Patriot Square, Bethnal Green, London E2 (020 7871 0461). Meal for two, with wine and service, gulp, £200
The problem with surprises is that not all of them are nice. A pink macaroon flavoured with Iberico ham served as a petit four is a complete surprise. It's definitely not a nice one. When you are left thinking: "I wish that had been lemon or raspberry or anything other than this", something is up. Sure, I can admire the technique by which all that hammy flavour is slipped into one of those sweet crisp meringue almond confections. That doesn't make it more pleasant to eat. Equally a tiny chocolate roulade with a sweet cream flavoured with ceps served as a dessert is eye-achingly clever. But that doesn't make either one pleasant to eat. When you find yourself reaching for the word "challenging" to describe your dinner and wanting to shout: "Who put all the bloody mushrooms in my pudding?", it's time to get your coat.
It is a shame our meal at Nuno Mendes's restaurant Viajante ended this way. Portuguese-born Mendes is an interesting chef: dark-eyed, intense, uncompromising, eager. A few years ago he attempted to bring his brand of playful modernism to a Hoxton pub. They advertised it as "fine dining in trainers". Few wanted his version of fine dining – curious flavour combinations, lots of sous-vide, liquids dehydrated unto clammy powders – regardless of their footwear. The pub dumped that menu, and Mendes moved on, eventually surfacing amid the grandeur of the former Bethnal Green Town Hall. Here, from an open kitchen, he serves "surprise" tasting menus of six or nine courses to gently hushed dining rooms.
It's not cheap. It's not on nodding terms with cheap. It couldn't even send cheap a postcard. Six courses is £65, and we could find nothing on the wine list below £30; a Marlborough Sauvignon that Majestic would flog me for £7.99 was listed at £32. For this money you get glorious moments and intriguing moments and moments that make you sigh and roll your eyes and want to stick a fork in the back of your hand.
At its best Viajante – it means "the traveller" – is very good indeed. Thai Explosion II may be a stupid name for a canapé, but this rich mousse of confited chicken flavoured with lemon grass, sandwiched between squares of crisp chicken skin and a coconut tuile, was a "blimey" moment. Crunchy biscuits of toasted amaranth smoked over hay with a wood sorrel purée were dense and musky. There were very good breads with a killer quenelle of smoked butter crusted with walnuts. There was a slippery bit of squid with the most extraordinary jellified texture despite having been chargrilled. Of the more substantial dishes the most pleasing was some crisp-skinned but rare trout with bright orange roe and an acidulated julienne of crunchy vegetables. There was a perfectly cooked piece of lobster with leek and milk skin – Mendes likes fiddling with milk – and a curiously traditional dish of cod with parsley and potatoes which was soft and gentle and soothing.
Other things were less successful. Telling us that parsnips have been treated like meat doesn't make them meat, even when you serve them with smears of truffle and onion and squishy beads of vinegary tapioca. It just makes for a brown starchy plateful that looks like it's ready for the dishwasher before you've got started. Planks of pigeon breast cooked sous-vide had that gelatinous texture which, whatever the reality, made it feel uncooked. And when they grandly presented the Viajante olive, and it turned out to be something like a kumquat stuffed with cream cheese wrapped in an olive green gel (it could have been all of these things, or none of them whatsoever), you could hear my eyeballs rolling back in my head. And then came those odd desserts.
In its eagerness to be so very now and forward thinking, the food at Viajante manages at times to feel curiously dated; it recalls the first flush of Hestomania, when even he has moved on and is now cooking up big platefuls of heartiness at Dinner.
Modern techniques are great. They're brilliant. If you want to cook my steak by banging it round the Large Hadron Collider, be my guest. Dehydrate my pig cheeks. Spherify my nuts. But only do so if the result tastes nicer. At Viajante deliciousness is too often forced to give way to cleverness. And that really is the biggest surprise of all.
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or visit theguardian.com/profile/jayrayner for all his reviews in one place
