50a Berkeley Street, London W1 (020 7399 4330). Meal for two, including wine and service, £160
You could, if you wish, hate Novikov on principle. Arkady Novikov, whose name is above the door, owns 50 or so restaurants in Moscow and likes to boast of his connections to Vladimir Putin. He has talked to me of his work as outside caterer to Putin's Kremlin and once broke off from an interview with me to entertain Putin's wife Lyudmila with a tour of his next venue. Of course, Putin has been accused in diplomatic cables released by Wikileaks of turning Russia into a wretched kleptocracy. He pursued violent campaigns in Chechnya and is being fingered for nicking Russia's parliamentary elections. If we know a man by the company he keeps, then perhaps the arrival in London of a big-ticket Novikov restaurant is not something to be universally applauded.
But you really don't have to hate Novikov on principle. There's more than enough about the place to let you hate it on its own terms. There is the usual stupidity of booking a table for 9pm only to be told that your booking is for just two hours. There is the unusual stupidity of an ape in a bomber jacket shoving his body between you and the door and barking: "Are you eating here tonight?" To which I could but reply: "Only if you'll let me." Inside more people step in our way. But we are spotted and led through the crowds. Novikov is vast. Indeed, it is two restaurants in one. The front half is a pan-Asian place that serves a menu of Chinese, Malaysian and Japanese dishes as if they are all the same thing (including the highly endangered bluefin tuna. Don't look so surprised. Novikov feeds Putin. You think he'd care about a small thing like sustainability?).
Down a flight of stairs, past the crowds of young ladies with older gentlemen sucking the bar dry, and you are in the huge windowless Italian restaurant, denoted by bits of wrought iron, faux rustic chandeliers, a huge open kitchen with meat-hanging cabinets, and the bash and clatter of music so loud I feel it in my prostate gland. It reminds me of the mega restaurants of Las Vegas, with one crucial difference. In Vegas the restaurants are generally very good. There's too much competition for it to be otherwise. This is generally very, very bad: prices that knock the wind out of you and moments of cooking so cack-handed, so foul, so astoundingly grim you want to congratulate the kitchen on its incompetence.
We eat some good things. Its vitello tonnato – thinly sliced veal with an anchovy and tuna sauce – gets the approval of my companion. The fried mushrooms topped with eggs are fine, too, as they should be for £18.50. This isn't in any way Italian. We order a rabbit ragout with pappardelle and calf's liver with butter and sage. My companion says: "This tastes like cheap Chinese food." She's right.
It takes me a minute to nail the rabbit dish: the small gnarly bits of meat, the heavy sauce that tastes as if it has been thickened with cornflour, the weird hit of chicken flavour I associate with stock cubes. It's a chicken and mushroom Pot Noodle. Without the useful plastic pot. The liver dish has all the same vices. The tragedy is that underneath the wallpaper-paste sauce is some very good liver that has ended its life badly. Zucchini fritti are so much hot, wet, floppy saltiness. We finish with a pile of formless Italian meringue. The hit of sugar feels like a reward. The wine list is punishing and includes bottles which retail in Italy for €8, priced here at £50. Waiters are impeccably Italian in that they will argue with you. Dishes are mispriced between the menu and the bill.
And the most depressing thing? It's full; packed to the fake ironwork with the hooting and the depilated, the bronzed and Botoxed. And so my advice to you. Don't go to Novikov. Keep not going. Keep not going a lot. In a city with a talent for opening hateful and tasteless restaurants, Novikov marks a special new low. That's its real achievement.
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or visit theguardian.com/profile/jayrayner for all his reviews in one place
