements. Sadly in London there are still more bland, disappointing tartares than there are any worth paying for, but this was one of the best I've had. And a goat's cheese soufflé was fresh and fluffy, and presented with some leaves of the most brilliant braised fennel, a perfect match to the sharp cheese. Does it sound like I'm picking tricky dishes to try and trip them up? I was. And it wasn't working.

Surely a traditional Venician pasta dish would expose Degò for the shallow tourist trap I knew it was? Bigoli is a type of hand made buckwheat pasta, like thick spaghetti. I'd not tried it, or even seen it, anywhere before, but it was quite brilliant - a rich, earthy taste of bucolic Northern Italian tradition, with just enough bite to roll around the mouth without being cloying. But the duck ragu it was soaked in - wow. Rich doesn't even begin to describe just how complex and rewarding the flavour was from this superficially simple looking meat sauce - quite brilliant.


Expectations shattered, confidence in my critical abilities shot, reeling from the blows of all my certainties coming crashing down around me in the space of an evening, I had one last chance to try and derail Degò. For my main course I insisted on ordering the T-bone steak - at £54 for 900g this was in line with the prices charged at Hawksmoor or Goodman but surely to God couldn't be as good as either of those? It arrived, it smelled fantastic, I tasted it, it was superb. Expertly cooked (though perhaps without that extra crust of a really hot grill), correctly seasoned, sliced into huge melty, buttery chunks of medium rare and with the same powerful flavour of top quality beef that had made the tartare so special, it was - honestly - a close to perfect steak. It wasn't technically a T-bone, actually - the fillet side seemed to be missing - but I still loved it.

So, what the hell is going on here? As far as I know, and I'm told, the same chef and pretty much the entire same team works at Degò today as did in October last year. But I just can't see how the same people who happily signed off that smelly octopus surrounded by pink goo or that balloon of rubbery mozzarella jokingly described as 'burrata' back then could have, in the space of a year, turned things around quite so dramatically. Towards the end of the evening Massimo, the Degò head chef, turned up for a chat and, rather than attempting to cleave me in twain with a 20" cook's knife, which I could understand, explained that in the first few weeks he was mainly out of the kitchen dealing with the various billion-and-one crises that every new restaurant has to cope with and probably wasn't keeping too much of an eye on the food. Which kind of makes sense but then, this wasn't just a disappointing meal we're talking about - my dinner in 2010 was a complete unmitigated disaster, every bit of everything we ate was in some way wrong. Degò hasn't just turned itself around, it's done the equivalent of raising itself from the dead. I still don't know whether to be happy for them or be terrified it may turn again and start actually killing people like some kind of undead restaurant zombie.

Who knows what kind of lessons can be learned here - that good PR works, perhaps, although Degò really did most of the opinion changing work for themselves by being suddenly inexplicably brilliant at cooking. That one meal isn't enough to write off a restaurant? Maybe, although I still absolutely stand by my first review, and there's surely an argument that if they are capable of being quite that bad, for however long, they deserve all they get. But here's me giving Degò a second chance anyway, and despite the risk of looking like a biddable PR shill I'm very glad I did - Degò still isn't perfect, but it is at least somewhere near Oxford Circus that deserves your money. And at no point in the last twelve months did I ever think I'd be saying that.

8/10

Apologies for lack of pictures - the dark, gloomy winters are lean times for food photography, and the dining room at Dego is gloomier than most

Home cooking with Ferran Adrià, Google UK HQ

On Tuesday 27th September Ferran Adrià will be in London to promote his new book, The Family Meal: Home cooking with Ferran Adrià. In celebration of this, we would love to invite you to join a family meal at the Google Building from 12.00pm to 14.00pm with Ferran who will be dishing the meal up, followed by a talk from him to discuss the importance of a family meal.

Sounds like fun, doesn't it? I realise my own relationship with Adrià's work is slightly more complicated than some, but only a fool would dismiss the massive impact - for better or for worse - El Bulli has had on the way people eat in restaurants. And having tried the best - and worst - of the experimental chef's product in Spain (and only just lived to tell the tale), I was genuinely interested to see what he could do for more humble dishes. True, I'm no hard-boiled Ferran Adrià fanboy, but I like a Caesar salad as much as the next man, and trotted off to Victoria with high hopes. What could go wrong?

The answer, in case you're wondering, was more or less everything. Firstly, it turns out there are two 'Google Buildings', a fact we (that is, myself and the small gang of food writers and bloggers invited along that day) were only alerted to once we had cleared security and been given sticky name tags at the wrong one. Once we'd trooped 100 yards up the road to the correct building, cleared security for a second time, been given a different plastic badge and herded into a glass lift to the 1st floor for yet another security routine then the 3rd (no sign of any stairs), it was all starting to get a bit stressful.


I realised I was losing my appetite (shocking, I know) and couldn't at first quite put my finger on why; then it struck me. The whole experience, the visitors' pass, the unfamiliar strip-lit corridors, the awkward procession past office workers queuing hungrily for lunch while you tried to avoid eye contact, it was like waiting for an interview. I'm sure the original idea of having Adria's food served in an office canteen made vague utilitarian sense, but the reality of it was unpleasant and oppressive - nobody eats at an office canteen out of choice, they all have to be there. This is not a comfortable, restaurant environment. This is high school.



Shown to a reserved table right under the noses of queuing Google staff, we were told food would start arriving in five minutes, and patiently waited. A good twenty minutes later, with no sign of anything happening, one of our party got up to see if he could find anyone in charge, and after disappearing over the far end of the canteen came back with news that Adrià along with various other far more important (I don't mean that to sound too cynical - I'm quite aware of food bloggers' position in the grand pecking order) top-flight PR people and journalists were having their own private Adrià-time, and we had essentially been forgotten. Not long before I decided to give the whole thing up and sulk off home, someone eventually appeared with the news that, in fact, we needed to queue up for food after all, and after rather embarrassingly herding us towards the front of the lunch line (the people behind us were either used to this kind of thing happening or hid their frustration very well), we started loading our greasy plastic trays with salads and charcuterie.



Objectively, I think the food was quite nice. It's probably not the greatest compliment in the world to say it's the best work canteen lunch I've ever had, but I should, in all fairness, give them that much. The lamb kebabs were moist but under seasoned, the risotto was diabolical (you could have used it as an industrial sealant) and most of the "hot" food... wasn't, but I liked the Italian ham selection and the breads (neither of which Adria had anything to do with) and there was a very nice fresh lime and guava drink to wash it all down with. But by this stage, the battle had been lost and I found it very hard to ignore the fact that there we were, on the "bloggers table", left to pick up our own lunch well out of sight of where the real action was happening, surrounded by hundreds of Google employees presumably rather nonplussed that a PR company had chosen to feature their lunch break as part of some kind of ironic office-themed book launch.

Now, in many ways, food bloggers have it easy - possibly way too easy. We write what we want, when we want to, we get offered free meals, we (very occasionally) get sent on fancy press trips with goodie bags and kitchen tours and flattered with attention from PRs and restaurants. The downside, such as there is one, is that we do it all for free - just for the sheer nerdy, obsessive love of it, but there are certainly worse ways to spend your free time. And I can understand why anyone reading this would think I have no right to moan about yet another gratis lunch being not quite up to scratch, I mean, who cares? Certainly not Adria, whose (very good in fact) book will no doubt be a huge success, and certainly not anyone too high up at the PR company in question, who accused me of throwing my "toys out of the pram" when frustration got the better of me and I tweeted about what a miserable time I was having.

But the point is, there are better ways of going about these things. I've been to some PR events where proceedings have dissolved into complete shambles from the very first moment but they've still been great fun thanks to just a general sense of graciousness and hospitality. It's not about the fact we had to wait around, it wasn't so much the disappointing food or the sterile (and, if I'm going to be honest, rather culty) atmosphere at Google HQ, it was the feeling that we weren't really needed or fulfilling any kind of noticeable role. And maybe we weren't, but as I say, at least try and pretend we were - or don't bother inviting us in the first place. "We thought you'd be grateful", was the defensive response from one of the PR people when we voiced our annoyance at having been left to our own devices in a staff canteen for the best part of an hour and a half. "I know", I thought.

Anyway, apologies for the protracted rant on issues that affect no more than a handful of people in London, and I promise normal service will be resumed as soon as possible. The happy fact is, most of the PR people I have contact with are enthusiastic, knowledgable and thoroughly competent. For every incident like the above there are hundreds that are a joy to be involved with and whatever you might think about the consequences of bloggers (and journalists for that matter) getting too close to PR companies, when the relationship works, it's to everyone's benefit. And yours, dear reader, too - I picked up a copy of The Family Meal from one of the friendlier PRs today (well of course I did, I may be ungrateful but I'm not stupid), and I shall donate it to someone picked at random from the comments on this post. As ever, agreement, argument, abuse and lunacy all gratefully received.