Brigadiers: 1-5 Bloomberg Arcade, London EC4N 8AR (020 3319 8140). Meal for two, including drinks and service £70-£110
Some restaurants are the product of accident. Others feel like they are shaped in response to their environment. Brigadiers is very much the latter. A bunch of inputs has been evaluated. A checklist has been studied and completed, and then reshaped as somewhere good to eat. This is not much of a surprise, given that Brigadiers is the latest from the Sethi family’s company, JKS Restaurants, one of the slickest outfits in the business.
The Sethis entered the food world through Karam, chef-proprietor of Trishna in Marylebone. Gymkhana, a more relaxed take on the Anglo-Indian repertoire, followed. It thrilled with its dish of minced kid goat curry with glossy nuggets of brain, and a bill which made the reverse snobs who think food from the Indian subcontinent should be dirt cheap howl into their crap lager. Sod them, the rest of us said, and ordered another bowl.
Karam was joined in the business by his siblings and they set up their restaurant investment group. They helped launch the Taiwanese art-meets-food project Bao and later its big brother Xu. They worked with chef Nieves Barragán Mohacho on her fabulous Spanish restaurant Sabor. They are involved with the hotdog and champagne bar Bubbledogs, took Sri Lankan food mainstream at Hoppers and chucked money into the modern-English Lyle’s. If someone asked you to define London’s diverse restaurant sector, show them the JKS list. It would do the job. They are extremely professional.
Brigadiers, which pulls on the Anglo-Indian sporting references of Gymkhana, is one of the first restaurants to open within the dead-eyed Bloomberg arcade in the City; even skateboarders couldn’t put this bit of gloomy built environment to good use. All the fun therefore has to be on the inside: it is a multi-chambered space of lacquered tables and red curtains. It feels like a direct response to the financial institutions surrounding it, filled with a certain kind of bloke: men, stinking of pheromones, ambition and status anxiety. Once they’ve finished pulling the lever on the global fruit machine, they’ll need a space in which to kick back.
Hence, Brigadiers. Yes of course women work in all those banks, but this place feels overtly male. There are flat-screen TVs, some hidden by curtains or blinds, the better to show sports. There is a room with a pool table and, next to it, on the wall, a machine dispensing serious whiskies. In the back bar are cocktails on tap. Choose from the espresso martini or the Old Fashioned. A couple of pulls on the Old-Fashioned lever and I’d be anybody’s.
Underlying all this is the clash, bash and bass drum thump of Indian food with hobnail boots on. The flavours are massive; it’s the culinary equivalent of the amplifier in Spinal Tap which goes up to 11, because who wants 10? Pork scratchings are thickly dusted in chaat masala spice and served with dollops of salty cod roe. Pieces of crisped chicken skin are layered with spiced ground masala chicken. The beer snacks include ox cheek vindaloo samosas and red chilli and lemon crisps. They want you to remember you’ve eaten here.
It would be hard to forget. Chicken wings come blackened in a furious spice crust and then doused in a thick butter sauce. We have a serving between the two of us. I quickly imagine popping back alone and having two bowls to myself, hunkered down over the table so nobody will spot me. “Beef chuck bone marrow keema chilli cheese kulcha” is a fighty game of food word association in a stoneware bowl. It describes a hugely compelling mince curry with a lump of roasted bone marrow down the middle, plus cheesy bread to scoop it all up with. By this point your fingertips will be oily and you’ll smell richly of roasted spices, garlic and happiness. Against these two, a small naan, piled with a mess of wood-fired mushrooms roasted with fenugreek, feels almost delicate. It isn’t, but it feels that way.
Main courses are huge and meaty. There’s a mushroom biryani and a dish of roasted aubergine but, really, it’s about things which once had a pulse. The meal becomes about dark brown things on plates, but they are very good, very intense dark brown things. Lamb ribs, that often overlooked cut which demands a firm hand, here gets one. They’re pelted with spices, before being left to loiter in a hot oven until they’ve started to fall apart, then dressed in a sauce the colour of a dark leather satchel. A similar treatment is given to goat chops. We try to pick them up by the bone, but the meat drops away into the sauce. Miraculously by this point I don’t appear to be wearing my dinner. I think it’s because I’m bent down over the table, inhaling. We have a steaming bowl of soft yellow dal to soothe the blow, and a bright green chilli chutney to punch it up again.
The menu lists lots of things which would encourage me back through the door again: there’s the achari beef short-rib and the full rack of tandoori lamb chops, the wood-roasted curry leaf masala turbot and the crab seekh kebabs. If I can find five friends, they’ll even do me a wood-roasted Goan suckling pig for £70 a head, which sounds like a night out I’d enjoy very much. It also sounds like a lot of money, and of course it is, but only if you stick doggedly to the dismal canard that food representing India must always be cheap.
Plus, of course, I have to refer back to that neighbourhood. A proposition like this can’t help but feel calculated, however flashily it’s done. This is a big-fisted Indian restaurant priced for those investment bankers looking for a crafty midweek meal which will repeat on them constantly between trades the next day. The pork scratchings are a fiver, the chicken wings are £8 a serving, and the goat chops, £20.
I suppose you’ll just have to order three pints of their sweet-sour Tropical Cyclone Mango IPA. That will help you forget about the bill. All desserts are variants on kulfi. We share a banana and yogurt version which tastes like an Indian take on a banana split. Propelled by our sugar rush, we roll out into the hard-edged night-time city, belching a heady mix of fenugreek and garlic, cardamom, cumin and delight at the sodium-kissed sky.
Jay’s news bites
Amaya, in Belgravia, was an early entrant to the market for quality Indian food without too much mannered formality. The menu of small plates is lengthy but at its heart are the tandoor ovens and kebabs. Go for smoked chilli lamb chops, venison seekh kebabs, grilled duck breast with spiced toasted coconut and a range of biryanis. But beware: the bill can quickly mount (amaya.biz).
Chris Staines made his name as chef at London’s Mandarin Oriental Hotel, where he won a Michelin star. He reappeared in the incongruous surroundings of what was a Best Western Hotel in Bath. Now he’s taken over the Bridge House Hotel in Beaminster, Dorset, and renamed it the Ollerod. Expect fish from the nearby coast and Asian flavours (theollerod.co.uk).
Even those of us who have issues with McDonald’s have found it hard to hate their coffee ads, which skewer beautifully the pretensions of the artisanal coffee shop. Now, as coffee sales keep rising, they are trialling baristas in London venues before rolling out to the East Midlands.
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or follow him on Twitter @jayrayner1
