Il Pomodorino
4/12 Regent Street, SW1 (020-7321 2100)
With my girlfriend away working for a fortnight and my other friends all off on holiday, and having no exciting travel plans myself this summer at all, I have had no option during August but to throw myself into my work. That is to say, I’ve been going to more restaurants than usual.
And, the ratio of good restaurants to bad ones being what it is, I have been going mostly to bad restaurants. Generally, I pan for good ones in advance so as to create a mostly positive impression of the restaurant world, and also because I want my guests to have a decent supper. But these last few days I have been going alone, and with only myself to worry about I have dropped all pretence of preselection and thus encountered the following pair of absolute honkers, which I am going to get off my chest while most of you are away on holiday.
The first is a gastropub called The Abbey on Kentish Town Road, down at the southern end where there is admittedly not much else but Chinese chippies, filthy late-night corner shops and 14-year-old fathers of three stabbing each other for their lunch money. A good-looking refurbishment has turned the former drug-dealers’ paradise of The Abbey Tavern into a more middle-class-looking joint, with shiny ventilation ducts gleaming on the high ceilings, walls of eau-de-nil, standard-issue chunky wooden tables and fancy mirrors.
The food, alas, stinks. Given that it is within a mile or so of some of London’s best gastropubs (St John’s on Junction Road, The Highgate on Highgate Road and The Lord Palmerston on Dartmouth Park Hill), it is shocking that they think they can get away with it. First off, the music - really awful modern R&B - was so loud my brain was shaking too much to read the menu. Secondly, nobody else in the place was eating. I thought it might be the old problem of the pub’s former clientele not yet having given way to that tranche of new British society that sometimes eats when it goes out to drink - for the punters were old-school Kentish Town white trash in button-sided adidas sweatpants, white trainers and cheap bling, with one or two elbow-nosed alcoholics face down on tables underneath The Racing Post. But the truth is that they probably ate here once before and have learnt their lesson.
The confit duck, turnip and beetroot “shepherd’s pie” was a nothingy pat of Smash-like goo over roadkill, too bad for the semi-posh gastropubber who still thinks confit is classy, but too poncily named for the underclass that eats this kind of crap regularly. “Seven hours braised lamb shank” had been braised for about an hour, max, and had nothing of note in texture or flavour. The pork and leek sausage tasted supermarket-bought, and the mash was on day release from potato prison. The roasted sardines smelt of pub toilet. The staff must not be blamed for misdirecting me, by the way, because they are not allowed to eat the food, so were unable to recommend anything when I asked them. It seemed an example of mean and witless management before I’d eaten myself, and then seemed charmingly paternal in its obvious intent to protect them from unpleasantness.
One hopes that the owners of Il Pomodorino are equally protective of their staff’s nutritional wellbeing. Ye Gods, what a horror. It is a big, rather well-designed, chunky modern restaurant on Lower Regent Street, a rare dead zone in the West End (as close as W1 gets to the southern end of Kentish Town Road), and the first British outlet of a chain that has apparently been very successful in Rome. I have never been to Rome but I have to assume - from what I experienced at Pomodorino - that the food is terrible.
Let’s take the eight-quid charcuterie plate with which I started. It contained four bits of crap pink salami, some passable ordinary Parma, some smears of greasy pancetta and a dull bresaola. I wanted to know more about the provenance of the meats, so I asked a waiter what they were. He knew nothing at all. Not even, when I tested him for fun, which was the bresaola and which was the Parma. He said he’d go and get someone who knew more than him, but nobody came, so I guess nobody did.
A tortino di melanzana was worse, much worse. An aubergine had simply been put in an oven until it was slightly deflated, and then served. It was depressed rather than cooked, and tasted like an aubergine that had just lost its job.
Insalata Caprese was fridge-cold, under-ripe tomatoes served with bland old cheapo mozzarella, bouncy as a tennis ball and only half as tasty. A pizza marinara comprised horrible, sweet, tinned-tasting sugo on a Jacob’s cracker with smears of anchovy and none of the advertised garlic. It was like eating a kitchen clock.
The only bright light was a filetto di manzo of beef, advertised as being a rare breed from the Chianina Valley, which was well presented and quite juicy, although not massively flavoursome - I was not surprised to discover on further investigation that until quite recently, the gigantic Chianina was bred almost exclusively as a pack animal.
For pudding I had a “caramelised apple tart”, which was a pile of pale-green stewed apple on wet pastry. I called a waiter over (not the one who knew
nothing about charcuterie) and pointed out that it was not caramelised. “Yes, it is,” he said. We looked at the wet pile of half-cooked fruit. “No, it isn’t,” I said. There was an element of parrot-sketch about the moment.
The waiter said, “Look underneath” - as if I should have known that that is where chefs usually hide the caramelised bit. I turned it over to reveal wet, grey wheaten cladding. “You see,” he said. There was no arguing with that. Indeed, a gobsmacking absence of knowledge is possibly the worst thing about Pomodorino, apart from the food. I noted four Slovenian wines on the wine list and, never having drunk one before, called a waiter over (not the one who didn’t know about fruit) to ask for advice. He had never drunk one, either, so he sent a blonde woman over, which was nice, but she was a Slovenian wine virgin, too, and so was the chap they brought over because he knew about the wine. Sorry, but if you’ve put four Slovenian wines on the list exclusively for punters who know and love the wines of Slovenia and will jump at the chance
of drinking one without inquiring about it, then I sure hope you haven’t bought too much of it.
They hadn’t bought any of the Rosso di Montalcino I ordered, which meant I had to spend more time looking at the preposterously arrogant wine list than I wanted to. It contains dozens of wines for over £100 and many for more than £200, ludicrous in a restaurant this bad. Who is going to order an ’83 Yquem with their not-caramelised apple tart?Particularly as they will probably be brought a can of Lucozade and simply argued with until they drink it and cough up the £360.
When in London, I suppose the lesson of this must be, do not do as the Romans do.
Il Pomodorino
4/12 Regent Street, SW1 (020-7321 2100)
Design: 7
Service: 3
Food: 2
Score: 4
Price: £40 a head without booze - ludicrous.
The Abbey
124 Kentish Town Road, NW1 (020-7267 9449)
Design: 8
Location: 3
Food: 2
Score: 3.67
Price: £20 a head without booze.
E-mail feedme@thetimes.co.uk if you know somewhere good and maybe we’ll go there together.
