Jacuzzi, Kensington

If you've been to Gloria, or Circo Popular, or Ave Mario, you'll know the drill by now. Big Mamma group restaurants are ludicrous, overblown chintz-fests where decent if overpriced food plays second fiddle to people watching and celeb-spotting. And don't get me wrong, there's absolutely nothing wrong with this occasionally - hell, even I got into the Ivy once - you just have to know what you're getting yourself into, because after being squeezed onto a tiny table and served food that would cost half the price anywhere else, you'd better hope there's a celeb or two to gawk at to make the whole experience worth your while.

Fortunately for us, Nick Cave was sat at the next table but one on Thursday night, so we had that box ticked from the get-go. It was somewhat of a surprise to notice he'd been sat at a very poky table for two in the same "Siberia", the third floor dining room next to the toilets - it's hard to believe even the youngest member of staff wouldn't notice Nick-bloody-Cave, looking more like Nick Cave than Nick Cave has ever Nick Caved, stalking into your restaurant, even if you'd never caught him on Jools Holland. Maybe they just have so many celebs going through their doors he doesn't even count as A-list any more.

The food, if you care (and I'm not sure they do), is fine. Least successful was crudo di gambero rosso whose main ingredient, usually one of the sweetest and most delightful Mediterranean residents, was served in three mushy dollops, drowned out by a fiercely sharp citrussy dressing. We couldn't detect any of the advertised 'bisque reduction', either, and as seafood bisque is one of my favourite things in the world maybe I'm more annoyed about this than anything else.

Crocchette di vitello tonnato could have been disgusting (much like the parent dish itself) but actually as veal-rich breadcrumbed croquettes topped with a gently tuna-y sauce they were perfectly pleasant. Giant capers are always fun, too.

Bresaola grissini were also edible. I mean it's hard to completely cock up the wrapping of charcuterie around breadsticks, and they didn't, so well done them. Probably they could have done with a bit more lime zest but in all honesty I'm just trying to find more words to say about meat wrapped around breadsticks. They existed. We ate them.

We both enjoyed the truffled spaghetti - at first. You'd have to be a real sourpuss not to enjoy at least some amount proper home-made and nicely al-dente spaghetti soaked in truffle-cream sauce, topped with yet more black truffle. The problem is after a couple of mouthfuls it all becomes a bit, well, much and about half the amount would have been more than enough. Fair play to them for the generous portions, though, I'm sure it would delight some quarters.

And speaking of generous, veal alla Milanese was so ludicrously massive that we managed barely 20% of it before handing the rest to friends of ours (not Nick Cave, even though he looked like he could do with fattening up a bit) who happened to be sat on the next table. It was actually pretty decent, and I'm sure the portion sizes are part of the whole Bacchanalic vibe, but there's really only so much deep-fried veal I really want to eat even at the best of times.

The bill, with a soft-launch 50% off food discount (with a bottle of wine and including an endive salad I have no memory of ordering or eating), came to £102.11, so would have been more like £200+ in normal times. And you know, perhaps £100 is the going rate these days for the possibility of gawking an A-lister and sitting in a room decorated with underwear, and perhaps I'm not exactly their target market (in fact I'm definitely not), but as a food blogger it is my duty to inform you that you can eat much better elsewhere for much less. But then, I expect you knew that already.

So, and to repeat, Jacuzzi is not really about the food. Some of it works, and some of it doesn't, and it's all too expensive, but none of that matters. Like Sexy Fish or the Ivy before it or even Bacchanalia from Richard Caring with its dedicated grape-feeder (yes, really), there are some places that exist outside of the usual norms and rules of restaurant dining, that will remain packed night-after-night while people like me scratch their heads and wonder what we're not getting. In fact, why not go, you may have the night of your life. You're welcome to it. I'll be in the pub.

6/10

During the soft-launch period, which I think might have ended already, food was 50% off.

Zaika, Kensington

For a time after I first started this whole blogging thing, I was quite sniffy about 'posh' Indian food. This is largely due to the fallout from two desperately disappointing meals, one at Benares in Mayfair which we'd trooped to for a friend's birthday to be served a variety of bits no better than you could get at any high street curry house, and another at Amaya where I seem to remember they refused to serve us poppadums with chutneys. And this is completely their prerogative of course, but I want poppadums and chutneys.

Maybe I'm less fussy these days - though this seems unlikely if I'm going to be honest - or maybe the posh Indian restaurants have gradually realised they have to do something more special than serve the same high street curries in fancy bowls and with nicer toilets, and have gradually upped their game. Surely this is something to do with the arrival on the scene of JKS superstar places like Trishna and Gymkhana, which must have made the existing Mayfair/Kensington set really sit up and take notice. Since then I have had genuinely enjoyable meals at Tamarind, Amaya and the like, and of course at any number of Surrender Mohan (Jamavar) and Rohit Ghai (Kutir, Manathan) operations which have taken the cuisine to a new level still.

Zaika is, I'm sure they won't mind me saying, one of the old school, a stalwart of Kensington High Street since waaaay back in 2002 in a space that was once a fancy banking hall - in fact the old safe, too large and heavy to remove, is used as a pantry. The menu is comfortable and familiar and attractive, with the usual array of kebabs, tikka bites and tandoori dishes alongside curries and biryanis, with plenty of decent pescatarian and vegetarian options. The tasting menu, which we were treated to, comprised a selection of highlights from the A La Carte, starting with (no poppadums, so a point off for that) this summery avocado and mango chat salad thingy, studded with pomegranete seeds.

Next came two vast scallops (admittedly this was to share between two), gently coloured and surrounded by a moat of amazing tomato, chilli and pineapple sauce, and topped with a very interesting coconut and beetroot "chutney" the texture of soft cheese. The scallops were nice and sweet, and we both enjoyed the coconut but the real star here was the complex, fiery pineapple-chilli sauce, quite unlike anything I'd had before.

Always my favourite part of meals like this, the platter of tandoori dishes did not disappoint, from wonderfully charred and textured lamb chops to a firm yet tenderly spiced tandoori seabass, and some juicy chunks of chicken, also coloured with flecks of black char. And yes, if I'm going to be brutal the lamb chops at Gymkhana probably have the edge, the fish at Jamavar is more deliriously complex, but these were still very enjoyable, very competent examples of their kind.

As is the tradition in these kinds of meals, all the remaining savoury dishes arrived at once, tableside, on a giant serving platter groaning with bowls, plates and jugs. Notable amongst them were the butter chicken, which all the best Indian restaurants do so well, a lovely silky yellow daal and a stack of tandoor-fresh naans, all fluffy and crisp in the right places.

This being an invite, though, we were treated to a couple more a la carte dishes intended to show off all the skills of the kitchen. First, a stunning slow-cooked lamb shank sealed in pastry, with a chimney of bone poking out of the top. Into this bone was poured a thick, rich cumin sauce, basting the lamb meat even before the pastry was cracked. Clever stuff.

Second (and not pictured, sorry, must have been enjoying myself too much), a chicken biryani so powerful and fragrant it not only drew gasps when the pastry casing was broken, but when other tables in the room had the same dish at various moments the same evening, the same incredible aroma launched itself around the room.

Desserts were a decent if slightly crystallised ginger stem ice cream and a nice and moist if otherwise unspectacular gulub jamun. I don't think there's any restaurant in this category that's yet completely nailed the dessert course, and though I'm not completely distraught considering I could barely eat much of it anyway thanks to the mountain of food they'd given us previously, it does make you wonder why so many stunning courses of complex and skillful cooking are so often followed by ice cream and a bit of cake. Or maybe I'm just not a fan of Indian desserts, who knows.

Desserts aside, though, this is a restaurant well worth bothering with, and even if you ignore the lamb shank and biryani which were cheeky extras, a hugely generous amount of rewarding and exciting food for the £65 price tag. For Kensington indeed, that counts as something approaching a bargain, and with a couple of cocktails and glasses of wine you should expect to come away with a bill of about £100pp. True, it's slightly overshadowed by the flashier new wave of high-end Indian restaurants, but that's no reason to dismiss it - it does what it does very well, efficiently and with a smile on its face, and you can't ask fairer than that. Here's to another 20 years.

7/10

I was invited to Zaika, and didn't see a bill.

Flora Indica, Earl's Court

We're constantly being told that 2017 is the Year of the Taco, and while I'm obviously delighted with this development, especially if it means more places like Breddos opening, it seems to me that a bigger story is what's happening to Indian food in the capital. It may not be just coincidence that January has already seen me post on two separate and equally exciting (in their own way) Indian restaurants; first the high-end Jamavar with its elegant and sophisticated take on the classics, then Kricket with its innovative English-Indian small plates concept.

And now here's Flora Indica, a restaurant that defies easy explanation but for the sake of categorisation you may as well think of as "Experimental Indian". They describe themselves as "one-of-a-kind" and they're not wrong - the menu is a barrage of Indian words and unusual ingredients that, as it turns out, are only intermittently useful at predicting the food that eventually arrives at the table. But despite the almost wilfully obscure nature of the concept, I can't deny that things like "Green Banana Kali Mirch | Banana Chips | Smoked Garlic Yoghurt" or "Venison Gilafi Sheek | Coriander Chilli Sauce | Spiced Fig" do sound exciting as well as weird, and if you never quite know what you're ordering, well, perhaps that's entirely deliberate.

Plus, I don't think it's possible to order badly at Flora Indica; every single one of the fourteen or so (savoury) dishes we tried were at least good and at best brilliant. Unfortunately for them, a restaurant is more than just the food, and I'll get to the issues with service and value in a bit, but meantime have a look at this "Baby Bitter Gourd Tak a Tak", which was a very cleverly balanced dish, the slight bitterness of the vegetable offset by a sweet pumpkin soup.

Achari Tender Broccoli also went down well, in a mildly sharp and spicy dressing and dash of sour cream. You may think that's not a huge amount of food for £5, just five small twigs of broccoli, but at the time it didn't seem so much of an issue, probably because they tasted so good.

We'd ordered these "poppadums" as we sat down, but they only appeared with the rest of the starters as someone apparently forgot to put the order through. Interesting things though, apparently puffed cassava with a little pot of house bitter pickle.

Naan with hemp seeds and Red Leicester cheese was excellent, the kind of British-Indian fusion I can very much get behind. It would have been more enjoyable without our overly familiar waiter interrupting with unneccessary chat ("So how was your weekend, guys?") but perhaps he was just embarrassed about having forgotten to put the poppadum order through and was overcompensating.

Opening weeks jitters could also account for the bizarre decision to fill a vacuum wine cooler almost to the brim with ice then precariously balance a bottle of wine on top of it, an arrangement that had no more effect on the temperature of the wine than not using the cooler at all.

Still, amidst the warm wine and the annoying interruptions, we still had the food, albeit not much of it. "Malwani Prawn" (3 of) were beautifully bouncy, dressed in a gentle spiced chutney and topped with mooli spaghetti.

Pulled Gressingham duck came in the form of a neat little tower of chilli-spiked meat, topped with a gram flour "cheela" (pancake) and a dollop of coconut chutney. This, too, was a genuinely lovely and intelligent bit of cooking.

Salmon trout was timed perfectly to just-pink inside, and had a wonderful flavour. £8 got us just about enough for a single mouthful, but again it was hard to be disappointed with anything other than the amount of it.

Sweetbread "shikampuri" (kind of a fish cake/kebab hybrid) was another brave experiment that completely worked. A lurid pink, earthy beetroot sauce complimented the offal notes of the kebab very well, and almost made you forget you were paying the best part of a tenner for a few grams of food.

I don't mean to labour the point about the portion sizes, but the fact the food was all so good just made you want even more of it, and though getting to try more of the menu was hardly a hardship on the one hand, we were very aware of the costs mounting up. Even the dishes from the "curries" section of the menu, with their heftier price points, contained only a smidgen more product, but again what was there was stunning. This chicken tikka came in a sauce best described as Heinz Cream of Tomato Soup made by God himself, so incredibly rich and packed full of flavour you could hardly imagine it being improved upon at all.

And this rogan josh, three or four pieces of beautifully tender lamb in another exquisitely constructed sauce, almost chocolately in its intensity. Also pictured, a black dhal which though not quite as perfect as the version at Jamavar, still did its job well, and a butter naan, light and bubbly.

So yes, someone at Flora Indica knows how to cook. And I'll gloss over the slightly more mundane desserts - I don't think I've ever had a very good dessert in an Indian restaurant (sorry) - because what came before was so enjoyable. Above is some kind of beetroot pudding which I'd rather forget about, and I believe we also had something involving pineapple.

The bill came to just under £50 a head, which I guess isn't a vast amount of money but it's still enough to put things like the dodgy service and small portions in a slightly more critical light. Only just enough though, because as I hope I've made clear, this is some of the most exciting and innovative Indian food London has to offer, and if you're any less of a grumpy misanthrope than me (which would be just about everyone I think) you may find a chatty waiter the least of your worries. Or, indeed, a vacuum cooler full of ice. Flora Indica has, despite its flaws, plenty to recommend it.

8/10

The Collection, Knightsbridge

There was a time a decade or two back, hard as it is to believe now, when The Collection was one of the hottest tables in town. Ideally located on the ever-desirable Brompton Road, it regularly played host to A-listers and assorted international glamour-pusses, the rest of the clientele carefully hand-picked out of the star struck hordes that would queue up every night. But yet, like the Met Bar before it or Mo*vida since, stars waned, times changed, and the Collection found itself out of favour. The George Michaels and Paris Hiltons began to book their parties elsewhere, the original owners lost interest and moved on, and by the time I first visited for a friend's birthday in 2006, the huge dining hall was half empty, and without the celebrity factor to support it the menu exposed as directionless and overpriced. I guess that's the problem with running a business aimed at fickle, fame-hungry poseurs - without anything substantial in terms of food or value to fall back on, it's all built on sand.


But now, in 2011, the Collection has been refurbished and relaunched, with a new menu, a new Italian head chef and apparently (though my memory isn't good enough to recall exactly what it was like pre-refurb) a new design inside and out. On the subject of that redesign though, I'm not sure how successful it's been. Whether or not you thought it was a good restaurant overall, one of the standout features of the old Collection was a long, underlit entrance hall which arced gently towards the glittering bar in the far distance. Last night, the underlighting had gone and the same journey felt rather less like a glamorous catwalk and a bit more like one of the pedestrianised subways under Elephant and Castle. The vast bar is still there, though, and I started the evening with something from the Chelsea-themed cocktail list, Granny Takes A Trip. It tasted a bit like mouthwash but I suppose mouthwash is refreshing.


You'll have to excuse the hideous photos which go nowhere near doing the food justice - it was so dark in there I would have nothing to show you if I didn't use the flash, but fortunately as one of only two tables taken last night (understandable I guess on a windy Monday night) I didn't think I'd be bothering anyone too much. Fresh house bread (I always like it when restaurants make their own bread) consisted of focaccia, a crunchy baguette and some kind of strange greasy parcel thing completely covered in salt but which I rather enjoyed in a heart-attackey sort of way. There were three different flavoured oils to dip them in, too, one of which was truffle. I like truffle.



At first I was pleasantly surprised that the "starters" all came in under £10 (this is Knightsbridge after all) but it turns out one of the concessions the New Collection has made to 2011 dining was the ubiquitous Small Plates concept, and we were advised to order at least three between two. Buffalo tartar was my favourite, cleverly hiding a quails egg within, although the accompanying crispbread was way too salty to eat - I scraped off a layer of the stuff so thick I could have seasoned an entire porterhouse with it. Burrata was very good (and very salty too) with more of that (very salty) crispbread, and a scallop carpaccio used good fresh ingredients and looked very pretty on the plate. Quite salty though.


Mains were, for various reasons that I think you may have picked up on by now, nearly right. A 250g sirloin steak, of good beef and cooked medium-rare, was so hugely oversalted I had to eat it between desperate gulps of tap water, and the weirdly bland tomato purée it was served with (not to mention the deathly unimaginative - ugh - rocket and tomato salad) didn't do anything for it. But, it was charred nicely, smelled of lovely barbeque smoke and the chips were very good if a bit-, oh, you get the picture. Barbequed grouper, coated in a thick, treacly marinade although cooked to flaky perfection, was served on top of a mound of crunchy samphire. And the thing about samphire is, it's quite salty.


One of the desserts, a pineapple carpaccio with chilli jelly, was lovely. A good mixture of flavours and very well presented, the chilli wasn't too strong and just got the tastebuds tingling alongside blobs of sharp lemon sorbet. The other, a warm pistachio tartlet, wasn't so enjoyable - the tart itself was fine, but it was served under a huge, thick ring of solid chocolate which rather put the whole thing off-balance. We still finished it off though, probably because it was one of only a couple of dishes all evening that hadn't been caked in sodium.


There will be plenty of people out there, I'm sure, who will thoroughly enjoy an evening at Collection. Just as I would never have been found in the queue out on Brompton Road hoping to catch a glimpse of Prince Harry tucking into his veal chop in the early noughties, I am certainly not now, with my shallow pockets and natural aversion to superficial Sloaney glamour, anything approaching Collection's target audience. All I can really safely comment on is whether the food and drink is worth the money, and I'm afraid it's not, at least not quite. A meal in Knightsbridge is always going to cost more than one in Whitechapel but with the unhinged approach to seasoning and the fact that most of the dishes on the overlong, geographically vague menu were if not exactly wrong then at the very least unadventurous, there's still better to be had elsewhere, even round these parts. The Collection has its place perhaps, but it's not for me.

5/10



I was invited to review The Collection