Telephone: 020 7627 0222
Address: 67 Venn Street, London SW4
Dinner for two, including wine and service, around £50.
For the second time in as many weeks I carry a burden of regret for having to cut up rough on a place I so wanted to like. At least this time I have someone to blame: Leslie Ash. Along with her footballer husband Lee Chapman, Ash is the driving force behind three restaurants - a branch of Teatro in London and Leeds and now a third, in Clapham, south London, called SO.UK - which is either pronounced like an Arabian bazaar or, with the two parts separately, as in So Graham Norton . It occupies a site which was once Ms Ash's childhood home and was, until the restaurant took over, a really good painting and decorating shop. It has been transformed into a smart place of low banquettes and chocolate veneer (naturally) with a menu that plunders dishes from the global larder.
One day between Christmas and New Year, I phoned to find out whether they were open for lunch the next day. Yes, of course they were; no, we didn't need to book and yes, we could bring children. So we turned up, laden with child-friendly paraphernalia, to find the bastard place was closed. Hence, for the benefit of Ms Ash, I now postulate Rayner's first law of the restaurant business: always make sure the doors to your establishment are unlocked when you say they will be, in case some uppity critic arrives and, finding himself excluded, declares in print that you are a bunch of incompetent shysters.
The problem was I still needed to review somewhere, and this is where the regret kicks in. Because we chose, instead, to go to a nearby Bretain restaurant called Gastro, which I have always liked and felt deserving of the attention. And, of course, for the first time it was a bloody disaster.
Let me deal with the nice stuff first. Gastro is a beautiful little place, a wood-lined snug with a classic zinc bar and, at one end, a huge table where people eat communally. They recently knocked through to the next-door shop and that, too, is a grand piece of work: old-fashioned booths, wood panelling and a big tank of live lobsters. The staff are friendly and the simpler stuff on the menu has never let us down. It is a great spot for cheap oysters or dressed crab with a home-made mayonnaise or a bowl of fish soup.
Unfortunately, we went for the more ambitious dishes on the menu which were almost all dire - when they bothered to arrive. Our starters took 45 minutes to get to us and our main courses another 20 minutes more, by which time we were practically chewing the table in frustration.
The most successful dish was a classic onion tart with anchovies - made with a fine crumbling pastry and soft buttery onions. Another starter of chargrilled squid was overly salty, though it was beaten in the brackish stakes by a tongue-stripping mixture of avocado and prawns. It was the kind of thing you would find turning up as a filling option at a dodgy sandwich bar.
Of the main courses the least bad was a dish of grilled bream which was merely dull. It came with what was described as a 'Monaco marmalade', an underwhelming dice of beetroot. Funny this, but I've never really thought of beetroot as the kind of glitzy vegetable that the bejewelled people of Monaco might go for. It's hardly the Versace of the vegetable world, now is it?
Roast pork came with an insipid pear sauce. An entrecote steak was simply dull and tough. And then there was my seafood cassoulet. I know it was risky to order a dish between Christmas and New Year clearly designed to use up any spare fish lying around, but I was feeling brave. What turned up was a huge pile of tasteless poached tuna with the odd bit of salmon thrown in, plus one big prawn. It lay in a tasteless pool of water, in which bobbed the occasional flageolet bean.
We did not stay for pudding. We were too depressed. It really is a pity because, by current standards, Gastro is not expensive at around £25 a head and on the simpler dishes I'm sure it can still play a blinder. But when we went there, it didn't. And, as I've said before, I can only write as I find. It's all the fault of that Leslie Ash, I tell you.
Contact Jay Rayner at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk.
