For the first fashion issue of 2005 I decided to go to a restaurant in Regent Street called Cocoon, because the first four letters of its name spell “Coco” and Coco Chanel was the woman who invented haute couture. I did this because after three years in the job, during which I have already written six reviews tailored to the demands of a fashion issue, I have now said everything I have to say about frocks and models. So the opening of Cocoon has given me a nice, offbeat way of segueing from fashion into food in my first paragraph. Although, to be honest, I have no idea if Coco really did invent haute couture or not, it just sounded aptly grandiose. I certainly don’t care enough to go and look it up and I doubt I’d have the relevant authority on my bookshelf, anyway.
I went to Cocoon, as it happens, during London Fashion Week. At least I think so. Certainly, mid-morning television that week was full of interviews with twinkling, crop-headed men in their early forties wearing brightly coloured shirts and making extravagant arm gestures, who cannot all have been Graham Norton.
As it turned out, Cocoon was quite a decent choice for a fashion week (as that was in London and this is in The Times) seeing as it is very distinctly one of those restaurants that prioritises form over function, style over substance, and reeks of that desperation to appear modish at all costs that so characterises the most successful fashions and the least satisfying restaurants.
There is, as you arrive, no sense that this is a place to eat. The lobby is orange and mazy with false walls and a coat-check woman hiding the other side of a huge porthole. Just inside the door there is a tall blond man in a black suit and black shirt with a clipboard, wearing a headset that keeps him in permanent contact with his slave-masters on the planet Thrarg.
Because the technology has not yet been perfected that would allow them to beam you up to the first-floor restaurant, you have to walk up the spiral staircase as through the orange, throbbing umbilical cord that draws you into the womb of the space beast. Upstairs there is another clipboard fellow and lots of nicely dressed staff milling about in a low anteroom with big pod chairs dangling from the ceiling. There is the definite whiff of Yellow Submarine and Woody Allen’s Sleeper - that overused current idiom (I blame Austin Powers) that recalls the future as it looked from the end of the Sixties. Except that the luminous orangeness of everything overlaid that with the more recently passé atmosphere of Oliver Peyton’s Mash chain and those awful Tango adverts. When I’m about to pay £300 for a meal for four (oh yes, my friend, three hundred) I don’t want to be Tango’d.
From the dangling pod room you walk on through two eating rooms, all podded out future-tastically with portholes and orangey dangly things and those round plastic tables like spindles that were characteristic of Seventies garden furniture, and into a round bar with standing room for about 40, all of whom were. You can loop round to the left through a darker space where there is room for a clutch of cocktail people to sit soft, but then you are back, swooshing through net drapes to more dining pods.
This long, low-ceilinged room with its strange low windows on to the bottom of Regent Street was most famously the home of Bruno Loubet’s L’Odéon, the last word in modern urban gastronomy for several minutes in 1998. But this is the space Cocoon inherited and their transformation of it is aptly named. Although “Weirdy Space Corridor for Thirsty Chavs” would have done equally well.
I can live with design nonsense if the food is honest, but at Cocoon the menu is as enslaved to fashion as the furniture. A note at the top of the price list says, “Following the tradition of Asian cultures, we have designed a menu ideal for sharing.” What a load of arse. Replace the words “Asian cultures” with “some of the trendiest and most expensive restaurants in London” and you have a more realistic idea of what they are attempting to copy.
For here there is sushi, there is crispy duck with hoisin sauce, there is dim sum, pad thai, Szechwan chicken, Shanghai snapper, vegetable curry and soft-shell crab with Mexican chilli. They’re trying to do Nobu, Zuma, Shumi and Sumosan rolled into your local Jade Fountain by way of the Flying Turban and Taco Bell. It’s the sort of place that makes it difficult to go out for dinner again the following evening because “I had foreign last night”.
Woohoo, so you can share. At Cocoon that’s just an excuse not to eat things. The old “you have the last piece of toro”, “no, no, you have it”, “no, no you” conversation is re-enacted here without false generosity. Although it’s not fair to single out the fatty tuna, since it does not appear as a sashimi option, only as “marinated and blowtorched” nigiri and they were gracious enough to bring it off-menu on demand, which may be why it was served far, far,
too cold, with teeth-numbing ice crystals destroying the complexity of the texture. Or maybe it is because they can’t store their fish properly that they have decided to take this finest of raw fish cuts and, ye gods, “marinate and blowtorch” it (and charge £8.50 for two tiny pieces).
It wasn’t all terrible. Only the (not) sizzling Mongolian lamb hotpot, mayo-slaughtered wasabi prawns, the stodgy dumplings and leaden-battered soft-shell crab were truly terrible. Some of the rest was OK. The crispy duck roll and dynamite spider roll with flying-fish roe were delicious. But none of it was original and none of it was dashing. The cocktails were good, the bill was huge and the bottles of water cost £4.50 - which is more than you pay even in Conran restaurants, which have always been le dernier cri in water exploitation. Shocking.
Now, when you are sitting, as I was, in full view of the huge McDonald’s screen at Piccadilly Circus, your thoughts turn frequently to the provenance of the meat and fish you are eating. The lamb, pork and beef here is not free-range or organic and had no especial qualities of which the chef was keen to boast, but I have given them a relatively generous meat/fish score because there is plenty of scope on the menu to avoid the dodgy elements. The salmon, alas, is non-organically farmed.
On that score, the highlight of the evening (apart from the service, which was effortlessly efficient, good-natured and helpful) was bumping into the manager of Amaya at the bar, who thanked me for the review of his place which appeared on these pages three weeks ago, noted the reservations I had expressed about the provenance of his meat and poultry and said that he was looking into the possibility of sourcing free-range chickens. It’s only one restaurant, it’s only chickens, and he’s only “looking into” it. But if it happens, wow. I hope they let me know. I’ll have to give them some sort of award or merit badge. Because it will mean we’re actually on the way.
Meat/fish: 4
Cooking: 5
Other: 7
Score: 5.33
Price: Two people could eat, drink a modest bottle and stick to tap water for £100.
Sumosan
26 Albemarle Street, W1 (020-7495 5999)
Least fashion-victimmy of the A-crop so you can usually get a table, and it’s not full of people you’d have to kill first to digest your lunch. Service is excellent and the rock shrimp tempura is exemplary.
Sushi-Say
33b Walm Lane, NW2 (020-8459 2971)
There’s no point pretending this place is still a secret or that the ramshackle café style isn’t cool or that Katsuharu Shimizu, the sushi master, is not a bit of a celeb in his own right. So go for the impeccable raw fish and grills and stunning home-made ice-cream.
E-mail feedme@thetimes.co.uk if you
know somewhere unfashionable, and maybe we’ll go there together
