Five Guys, Covent Garden

It was billed as the "burger wars". Two behemoths of US burger culture, Five Guys and Shake Shack, were opening their first London branches within a few days of each other, and for while it seemed it was all any food blogger or restaurant critic was talking about. Would you go for the small-town, mass-market appeal of Five Guys, with their generous portions and limitless toppings? Or the refined, big-city chic Shake Shack, each sandwich a mini work of art and accompanied by an oh-so-clever selection of trendy London craft beers and Paul A Young chocolates? We went, we queued, we ate. At the time, it was Shake Shack that seemed to be winning the battle for hearts and minds but as with so many of these things, once the initial hype died down we all snuck back off to MeatLiquor and Patty & Bun and left them to it. I don't know about you, but I've not returned to Shake Shack and never even made it to Five Guys London in the first place.

So I was in Covent Garden one lunchtime looking for Christmas presents and avoiding the chuggers and I noticed Five Guys, shining pristine bright red and white like a hospital emergency room made out of Lego, totally unmistakable and unmistakably totally deserted. Finally, I thought, here was my chance to try their flagship offering without the prejudice of a three-hour wait clouding the results, and I wandered inside.

The welcome was friendly, the choices to be made fairly simple. I'd been warned the 'normal' burger was enough for a party of six, so stuck to the 'little cheeseburger' with 'little fries' and 'little drink', the ordering of which was faintly emasculating but when it arrived turned out to be plenty big enough. The only thing 'little' about the portion of fries, for example, was the ridiculous tiny cup they filled up to the brim before pouring a good half pound of overfill into the bottom of the brown takeaway bag. As to why, your guess is as good as mine. But they tasted pretty good - thank you "Guy Poskitt farm - UK" where apparently they were from that day.

I noticed something, too, while I was waiting for my Five Guys order to be delivered. Around the room hang quotes and reviews from esteemed Stateside publications like the New York and Los Angeles Times, full of praise for their product, as you might expect from the home of the cheeseburger, but in words that veer worryingly close to hyperbolic cult-like fervour. But where were the UK reviews? Not a single one visible anywhere on the walls, and only one, a blogger, quoted very briefly as part of an electronic slideshow on the back of the tills. Even the most mediocre burger joint can usually find at least a blogger or two to quote on their stationery - are things really that bad, six months after a launch that was reported on the national news, that only one critic in town has anything positive to say?

The burger was, as others will no doubt have told you long before now, a pretty nondescript affair. The beef had no discernible flavour and was cooked through to dry grey. The plastic cheese did its job servicably well, and I didn't hate the heavily seeded bun even though, crumpled and somewhat deflated, it didn't look particularly appetising. But it was all instantly forgettable, and for over £10 for the whole lot including a drink from one of those machines that pretend to offer thousands of different flavours but somehow always leave you with the exact same chemical-infused fizz no matter what you choose, it was too expensive.

"Instantly forgettable". Perhaps that explains it. Barely six months on, it's terribly obvious that, aside from a few timid American tourists, the crowds have turned their backs on Five Guys and (from what I gather) Shake Shack as well. I can't help thinking that these huge operations just sat on their hands for too long, waiting for the right moment to strike, and by the time they'd decided to finally grace us with their presence, safe in the knowledge that they were what London had been waiting for, we'd quietly created a healthy selection of world-class burgers of our own, thankyouverymuch.

Schadenfreude, you say? Well, you can hardly blame us. It's never nice to see a good business failing, never mind two, but the acres of empty, roped-off queuing areas at both Five Guys and Shake Shack just point towards not only a massive over-confidence in your own product but a rather arrogant attitude to the reception they were expecting from a city already hardly struggling for a way to enjoy minced beef and cheese inside a semi-brioche bun. Cheeseburger and fries? Hot dogs? Buffalo wings? Nah, you're alright America, we're good, thanks. What else you got?

5/10

Sticks'n'Sushi, Wimbledon

Wimbledon used to be the place that restaurants went to die. It's strange how the smartest areas of town seem to suffer from a dearth of decent eating options; look at Hampstead, for example, with its couple of half-assed gastropubs and a Gaucho Grill, or Knightsbridge & West Brompton where people go to see and be seen eating salad. You'd think that where the disposable income goes, good food would inevitably follow but the opposite seems to be the case; where times are hard, and incomes low, restaurants fall over each other to offer great value and a great time. In areas that they don't have to try to turn a profit, well, they don't.

Thank heavens, then, that Wimbledon finally has a restaurant worth the trek to SW19. I don't mean Sticks'n'Sushi of course, oh no - that wouldn't be worth anyone's Zone 3 Oystercard supplement. I mean the Lawn Bistro, up the hill in Wimbledon Village, which opened a few months ago and is serving classy, starry dishes for a very reasonable amount of money and which I enjoyed very much. I may one day get around to reviewing it, but in the meantime Hugh Wright has, as usual, said everything worth saying about the place on his blog and I urge you to go read it.

Anyway, to Sticks'n'Sushi. The ninth in a chain, though the first in London (all previous branches are in Copenhagen), it presumably has plans to expand even further so quite why they've chosen Wimbledon for their flagship is unclear. Perhaps it has something to do with the huge space required for their "concept" - a massive open kitchen consisting of rows of gleaming workstations and looking like the set of Iron Chef. It's certainly impressive, and the rest of the room is attractive in a sort of chainy way even if it did remind me rather disturbingly of the inside of Fire & Stone in Covent Garden.

But my heart sank when I saw the "menu". Rather than have anything so pedestrian as a sheet of paper with available dishes listed on it, Sticks'n'Sushi prefers you rifle through a glossy catalogue of artfully photographed seafood, with barely more than a couple of dishes per double-page for extra annoyance, and the odd box of smug 'sustainability' guff. Even more incredibly, there are two of these catalogues, one containing A La Carte and the other a number of suggested "meals" with irritating names like "Salmon, duck and his friends" and "Mixed emotions". It's almost impossible to settle upon anything though because by the time you've reached the last page of this Littlewoods Catalogue of Food you've completely forgotten what came first. It's pointless, and annoying, and so in a desperate attempt to cobble together some kind of variety between the two of us we ordered a few bits of sashimi and a few yakitori and hoped for the best.

The food, on the whole, wasn't all that bad. Some "blini" (not very Japanese I know, but they were a special suggested by our waiter and rather than to have to plough through that menu again we agreed to have them) were on the bland side but still had enough nice fresh fish and crab to be worth the effort. Sashimi (tuna, salmon and yellowfish) was nicely presented on a pile of ice but were only middling-quality as you can probably tell by the rather mean strips of fat in the salmon. And beef tataki threw some interesting textures together, and was particularly enjoyable dipped in the goma dressing it came with, but was fairly low quality cow.

Elsewhere, "ebi bites" (deep fried prawn things in batter) were soft and greasy and drowning in mayonnaise, tuna yakitori was overcooked to dry grey, and chicken tebasaki (wings) managed somehow to be bland despite being incredibly overseasoned. Nothing was hideous, or even inedible, and I can think of certain things I would even like to try again amongst the whole load of stuff that I certainly wouldn't, but overall this was mediocre Japanese food, all style and no substance, glossily presented but lacking heart.

Which is what you might expect from a chain, and it's still not the worst Japanese food I've eaten in London (Yo! Sushi has few rivals in that department), so why is there no chance of hell I'd ever go back to Sticks'n'Sushi? One reason and one reason only - the stupidly high prices. Our meal, with a couple of cocktails and a £20 half (half!) bottle of sake came to £112.16. Luckily for us (if not them), this was a PR invite, but this is about as much as you'd pay in Roka on Charlotte Street, where the flashy presentations are matched by real skill at the stove, or even at Sushi of Shiori where £50/head will buy you two hours in the company of London's most talented Japanese chef. It's cheaper than Umu perhaps, or Yashin, but for heaven's sake this is a chain with chain ambitions, not a boutique omakase sushi bar. It's simply not worth this amount of money.

But don't worry Wimbledon, you still have the Lawn Bistro. And don't worry the rest of London, because there's no need to travel to SW19 for good sushi, you can go to anywhere above as well as Asakusa in Mornington Crescent or Ten Ten Tei in Soho. And for great yakitori, as well as Roka there's the wonderful Bincho on Old Compton Street, which regularly offers a thrilling range of things on sticks for very little money indeed. I'm not sure what it says about the standard (and cost) of food available in Cophenhagen that SnS is so wildly popular over there, but we have no need for another mediocre Japanese chain over here thank you very much. One is more than enough.

4/10



I was invited to Sticks'n'Sushi

Jamie's Italian, Westfield Stratford City

With many of the best new restaurants in London not taking reservations, the grumbling of discontent amongst people who prefer to eat their dinner on a guaranteed table at a guaranteed time (and of course I can appreciate where they're coming from) grows ever louder. A few years back it was only fast food joints or tourist traps like the Hard Rock Café that didn't take bookings, and nobody gave a damn about those. But since the influx of no-bookings restaurants that served food people actually wanted to eat (a group that essentially contains all the current rock gods of London dining - the Polpo group, Burger & Lobster, Pitt Cue, MeatLiquor, etc.), the question of To Queue Or Not To Queue has split opinion quite dramatically.

Needless to say, I am a tragic restaurant geek that will happily queue for hours in the freezing cold for the best St. Louis ribs in town, but I still have some tricks to make my chances as good as possible. One of them is to hit what industry types refer to as the "shoulder hours" - the gap in between lunch and dinner around 3-5pm, where the stragglers for lunch have yet to properly overlap with the early birds for the evening. Also, if you can bear to wait that long, even the legendary queues at MeatLiquor tend to calm down by about 9:30/10pm ish, so that's another period you're quite likely to score a walk-in. Possibly. Alright, maybe not on a Friday. Or Saturday.

The point is, I know how frustrating it is to not know when you're going to eat or where - or even if - you're going to sit, and I've heard all the arguments about how the system is all about convenience for the restaurant and not the consumer, and how it tends to create a transitory atmosphere of people who got lucky rather than a steady culture of friendly regulars. But the fact is, a no-bookings policy coupled with a reliable stream of punters allows a restaurant to charge less for better ingredients, and if the upshot is that you can eat an entire steamed lobster with chips and a salad in the middle of Mayfair for £20, well, I'll grin and bear it. And judging by the massive popularity of many of these places, so can many others.

But what if somewhere makes you queue for half an hour and then still serves overpriced, mediocre rubbish in a charmless corner of a shopping centre in Stratford? You probably won't believe me if you've read my post on Barbecoa but I really wanted to like Jamie's Italian; the guy knows good food when he sees it, and coupled with all the willing investors he must surely be able to magic up with an internationally famous profile like that, you'd think he'd be able to hit all the bases of decent Italian home cooking and use economies of scale to get hold of decent ingredients. Instead, he seems to have created a slightly more expensive version of Zizzi's, and as anyone who's ever been to Zizzi's will tell you, this is not a good thing.


In the interests of fairness, I should say that the drinks from the bartenders at Jamie's Italian Westfield Stratford were pretty decent. My Negroni was tiny and warm but had all the proper ingredients in proper proportions, and my friend's Florence Fizz, containing shocking pink pomegranate juice, was just about refreshing enough to justify the £6.25 price tag. Also they seem to have constructed themselves a worthwhile wine list by most chain Italian standards, the house chardonnay from Puglia being unexpectedly lovely for a paltry £15.85. I still would have quite liked to have been brought the actual bottle though, rather than have it from a big glass vase - not that I don't trust them, of course...


But, oh dear, the food. Sirloin steak, ordered medium, came disastrously overcooked to well done and was a laborious task to eat. This is a shame because I have a feeling, based on rolling a piece of leathery beef around my mouth for a minute or two, that the raw product wasn't bad at all - and it was at least seasoned well. Accompanying "funky" chips (kill me now) were diabolical - soggy and bland and a strange orange hue that brought to mind deep-fried slugs, they were the kind of thing that made you angry anyone even considered them worth sending out of the kitchen. My Turkey Milanese did at least arrive with a faint hint of truffle, albeit far less than the picture below would indicate as the fungus itself was pretty cardboardy, but the turkey was nothing more than a huge sponge of bland meat transporting (I'm guessing) about two litres of cooking oil. The best thing about this plate of food was the fried egg, and even that wasn't very nice.


It's a good job we drank more than is usually wise of a Saturday lunchtime because without the calming effect of the alcohol I'm not sure I would have left with my sanity. And before you say anything no, we didn't complain - just think of all the reasons you've ever had for not complaining about a mediocre meal, and pick one; we were trying to enjoy ourselves, we didn't want to make a fuss, we wanted to just get out of there and go home. And get out of there we eventually did (attracting the waitress being a surprisingly hard task in a restaurant so full of staff), £60 lighter and each of us - I from the turkey, my friend from her soggy chips, and both of us from the overwhelming stench of ripoff - really quite queasy.


There's a good way and a bad way of going about treating paying customers if you run a no-bookings policy. Either queue 'em up and pack 'em in but give those lucky enough to reach the front of the line mind-blowingly good food at stupidly low prices (see paragraph two), or use your high profile and backlog of good will to charge a huge number of people way over the odds for crappy food. As much as I'd kept an open mind for my meal on Saturday, and as much as I'd love to say that here was a new chain that could finally lift high street dining in Britain above its current desperately poor level, it was very soon obvious that instead of something that will beat the groaning corpse of Zizzi's, Ask and Carluccio's into the ground where they belong, the Jamie's Italian model is actually just more of the same - commodity ingredients, cooked badly, served for the highest possible profit. How thoroughly depressing.

2/10