I say “impossible”. I am aware that, in principle, the chance exists that one could go there and be served a plate of food. I have met people who know people to whom it has happened. But in that sense it is rather like the National Lottery: odds of 14,000,000-1 do not mean “unlikely”, they mean “impossible”. “Somebody has to win,” say inveterate ticket-buyers. But, statistically, they don’t. So, just as I gave up buying lottery tickets a couple of months after it launched, I have now given up (Anchor &) Hope.
It’s not just because it is so hard to get a meal when the place is open. It is more because I have twice schlepped all the way down there (an hour on public transport) and found it – quite randomly – shut. This could never happen with a restaurant where they take bookings, because when you phoned to book they would tell you that they were going to be shut, and you would go somewhere else.
And so twice I have been stranded in Waterloo at noon with nowhere to go and nowhere else yet open (you can’t go to the A&H at conventional times because at those times you have to wait in the bar for two hours for your table and are too drunk to stand, let alone eat, by the time they come for you, if they come for you).
I understand that it is not the Anchor & Hope’s fault that people come from miles around to eat their food. And I am aware that lots of people, assuming they are lucky enough to show up when it’s open, are happy to swill nine pints of lager and join in the choruses of Knees Up Mother Brown while they wait for a supper that may or may not happen. But, personally, when I travel an hour for dinner I don’t want it to be only in the vague hope of being fed. If
I wanted that I would go and live in Niger and wait for the UN rice drop.
So it was with not undiluted joy that I learnt that the newly opened Nobu Berkeley, the latest in the worldwide Peruvian-Japanese fusion chain that has something (nobody is quite sure what) to do with Robert De Niro, is to operate a no-bookings policy.
In principle, it ought to make it easier to get a table. But will it, really? If it did, it would be marvellous. It would mean that Nobu’s brilliant and original (though forehead-slappingly expensive) cuisine would be available to the many – as Tony Blair would say – not just the few.
Because, of course, the original London Nobu, on Park Lane, is one of those restaurants where the whole point is that you (and I mean you) can’t get a table – which is what makes it so appealing for the people who can. It’s like The Ivy in that respect. And it means that unfamous people with a bit of pride tend to avoid it because it is humiliating to be told you have to wait three weeks for a table when you know perfectly well that Jade Goody off Big Brother doesn’t. The result is that such places are always full either of famous people who just happened to pop by, or of people who have booked months ahead in the hope of seeing famous people.
Z-list chippiness aside, my main worry was that I would queue all night and not eat at all. But on the phone they promised a wait of no more than half an hour. Probably less. They said I could “enjoy a cocktail in the bar” while I waited. As if it would be free.
When I got there at eight o’clock, however, the receptionist whistled through her teeth like a Yellow Pages plumber on a midnight call-out and said, “Fffff, the whole world wants to eat at eight o’clock – it’ll be at least an hour and a half.”
What I then had to do was go upstairs to the restaurant to register my interest in eating (other reviewers have said they were greeted with a chorus of “irashaimase” but that must be only in opening-week) and give them my name and phone number (in case I was back home in bed by the time my table was ready) and then be escorted back downstairs by one of a horde of beautiful Ukrainian women dressed in scraps of clothing stitched together from fleeting thoughts, to wait in the bar.
Alas, the bar was also full. So they said they would tell me when a place became available for me to sit until a table became available. And so I stood and listened to groups of men in Cup Final Day suits propositioning the big half-naked Ukrainians.
And then I was recognised by the house, and thereafter everything was smashing. I was whisked immediately upstairs to a table next to Tim Burton, Helena Bonham Carter and Bryan Adams – who may or may not have queued on their feet at the bar for an hour and a half to get their table – from where I could see, at the end of my swish little spotlit corridor full of critics and celebs, the open troughing area for chavs who had been queueing since March (camp-beds, kagoules, the whole Harrods sale malarkey), while people who could have got into the other Nobu anyway were shown in ahead of them. Plus ça change, plus ça reste Nobu.
The food was brilliant, of course. Lots of Nobu classics, lots of new stuff. There was scallop sashimi as fresh and sweet and plump as lychees; then cool, joyful slivers of dense, shimmering mackerel; peachy o-toro of fine quality; the signature new-style sashimi – fleshy, almost living wagyu beef with a hot oil dashed on to take off the chill; and then rock shrimp tempura (a little greasier than I remember, a little wan) with ponzu (citrus dressing); a very plain baked mushroom dish that didn’t work for me – too much like rootling beneath a hazel tree; the “cabbage-steak”, which has been hailed as revolutionary and involved raw cabbage barely roasted in the wood-oven and drizzled with truffle oil (and topped, if you are me, with slivers of black truffle – diners on an adjoining table didn’t get any).
I was a little stuffed to take full toll of the toro collar steak, which was two giant grilled slabs of fatty deep-sea fish neck that were very strange and good, very Hemingway. Best of all, I thought, was the pork belly in miso: an innovation involving big cubes of really good pig, layered gorgeously with fat and given great richness and depth by a sticky miso concoction of some sort. You can tell your friends that it is the new black cod in miso.
You can even tell them you know someone who jumped the queue.
NOBU BERKELEY
15 Berkeley Street, W1
(020-7290 9222)
Meat/fish: 5
Cooking: 8
Other: 7
Score: 6.67
Price: Two people overeating, with a £33 riesling –£206.43 (inc 15 per cent service)
Café Japan
626 Finchley Road, NW11
(020-8455 6854)
A third of the price, nearly as good as Nobu, and the whole staff really does shout its greetings when you walk in.
The Highgate
79 Highgate Road, NW5
(020-7485 8442)
Two weeks ago I gave the impression that The Highgate had closed down. Not so. There has merely been a management reshuffle which may or may not lead to
a change of ownership in the future. Meanwhile, trading continues as usual: same great chef, same lovely staff, same reassuring proximity to my house.
E-mail feedme@thetimes.co.uk if you know somewhere good, and maybe we’ll go there together
