30-32 Vanston Place, SW6 (020-7386 0086).
Lunch every day, dinner Monday to Saturday.The best poem written in English, it is now widely agreed, is Dooley Is a Traitor by James Michie. Not much is known about Michie, at least not by me, except that in 1927 he published a poem - full of good gags and chunky rhymes - about a convicted murderer on trial for draft-dodging.
What the judge in this unique courtroom drama(tic poem) cannot understand about Dooley, separated as the two men are by a great gulf in class and education, is why a man who has killed in hot blood for his own ends should refuse to kill in cold blood for his king and country.
“Now is it that you simply aren’t willing,” the judge asks the shuffling Cockney in the dock, “Or have you a fundamental moral objection to killing?”
Dooley is aghast:
“No objection at all, sir,” I said.
“There’s a deal of the world I’d rather see dead - Such as Johnny Stubbs or Fred Settle or my last landlord, Mr Syme.
Give me a gun and your blessing, your honour, and I’ll be killing them all the time.
But my conscience says a clear No
To killing a crowd of gentlemen I don’t know.”
As Dooley warms to his theme the very notion of “bravery” is reconstructed and the murderer’s refusal to kill men with whom he is not on personal terms begins to sound like the highest form of honour. Too high for me. I am quite the opposite of Dooley. I can only kill a man I have not met. Once I have shaken hands with him I just can’t do it. And by “kill”, of course, I mean “give a really stinking review to”.
If I can just get into a restaurant and get out again without them knowing it’s me, I feel free to tell it how I found it. If I have to kill ’em I have to kill ’em - and balls to the collateral damage (firings, closures, suicides) that may come as a direct or indirect result of my murderous actions. But meet the chef, the owner, or the parents or children of either and I’m hamstrung. Smiles, handshakes, imprecations to accept no bill (always declined), a desire expressed to see me again, an invitation to come and eat with the family, to share old recipes, chat about the Old Country, sleep with the wife, and then what should I do? Go home and turn the place over?
Perhaps, but what I do is go home and look for the positives because I can see in my mind’s eye the little guy standing there at the door in the new suit he bought specially, and so I dodge the issue, and write a quiet little piece about other things (favourite poems, etc) with coded messages in it to warn regular readers away.
That is why I am rarely the first critic to review somewhere new: because in the first few weeks of a new restaurant operation the public relations consultant will be there at all times, hosting tables, making notes, or just endlessly repeating the news that “it’s basically a whole new concept
in eating and drinking”. I walk in: “Mwah, mwah, this is Giles Coren, Giles, do you know Serge, the owner? He escaped from a Serbian death camp by pole-vaulting over the wall with a stick made from his own bogeys, and then hopped to London on his only leg. His whole family was executed, including the pets. His dream was always to open a restaurant and he has dedicated it to the memory of his baby triplets who drowned in a horrible accident last week. He’s a huge fan of your column. Enjoy.”
So I left Aziz until I thought I was safe. I was wrong. The PR (a very fine one) was there. I met the family. And that is why I have written 700 words without mentioning the food. Had it been any good I would have dived in, expressing mild inverted snobbery about the Fulham Road location, and showing off my relatively well-travelled youth by boasting that of the multiple cuisines on offer at Aziz (including Lebanese, Turkish, Moroccan, Tunisian, Greek and Israeli) Lebanese is the only one I have not troughed on extensively in situ, and that only because the weekend I was there I was still sick from the food in Syria. I would have asserted that they are great cuisines, some of them, and that a good chef might be expected to master one of them but not all, and that the place was taking a risk.
My food was cooked by the former head chef at Momo, the popular Heddon Street nightclub. I have always hated Momo. It is said to have made North African cuisine fashionable. I would have been more impressed by edible.
The menu at Aziz offered dozens of exciting dishes from the great Eurafroasian melting pot, none of which was done well. The baba ganoush had no smoky zing, hoummos was unalloyed chickpea mash (no lemon, no garlic, no tahini), there was a sludgy almond soup, Brobdingnagian borek full of far too much fatty goat’s cheese (like a goat-flavoured deep-fried cream horn), the tabouleh was just a ball of wet wheat, the corn and tulum fritters were as gacky as they sound and even the liver kebab had a suspiciously tooth-pasty texture. There was no spice, no lift, no joy. Every dish had the same taste and texture as the next. At Passover, the Jews (who once lived in all the countries mentioned above but have since been driven out of all but two) eat a sweet paste called haroseth, which is meant to remind them of the mortar their enslaved ancestors used to build the pyramids. Each new dish here not only reminded me of 4,000-year-old cement, but surely was. I wept for Exodus.
If I was a brave man, like Dooley, I’d be honest about the main courses. I noted at the time that the monkfish and fennel en croûte was “like a fishmonger’s clog”, but I am too soft to go into why. Nor should I attempt to describe the fishy whiff of the baby squid stuffed with beef which my notes tell me were “a biblical abomination”. The seven-hour slow-baked lamb shank tasted, at most, of sucked thumb - the meat just wasn’t robustly flavoured enough to survive the long cook - and was served gastropub style with a huge branch of rosemary. With Jerusalem artichokes. In July?
On the positive side, the sucuk sausage and turnip stew was very good (sweet and complex and rising above the general impression of an in-flight snack on Air Tripoli), and the waitress was a total heart-stopper: unchallenged head girl at the Natalie Imbruglia Institute of Almond-Eyed Mankillery. And when I asked her if they had any other North African wines than the measly two I could see on the list she beautifully, if unwittingly, expressed the sheer pointlessness of forcing together multiple distinct gastronomies on the grounds of geographical coincidence. “No,” she said. “But we’ve got South African wine.”
Food: 1
Atmosphere: 4
Service: 7
Price: £80 a couple with grog
Know anywhere better? E-mail feedme@thetimes.co.uk and maybe we’ll go there together
Restaurant choice: North African
Jour et Nuit
316 Holloway Road, N7 (020-7700 2188)
This used to be the Royal Cous-Cous House and is now really a café, but the same guy owns it and they do Moroccan food on Friday and Saturday nights. It’s only OK but it’s dog cheap. Just like in Morocco.
Numidie
48 Westow Hill, SE19 (020-8766 6166)
Rather than trot the world for unrelated dishes, the chef here delves into the past of his native Algeria to offer up Numidian cuisine (which is what all those Numidians
in Astérix must have eaten) within a stone’s throw of
Crystal Palace. Exemplary couscous, great merguez
frites and all the poncy aubergines galettes you could want. And so far south you’re practically in Africa already.
