NO STARS

This is traditionally the week when I give northern food a famished kicking, more in sorrow than in hunger. I find no good reason to break with tradition this year. I drove to the northwest Highlands for a week’s stalking and I drove back. The journey takes 10 or 11 hours each way – and after Bray (or before), there’s really nowhere you would want to stop and open your mouth.

My abiding gastro memory this year is of a granary bap that had the consistency of gritty candyfloss and was filled with finely minced, bright-yellow cheese from the rootless international pandemic of cheddar. It came with the addition of chutney, either sweet or hot. I don’t know which I got, but it tasted like hotel-breakfast jam into which someone had tipped vinegar.

This was in Penrith, the Lake District, where the locals, in stark counterpoint to their surroundings, are the ugliest people in the nation. That’s despite fierce competition from the Scottish Borders. I’m immune to the charm of Cumbria, a small prejudice inspired and sustained by a lifelong vegetative disgust of Wordsworth. He is lyric brown sauce, an unctuous, fruity slop that’s supposed to be a complement, but actually drowns nature in rhyming sycophancy.

Scottish food is even worse. It has become a self-perpetuating stand-up joke, a game of disgusting combinations and one-upmanship. I was offered a sausage and asked, in a get-you-if-you’re-so-clever sort of way, to guess the mystery ingredient. I failed. If I’d gone through the Larousse Gastronomique from A to Z, I’d have failed. It was Irn-Bru. Someone is making sausages with too much rusk and Irn-Bru. Why? Do you think we’re falling short of our E numbers?

What is the point? No, really, what is the point? Presumably, it’s the same one that inspired haggis lasagne, or a Scottish restaurant to advertise itself on television with the world’s largest deep-fried Mars bar. It’s a wilful and childish Glasgow kiss to all that poncified, southern, snobby, fine-dining, green-eating gastronomy. Scots are now racing Zimbabweans to an early grave – cutting off their lives to spite their faces.

The Scottish diet might be mitigated if, in its relentlessly fried, sugary, saturated minced-meatiness, it were also dribblingly delicious, utterly McMoreish. But it isn’t. It’s repellent, fouled with imbecilic flavours and mud textures, a thuggish poison with all the variation and nuance of a conversation between drunks on a bench.

And the staggeringly miserable truth is that it’s despite Scotland having the greatest variety of raw ingredients in the world: cold-water fish that trounce the Mediterranean’s; vegetables that are incomparably tastier than Tuscany’s; beef that’s finer than any in France; lamb that’s sweeter than in Scandinavia; game more varied and delicious than in Germany; and more varieties of fruit than Spain. It also has an unprecedented heritage of recipes, ingenuity and skill. Scottish cooks used to be in demand around the world, particularly for their baking and preserves. But all this has been infantilely discarded to make some collective, chippy, ironic joke. The death of Scots cuisine is the most inexplicable suicide in all of civilisation.

Mind you, back in London, the capital of the foodie universe, I found a restaurant of such risible, inhospitable pseudery that it makes the slow oblivion of deep-fried stovies seem like the aesthetic option. Dinings styles itself as a Japanese tapas bar. What the ergonomic difference between small plates of Japanese nibbles and small plates of Spanish nibbles is, apart from a couple of speech impediments, who could tell? And who could care? It’s just another of those binary, feely word associations that are supposed to get you in the mood.

Harcourt Street is a dead corner of the northern West End. The restaurant is a tiny terraced house, opposite the Swedish church. I had no idea there was a Swedish church in London – I imagine it’s all blond wood and stainless steel inside, and you can get flat-pack pews and absolution for absolutely everything.

The front room of the restaurant is taken up with a fish bar and a single resentful cook working his organic origami with a stubborn, precise slowness. Because there were five of us, we were led to the basement, to what had once been the coal hole. It was white and lit with the sort of neon that could induce migraine in the blind. The chairs were unsustainable for anyone who owns their own legs or a coccyx attached to a nervous system. It was a space for eating, designed and serviced by people who knew they would never have to sit and eat there. The whole restaurant made it as difficult as possible for customers to get things into their mouth.

The menu was about as clear and simple as a mortgage agreement, but that was irrelevant because the food got out of the bottleneck that was the kitchen only when Mr Glumpy upstairs got round to folding it. We were offered a plate with four bits of fish. I pointed out there were five of us, so we were going to have to kill the weakest. “But it’s what you ordered,” said the waitress. I ordered dozens of things, hundreds of things, uncountable piles of Japanese tapas, but what you have chosen to bring is four labial slivers of fish for a table of five. Have you been in the hospitality business long?

The table next to us – actually, not so much next as conjoined to us – got served a beef maki. “We ordered tuna,” the girl protested. “I’m a vegetarian.” “That will be a 20-minute wait,” offered the waitress, helpfully.

All of this might have been at least partially mitigated if the food were sublime or original or even sustaining. But it barely managed to raise its chin above adequate. Most of it I’ve forgotten through self-hypnosis. But the pork-belly kakuni refuses to depart. It was like sex-change offcuts. And, bizarrely, I can’t forget the salmon miso soup, even though it tasted of amnesia. The sushi was no better than you’d get from a chill-cabinet bento box in a service-station supermarket.

After £176 of this stuff, we were all as hungry as greengrocers’ dogs, and I started ordering again. But nothing arrived, so I told them to forget it and bring us a bill. I had to ask them four times. When it came, they’d taken off the service charge and then put it on again, having deleted 35p.

We all returned to our separate homes and raided the fridge. It was the end of a thoroughly miserable, unappetising, ungenerous evening that managed, with great effort, to cater for nothing at all. I felt like sending them the bill for our TV suppers. But they got this review instead. If Dinings feels like branching out, may I suggest Glasgow?

22 Harcourt Street, W1; 020 7723 0666
Lunch, Mon-Fri, noon-3pm; dinner, Mon-Sat, 6pm-11pm

5 stars: Sashimi; 4 stars: Soyummi; 3 stars: Sosami; 2 stars: Soshoddi; 1 star: Sosuemi

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