Yashin, Kensington

"Without Soy Sauce
but if you want to."

This bizarrely illiterate directive is spelled out in large neon lettering on the back wall of stylish, newish sushi joint Yashin in Kensington. A couple of issues immediately spring to mind. Firstly, what on earth have Yashin got against soy sauce? I can understand Chinese restaurants being proud to not use MSG in their food, or a burger joint advertising their use of never-frozen beef, but I can't imagine anyone thinking the fact they deliberately avoid soy, a relatively benign and pretty tasty condiment at the best of times, would really be a selling point. Secondly, why then qualify it with "but if you want to"? Do they mean "unless" you want to, which would be a rather weak climb-down but would at least make grammatical sense or do they literally mean it to sound so hostile - "well, go ahead and ask for soy, then, you awkward bastard, but we won't like it and may spit in your miso." Very weird.


Fortunately, despite being forced to stare at this illuminated act of literary aggression throughout the course of our meal, it turned out to be quite at odds with the attitude of the staff, who to a man were helpful, pleasant and so completely on the ball when it came to service we barely needed to look up from our dinner for one of them to immediately catch our eye. Admittedly, it's probably quite easy being attentive in a room with only 16-odd covers upstairs and almost as many staff milling around, but it still doesn't mean it's not appreciated. The ultra-dutiful service also makes sense in the context of the prices at Yashin, which start at nose-bleeding and swiftly head towards eyeball-bursting if you're not very careful. Thinking I was being sensible in ordering one of the cheapest sakes on the menu, £26 in fact bought me a measure of size of a small beer bottle - it was nice enough I suppose, but I find it very hard to enjoy any alcoholic beverage more expensive than vintage champagne that isn't, in fact, vintage champagne.


The food itself, too, very much continued the theme of playing fast and loose with the idea of value. Marinated oysters were prettily presented on dyed blue ice, with a powerful shallot dressing and crispy lotus root, but the two not particularly massive shellfish weren't really extraordinary enough to justify £5.60. Akedashi soup (£2.50) felt a bit more like a good deal, rich and colourful and very much suiting the ironic afternoon tea presentation.


I only have myself to blame for the £13.50 price tag associated with a dish of Wagyu Carpaccio with wasabi, but having had a rather disappointing Wagyu steak when seared on the Jospers at top steakhouse Goodman a few months back I wondered if the Japanese method would bring out more in this premium meat. I can't really say it did though - the dressing was rather straightforward, just notes of vinegar and sugar and white radish, and the beef itself tender but pretty bland. Perhaps I'm missing something.



Grouper Carpaccio with spicy yuzu (£7.90) was better, grouper having a great firm texture and plenty of fresh flavour, and yuzu turned out to be a great acidic compliment to the protein, albeit displaying nothing much approaching the description "spicy"; I was underwhelmed with the seafood salad with sweet potato though, which contained tasteless rubbery chunks of unseasoned seafood (some kind of clam I think, amongst other things).



Soft shell crab "salad" (more accurately described as "a soft shelled crab and a shed load of lettuce") boasted expertly fried crab with absolutely bags of seafood flavour, but was a fairly miserly portion for £8.40. At Mien Tay, my local Vietnamese, you get two of these for £7, and, ironically, a nice soy & chilli sauce to dip them in. Because actually, Yashin, sometimes I do want to.



And then, the centrepiece of the meal, the Omakase 8 sushi set. Yashin are unusual amongst sushi places, at least in London, for very briefly searing the top of the nigiri with a blowtorch before dressing and serving. This bit of theatre is exciting to watch, especially when, as we were on our visit, you're sat so close to the prep area there's a very real chance of getting your eyebrows singed, but let's just consider this whole blowtorch business for a second. Sushi is raw fish, right? And nigiri is warm sushi rice with raw fish on top. And whether or not you prefer your fish raw or cooked, the fact is that there's a reason why sushi is served raw because cooking it fundamentally changes the way fish tastes. And if Yashin think they're improving the sushi by cooking it, then that means they think cooked fish tastes better than raw, which is, to say the least, a very odd attitude from a sushi restaurant. The omakase, by the way, was pretty nice - I particularly enjoyed some fatty tuna topped with a tiny flower petal and dab of truffle oil, and a salmon with lovely sharp ponzu jelly - but it wasn't anything above the standard of ingredients I enjoyed at Asakusa last year, and cost a frankly ludicrous £30.


I think you probably have the picture by now. If money was no object, if you are a connoisseur of fine sake and you like your nigiri cooked, you could easily find a lot to like at Yashin. In fact, plenty of people have, and it was with a mixture of surprise and regret that it slowly dawned on me I wasn't going to have quite the transcendental experience greater reviewers than me had spoken of. I should also say that my dining companion that night, a food blogger whose younger palate is probably not quite as battered as mine had a much better time and has already been two or three times. But if it was just up to me, I wouldn't go back to Yashin and to that extent I can't recommend it. It's perfectly nice, fresh food served at the kind of silly prices (our bill, with a couple of extra bits of sashimi, came to £161 for two) I can't see anyone but the guys who took our place at the bar after we'd gone, who parked their vintage Mercedes convertible just outside, being able to justify.

5/10



Pictures courtesy of Hollow Legs

Magdalen, Bermondsey

It says a great deal more about my inexcusably spoiled attitude to London dining than it does about the excellent team behind the Magdalen that I only just resisted the temptation to dismiss the menu as "familiar". It is only familiar, of course, to hopeless restaurant addicts like me - there's the pig's head and gribiche I had at the Prince of Wales in Putney; the calves brains and capers from Racine; braised kid and artichokes from the Anchor & Hope. I'm not suggesting that any of these places invented those things (although the more knowledgeable of you are welcome to provide a more comprehensive back-story if you fancy it), but familiarity should not always be a stick to beat restaurants with - it should be a source of pride, and is to the benefit of us all, that the best dishes are passed around the gastropubs of London in tribute by enthusiastic chefs. There's nothing wrong with a familiar menu if it all tastes good, and the food at Magdalen certainly all tastes very good indeed.




Rabbit bruschetta were fresh and summery and though slightly over-oiled (actually, quite soggy if I'm going to be honest) were still a fairly decent mix of textures and flavours. I have a bit of a troubled history with rabbit; so many places cook it so badly that for a while I thought there was something about bunnies that made them inherently unsuitable for eating, and it was only a freshly barbecued version with aioli from a local restaurant in Catalonia a few years back that convinced me they were worth bothering with at all. Here the rabbit meat was sweet and juicy and as good as (I imagine) it can be.



I loved my starter of smoked anchovies, radishes, green beans and duck egg. The salad was dressed perfectly (and actually seasoned quite aggressively, fine for me but a bit too salty for my friend), the anchovies were tasty and soft (if not very smoky for some reason) and the egg was boiled to a nice runny yolk. Unpretentious, using top ingredients and displaying just enough technical skill to be worth the money, it was a classic gastropub starter. My friend's chilled cucumber soup was also delicious, studded with sweet brown shrimps and topped with dill, and very attractive to boot.



Hereford rump, white beans, spinach and rosemary was about as good a dish as I can remember from a restaurant like this, and I relished every second of the, er, 30 seconds or so it took to shovel it down. The beef itself was seared to a lovely pink, and was all incredibly tender, but it was the sauce that it came swimming in that made it really special - rich and brown and, for want of a better word, just very, very "beefy". An incredibly successful way of serving what was presumably not the most expensive cow money can buy - just cook it well and top up the flavour with a bit of extra effort in the kitchen. Top marks. And a friend’s baked brill was equally technically accomplished, with a great crispy skin (there should be some kind of law against serving fish any other way) and a silky butter sauce spiked with salty samphire.


Looking back now, I can hardly bear to think how close we came to not ordering the Magdalen cherry & almond tart. We were stuffed and slightly sozzled (well, I was), the midsummer sun was beginning to set over Tower Bridge, and had we thrown in the towel after the main courses I still would have considered it one of my favourite mid-range meals of the year. But we were enjoying ourselves very much and I quite fancied an excuse to neck a small glass of Jurancon before the train ride home, and so we thought it would be a good idea to share a dessert. What arrived was one of the greatest little cherry and almond tarts I've had the pleasure of eating in my whole life. Buttery and syrupy, with a generous handful of juicy cherries and scattering of toasted almonds, the filling was beautifully light, slightly crunchy on top and with a delicate but solid base that broke under the slightest of pressure from my spoon. Was it just that it was fresh out of the oven, was it the effect of the sweet wine, or is the pastry chef at Magdalen one of the great unsung heroes of London gastronomy? I don't know, I didn't want to know, I just want to go back and do it all again.


Detractors amongst you will point out that for the prices they charge at Magdalen, you would hope the cooking is at least very good. And yes, with £8 starters and £18 main courses and £6 desserts, while not being anywhere near unreasonable, it is perhaps more than you could spend in some local restaurants. But cooking of this style and quality - accessible, unpretentious, terrific cooking; cooking of warmth, flavour and spirit, not perfect but always enjoyable, this is not something you find in every neighbourhood. In fact, it's not something you find very often, anywhere. Magdalen is a restaurant that anyone can enjoy, and deserves to be enjoyed by as many as possible.

9/10



I was invited to review Magdalen.

Viajante revisited, Bethnal Green

The words "El Bulli-trained" have been attached to chef Nuno Mendes for as long as he has been working in London. It is a tag that has followed him from the ill-fated but briefly brilliant Bacchus in Hoxton in 2007, to the clandestine Loft supper club the year after (although how accurate a description the word "supper club" is to anywhere charging £100 a head is debatable) and then, from March last year, to Viajante, an ambitious and wilfully idiosyncratic operation in what must be the most unlikely location for a 5-star hotel in London, the old Bethnal Green Town Hall, nestled amongst the kebab shops and strip joints that surround Cambridge Heath station. Having worked at El Bulli is a big deal of course, and whatever you might think of Ferran Adria's tricks and foams you wouldn't deny any chef the opportunity to put it on his or her CV, but even Viajante's own press releases only coyly refer to Mendes doing a "stage" at the eponymous restaurant some time in the 90s, and it is his time with superchefs Wolfgang Puck and Jean-George Vongerichten that seem to have been more a more substantial feature of his culinary education.


Chef back stories are dull, and I only mention the above because however accurate or otherwise "El Bulli-trained" is as a shorthand for Nuno Mendes' cooking style, it is the one that he is, for better or worse, most associated with, and, crucially, the one that is foremost in most diners' minds as they take a seat in the strangely solemn dining room at Viajante. People, I'm guessing, come here for clever twists and techniques, unusual ingredients, an international and ultra-modern menu of shocks and surprises. They also come here for theatre - there's an open kitchen, which judging by the arrangement of tables and chairs in the room is almost literally a substitute stage, and perhaps they also come here to see Mendes himself. There was no sign of him last night, though, and as I stared out from our corner table as a half dozen chefs silently assembled plate after plate of elaborate bijou tasting dishes, I wondered what was supposed to be so entertaining about it. Surely an open kitchen should be full of fire and smoke, frantic activity, blood, sweat and tears. In Viajante, with all the "proper" cooking done in a prep area downstairs, all the show-kitchen chefs have to do is tweezer the prepared elements onto a selection of bizarre tableware and send it out. It all seemed a bit sterile.


But, to the food, and the first couple of amuses were very decent. "Thai Explosion" was a kind of biscuit made with familiarly Thai ingredients such as chicken, lemongrass and coriander, softly sweet and very clever, and "Crab doughnuts" were just that, inventive and very well put together, the kind of thing which in less skilled hands could have been a complete disaster (mmm fishy doughnuts) but here was great fun.


The first disappointment came with the "Bread and butter", a course in its own right thanks to a selection of two house "butter" creations, one involving chicken skin and one darker one allegedly somehow containing black pudding. Despite the bread being fresh and warm, neither of the "butters" really tasted of much other than, well, whipped butter, a particular blow to me as the chicken skin butter was the highlight of my first visit in summer last year. I don't know whether they've changed the recipe or I remember it being better than it was, but having hyped it to my friend it was a bit embarrassing when it turned out to be a bit of a let down.


And talking of let-downs, "Fresh cheese with peas and flowers" was pond water, the "cheese" being little more than thickened, opaque gunk and entirely unseasoned. The peas were nice but no more than that and the flowers made it all look quite pretty, but it was a hugely underwhelming, bafflingly unsuccessful course. It was also far too cold, seemingly straight out of the fridge, lending it a rather soul-less pre-prepared feel. All kinds of wrong.


The two courses "Squid with ink, pickled radishes and sea lettuce" and "White, green and wild asparagus with milk skin" both suffered from the same fridge-fresh temperature issue and both were lacking in flavour and seasoning. You could see what they were trying to do - the ribbon-cut squid in ink matched with fresh pickled radish should have been a home run, and there's not much you can do to asparagus to make them bland, but we could find anything to get excited about. Frosty, literally and metaphorically.



And then, shockingly, a flash of brilliance. "Leek heart with lobster and leek consommé" was astonishingly good, the lobster cooked two separate ways, boiled and I think a ceviche or marinade of some kind, and both deliciously moist and tasty. They came with fantastic charred leek pieces which added a smoky earthy note, and the resulting broth was scooped up with evangelical fervour. A really great dish, although it did occur to me how a kitchen capable of this could have served the peas and flowers thing with a straight face.


"Cod and potatoes with confit egg yolk and saffron" was also excellent. Lovely bright-white flakes of moist cod, a earthy smothering of saffron foam and - best of all - a fudgy, rich egg yolk to coat it all, it was a sort of deconstructed fish pie, at once familiar and unfamiliar.


And then just as we were beginning to think it may have been worth the trek to Bethnal Green after all, "Duck heart and tongue with mushroom floss and spiced broth" brought us crashing back to earth. Although the textures were interesting and the presentation pretty, the flavours were too subdued to be enjoyable, and a lack of seasoning meant all the pieces just merged into one vaguely edible stew. Not disgusting, and not that far off being right, but still wrong.


Even worse was "Pork secretos with artichoke and red wine tapioca", notable at least as the first dish using Iberico pork that I've ever not enjoyed. Simultaneously containing dry flesh and wobbly under-rendered fat, the pig itself was the biggest disappointment but with tough artichokes and a weird smear of underseasoned scarlet porridge to go with it, nothing else on the plate was enjoyable. It was, even taking into account the presentation which had at least been consistent up to this point, a sub-gastropub turn-off.


"Frozen maple with shiso and green apple" wasn't great but was at least interesting, the savoury sorbet working well as a palette cleanser and I liked the sharp shiso and the range of textures in the ice. Then, just in case we weren't discombobulated enough, the first of the desserts proper, "White chocolate with grapefruit and lemon", conspired to be surprisingly good. There was a really interesting blend of textures between the teeny meringue buttons and the soft white chocolate mousse, and the citrusy sauce finished the whole thing off very nicely.



Desserts in fact seemed to be amongst Viajante's strongest cards, the final one "Pickled and raw cucumber with milk sorbet" being just the right side of challenging and containing soft, sharp, crunchy and smooth elements all working in harmony. Pickled cucumber in a dessert, and it was quite nice - who knew?


But despite the odd highlight, I'm afraid the over-riding memory I will take with me from my experience at Viajante is of disappointment. Disappointment for a number of reasons, not least the niggling feeling that it was better the first time, that some of the dishes were so poor, that the room seemed even less conducive to having a relaxing evening. Disappointment that the odd superb dish was enough to remind me that they can produce world-class food when they want to and that I can't just write off it all as overthought nonsense. But mainly disappointment because this largely humdrum meal out in the furthest reaches of the gritty East End cost us, with only one bottle of cheapish Riesling between two and a Kir Royale each, the best part of £250, pitching it into battle with the Ledbury, Le Gavroche and pretty much every other fine dining restaurant in the capital. And based on my experience, it is a battle they are always going to lose.


So it seems, after all, that Viajante may be El Bulli's representative in London. Believe me, this isn't much of a compliment - I won the El Bulli lottery a couple of years back and trotted off to Girona only to suffer a self-important, maddeningly inconsistent meal of salty fruit, raw squid guts and other stomach-churning "experiments" interspersed with the odd edible treat. It was overlong, overwhelming and overpriced, and yet there was enough about it that was thought-provoking and challenging, and just about enough good courses to see what all the fuss was about. On the journey back from Bethnal Green last night I felt a very similar way to how I felt in the car back along those scary coastal roads north of Roses - slightly queasy, slightly confused and ever so slightly ripped off. Viajante is interesting all right, but it's not for me.

5/10

Lemonia, Primrose Hill

There is no reason I can think of for why so many Greek restaurants in London should be so very poor. After distressing experiences at two different branches of Real Greek (neither were my choice; was dragged there by friends brandishing 50% off vouchers, presumably the only way they can attract paying customers) followed by a catastrophically awful dinner in Camberwell (I won't mention the name but it's easily Googled if you're desperate to try the greasy supermarket taramasalata and frozen calamari for yourself), I had pretty much given up hope of ever finding anywhere worth my money. Why can Turkey, not a million miles away from Greece geographically or (debatably) culinarily, bless us Londoners with more brilliant little Ocakbasi grills than we could ever want or deserve, and our options for a Greek be either a permanently-discounted chain that sold its heart to investors many years ago or some grotty local Taverna serving mystery meat? It makes no sense.


But being the eternal optimist, and emboldened by a slew of recommendations from Twitter after wondering out loud if I'd ever find a good Greek restaurant in this town, last night I and a friend found ourselves in Lemonia, Primrose Hill. Perhaps, the dodgy reasoning went, if we paid a bit more and tried a long-established and objectively very popular restaurant in a slightly nicer part of town, the chances of being disastrously disappointed would be diminished somewhat. Well, you can't say we didn't try.


I did like one thing at Lemonia, though. The taramasalata, fluffy and bright and actually tasting of nice fresh cod's roe instead of the weird pink goo you find in Tescos (or indeed in Greek restaurants in Camberwell) was fantastic, even very nearly worth the £5 they charge for it. We were happy enough scooping it up with house bread, although for some reason despite asking for just "pitta", we were brought (and charged for) one small portion of decent warm pitta and two large toasted slices of what tasted suspiciously like Sainsbury's sesame loaf, which remained largely untouched.


The other starters were less enjoyable. Tsatziki was warm and unremarkable (and at £4.75 must be at the upper end of what you can pay for a mixture of yoghurt and cucumber) and a couple of parcels of spanakopitta were light on filling and heavy on oil. They also cost £2.50 each, which is surely way too much.

As for the main course, a mixed grill, I have rarely seen a more carelessly presented and unexciting looking plate of food. This is exactly how it arrived - like what might be leftover at a garden party after all the guests had gone home and the barbecue coals had long gone cold. There was a single tiny lamb chop, cooked through to chewy grey, a couple of kebabs of bland lamb chunks and (admittedly surprisingly moist) cubed chicken, and finally a single miniscule blackened sausage rolling around at the side, looking like a burn victim's dismembered digit. Most of it was boring if just about edible, but the sausage was mealy and dry and packed with far too many herbs and vegetables, giving it a horrible sweaty feel in the mouth.


Whether by way of an apology or through sheer incompetence, Lemonia only charged us £9.75 for the mixed grill rather than the listed £14.75, but it still wasn't worth it. And also, ordinarily I'd applaud anywhere only charging a 10% service charge rather than the normal 12.5% but even that seemed over the odds - we had arrived after and were seated next to a very pleasant American family of four who watched bemused as me and my friend ordered our food, finished off our starters, picked at our mains and polished off a bottle of rosé all before their first dishes arrived. I felt their hungry eyes dart over our way as we tucked into the taramasalata but I'm fairly sure hunger gave way to terror once they caught a glimpse of that mixed grill. Even so, if it had been the other way round and we'd waited 25 minutes for our food while the table next door feasted, I would have been furious.


The search goes on, then, I suppose. I still have a handful of recommendations for places in scary locations like Enfield and I'm not about to write off a national cuisine just because their restaurateurs aren't up to the job - otherwise we'd have all given up on Mexican cuisine long before the likes of Wahaca and Buen Provecho showed us how it should be done. But Lemonia's success and longevity is baffling - perhaps there's not much competition in Primrose Hill, perhaps the celebrity factor is drawing in more people to a mediocre local restaurant than would otherwise be the case, or perhaps - and this is the most worrying thought - people think this is just as good as Greek food can be. Well, I am eager and willing to prove them wrong. Watch this space.

4/10

Rock Lobsta, Shoreditch

Given the huge number of burger trucks, popup restaurants and other temporary and/or mobile outlets swamping London at the moment, it is perhaps inevitable that not all of them will be very good. And ordinarily a mediocre popup wouldn't be worth the effort of a blog post - these things are often small-scale affairs and temporary to the point of fleeting, and to bash one here, especially one that is only going to be around for a long weekend in any case, may seem at best pointless and at worst pointlessly cruel. But my experience at Rock Lobsta last night was just so irritating in almost every respect that out of a sense of duty to anyone out there who may otherwise be tempted to visit this slickly-marketed operation, and in a desperate attempt to persuade the people responsible for it to stop treating street food as a restaurant PR campaign, I thought I'd put a few words down.

Firstly, it's not just the prices that bother me about Rock Lobsta. I was being as realistic as I could about what it's possible to achieve involving fresh seafood on a budget in this country; we are never going to have access to a US$6 lobster roll or the kind of seafood outlets the lucky residents of San Diego enjoy. But I do think that for £15 I'm entitled to something a little more dramatic than a spoonful of bland lobster meat ("natives" I was told but this was hardly the best advertisement for British produce), drowned in cheap commodity mayo and laid inside a dry brioche bun. Accompanying pickles (including samphire) were nice, and there was a handful of salt and vinegar crisps to attempt to cut through all the mayonnaise, but everything had the overwhelming flavour of rip-off.

And it wasn't just the lobster roll itself that stuck in the throat. An £8 plate of crayfish, once you'd pulled them apart and extracted the teeny sliver of meat from the tails, contained just six prawn-sized edible morsels, hardly enough even to taste. They were presented with something they called "saffron mayonnaise" but which tasted remarkably like the cheap stuff that came in the lobster roll only with something that made it go yellow - possibly saffron, who knows. I also ordered a beer, which was £4, and the total should have come to a crazy £27 but for some reason they only charged me £20. Perhaps it was a mistake, perhaps it was just guilt.

Rather embarrassingly I had brought along a couple of friends to suffer the evening with me, one of whom has Coeliac's disease and therefore has to avoid gluten not through any kind of vague holistic reason but because it literally will hospitalise her. We realised the lobster bun itself was no-go but thought maybe some kind of Atkins option would work and asked what went into the rest of it. "It's just lobster" was the stunningly inaccurate response. Er, there's mayonnaise though too, isn't there? What goes into that? "I don't know, it comes in a jar". This painful exchange wasn't made any easier by one of the other chefs uttering very audible "move along now" noises, and so in the end said unfortunate friend left fuming and kept her money, possibly to spend on a three course meal somewhere that cared.

It's worth repeating that if I had paid £15 for a lobster roll and it had been juicy and tasty, with fresh mayonnaise and soft white bread, I wouldn't have been in the least bit put out. The Hawksmoor lobster roll, in fact, is £25 - admittedly it contains a whole lobster but it comes soaked in garlic and hazelnut butter and with proper béarnaise sauce on the side and is really lovely despite carving a hole in your wallet so large you could fall through it. Everything about Rock Lobsta felt shallow, a cleverly-promoted bandwagon-jumping exercise in food PR calculated to stir up interest for the inevitable bricks-and-mortar offering in the near future. And although I'm sure they're not making a fortune, at this stage at least, in the end it just feels like an advertising stunt and not an honest attempt to serve real street food, and that really grates. There may yet be a way of bringing decent lobster rolls to the UK and making the numbers work, of showing love and care to the king of crustaceans and paying more than lip service to the notion of value, but Rock Lobsta, sad to say, ain't it.

3/10

Al Waha, Westbourne Grove

In stark contrast to some other world cuisines I could care to mention (*cough* Mexican *cough* Thai *cough*) it seems there are a lot of very good Lebanese restaurants in London. A casual enquiry on Twitter as to which of them was worth visiting drew a huge list of recommendations from all over the place, along with some remarkably enthusiastic reviews - "Maroush Juice serves the best halloumi in the world"; "Mr Falafel...puts crack in his falafels"; "Levant on Wigmore street - excellent food, swanky restaurant". So, spoiled for choice and fairly confident most of the places on fhe shortlist would have served a decent meal, we in the end booked Al Waha on Westbourne Grove, based on the fact that it was relatively easy for both myself and my dinner date to get home, and that the tips had been ever so slightly more slavering than for anywhere else.


One of the "problems" of crowd sourcing restaurant tips on Twitter is that the experience you end up with is probably quite different to if you'd just wandered in off the street and made the most of anything on the menu you recognised as edible. We turned up at Al Waha with a good half-dozen "must order" items, some of which weren't even on the printed menu, and so there's a possibility our eclectic ordering impressed the kitchen staff into trying that little bit harder (well, you never know), not to mention that the dishes themselves were possibly the cream of what Al Waha can produce. That said, the meal we constructed for ourselves through the power of social media stands up as possibly the best Lebanese food I've ever eaten in the capital; never less than good, and often astonishing.



The first proper dish to arrive was a bowl of Fattoush (£4.50), a vegetable and herb salad livened by crispy slivers of deep-fried pita bread. It is a dish - like most salads - that relies upon absolutely fresh ingredients to be anything more than edible, but fortunately here it was excellent, full of interesting textures and aromatic flavours.



Falafel (£4.50) were, I'm afraid, rather under seasoned and needed either a lot more salt or a lot more of the miserly portion of sesame dressing they arrived with. It's a shame, too, as the timing on the frying was perfect, creating a lovely crust and soft insides. Perhaps an off day on the falafels, but they were still decent enough.


Chicken wings (Jawaneh meshwiyeh) (£5), crisply fried and dressed in a punchy garlic sauce had a great grilled flavour but I just didn't like the way they'd hacked each wing in half across the bone; chicken marrow makes me queasy and anyway, isn't it far more fun when you disassemble a chicken wing yourself than have it hacked apart before you get the chance? Again though, you could pick fault but you could still very easily enjoy.


Things really stepped up a gear with arrival of Kibbeh Nayeh (£10), a simply brilliant dish of raw lamb mixed with crushed wheat and punchy - but balanced - spices. Artfully presented, arranged into bitesize portions and topped with fried onions and what I think was chunks of moist liver, it was a delight to eat, addictively chillified and uniquely Lebanese. Also superb was a dish of Hummous Kawarmah (£6), the house hummous soft and light as whipped cream and topped with chunks of salty lamb and pine nuts.



Sojuk Sadah (£5.50) were one of a couple of types of house spicy sausage, softer in texture than you might expect and packed full of zingy spice. I suppose they could be described as a sort of Lebanese chorizo, with a similar kind of oily fire, and went down a storm. But even better than that, and our favourite dish overall - all the more amazing considering it was just something we'd spotted on the menu and didn't come recommended as such from anyone - were sweetbreads (haliwat) cooked absolutely to crusty, wobbly perfection in a light lemon dressing and surely the bargain of the year at £7.50 a plate. I have rarely, if ever, had sweetbreads cooked this well in some of the top Michelin-starred restaurants in the country; they disappeared in seconds.



I don't know if Al Waha is the "best" (whatever that means) Lebanese restaurant in London. And I'm not going to pretend it was perfect - the Lebanese wine at £13.50 a half bottle was fairly horrible (my friend thought it could have been corked but we gingerly sipped at it anyway) and the annoying cover charge of £1.50 a head seemed to get you little more than a tiny bowl of boring olives and a bizarre basket of raw, undressed vegetables that defied use or explanation (what exactly am I expected to do with a whole spring onion!?). But it is very easy to ignore such niggles when the rest of the meal (and, I should also mention, the friendly and attentive service) was of such a high standard, and more than that, a couple of the dishes - the lamb kibbeh, the sweetbreads - were worth any amount of hardship. Al Waha is a treasure, and I will certainly be back.

8/10