The Living Room 2/10
Telephone: 08701 662223. Address: 1 Oxford Castle, Oxford. Open All week, 10am-midnight (1am, Thur; 2am, Fri & Sat; 11am-midnight, Sun). Price Around £25 a head, plus drinks. Wheelchair access and disabled WC.
When I find myself on death row, having just been denied clemency by governor Jeb Bush (a recurring nightmare; best not dwell), and the guard asks after the last meal, I now know what to request. I want the chef (if there is one) from The Living Room in Oxford flown over to replicate, precisely, the dinner I ate there recently. After that, death by lethal injection will be comic relief.
The Oxford branch of this burgeoning chain stands in the shadow of an ancient prison, which is where the owners belong for offences against the palate. With its hint of fireside armchair, The Living Room seems a misleading name for what is part cocktail bar and part dining area cheaply but skilfully styled to produce an echo of a trendy London fusion joint: loads of dark wood, plants lining the walls, low-hanging lamps, exceedingly dimly lit.
Still, the gaggle of young women at the bar and arrayed across the restaurant seemed happy enough, so we adopted a let's-not-be-snotty-metropolitans-and-give-it-every-chance approach. We were soon smitten by Farrah, a waitress-in-training who appeared with tutor Camilla maternally beside her and who ran expertly through the specials. A reference to "the mussels of the day" sounded novel, albeit less intriguing than beef Bergerac, disappointingly amended to bourguignon by Camilla. The menu calls itself eclectic, but in fact it's a chaotic mish-mash of clashing influences (Italian, Japanese, Thai, New York deli) with a few imbecilic inventions apparently chucked in to lend a flimsy cloak of originality (burger with gorgonzola and pear: yuck, yuck and, yea, even thrice yuck).
My friends, who moved to Oxford not long ago, were pointedly praising the food at the Randolph Hotel when the starters arrived. "Can I move back to London now?" said one of them within 0.37 seconds of tasting her oversalted and oddly liquid "spiced Thai salmon fishcakes" (£5.45). "Oh my God, oh my God," was her husband's opaque reply as he tried his "roast duck tatin" (£5.95) - strips of grey duck, seemingly microwaved for 20 seconds and served with what appeared to be wood chippings on what was cited as a piece of pastry but might have been a J-cloth, the ensemble accompanied by a sinister black sauce redolent of a liquefied Fisherman's Friend and something too testicular in texture and appearance to merit further investigation. Of my starter, four icy chunks of rubberised squid laced with red pepper and served with sub-KFC coleslaw flavoured with wasabi (£5.45), I propose to say little, not because there isn't much to say (I could write three volumes), but because some painful memories must be suppressed if the experience is to be faced again, and ruling out squid for life could be irritating. Although not much.
A round of cheering broke out as the manageress dropped a tray of glasses, a chorus of Happy Birthday arose elsewhere, and Farrah presented a trio of main courses that would, were they served in a prison canteen, have the local roof tilers licking their lips in anticipation of a tasty contract. The kindest thing to be said about the sea bass fillets (£11.95), which looked like smoked mackerel and tasted like on-the-turn cod, is that they'd been successfully thawed. My roasted meatball, tomato sauce and spaghetti (£8.95) would have been a stone-cold disgrace to Signor Dolmio. And whatever one calls the aforementioned beef stew (£9.95), it made fish eyes and witchetty grubs with Ant and Dec seem like an à la carte splurge at Le Gavroche.
When the label on a warmly recommended Spanish dessert wine (ordered to neutralise the taste of history's vilest chocolate fudge cake) suggested it would go with anything except dessert, it seemed the moment to drink up and request the bill. This amounted, with moderate drinking and several side dishes, to £40 a head, which would buy you a three-course set lunch and half a bottle of house wine at many Michelin-starred places. Here, without exaggerating one iota, it is impossible to be sure if there is a chef at all, or whether everything arrives from a central depot each morning, pre-packed and ready to warm up. Someone is getting away with culinary murder here. Time to call in Inspector Jim "Boeuf" Bergerac, on secondment from the Jersey police.
