Casa Brindisa

7-9 Exhibition Road, SW7; 020 7590 0008

Mon-Sat, noon-11pm; Sun, noon-9pm

5 stars: Favour of the month. 4 stars: Grace and favour. 3 stars: Favour-enhanced. 2 stars: Artificial favour. 1 star: Do me a favour

As with Batman and gynaecologists, the first rule for journalists is never use your power for evil. You must never harness the Mighty Wurlitzer of the press simply to settle personal scores. If you’re a critic, everyone will assume that you do. We’re all accused of taking bribes, exacting revenge, helping mates, conducting vendettas, callous acts of gratuitous calumny, and selling compliments for kisses. If I’d accepted as many sexual favours as have been promised to me in exchange for reviews, they could have named an STD clinic after me and I’d be walking with a packet of frozen peas down my Y-fronts. When everyone thinks you’re corrupt, the only defence is to know that you’re not. Never accept a free meal, or waitress.

What follows may sound like sour grapes, but really, it’s not. Sour grapes would have been very welcome as a side order. I wasn’t meaning to write about Fakhreldine (not as nice as it sounds) on Piccadilly. It isn’t this week’s review, and I was there as someone else’s guest and would never normally review someone else’s dinner and, anyway, I did this Lebanese years ago. But the service was so staggeringly bad, I thought it would be a public service to share it with you. Indeed it might well be an abrogation of the second law of journalism and gynaecology: share the good gristly gossip with as many people as possible.

I asked the waiter what fruit juice he had. Lebanese restaurants, being a collective euphemism for all food from the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf, generally have very good freshly squeezed juice, because so many of their customers are observant Muslims, or Muslims who want something to mix with their vodka. He shrugged, in that very Lebanese shruggish way, and said: “Passion fruit, orange, apple, cranberry.” Good. I’ll have orange and cranberry. “No, you can’t have that.” Really? It’s not exactly cocktail heresy. It’s not pushing the citrus-beverage envelope.

“The bar won’t do it,” he muttered. Okay. I got a twinge of Jack Nicholson. This is what we’re going to do. You’re going to bring me a glass of orange juice and a glass of cranberry juice. He regarded me cogitatively. “Who’s the other one for?” The other what? “The other . . . juice.” They’re both for me.

He toyed for a moment with the idea of making a meal out of this, but seeing that he conspicuously couldn’t be bothered to make a meal out of anything else, he let it go with a mere sneer. Ten minutes later, the orange and cranberry came, both, I assume, fresh from the Tetra Paks. Thank you. Now here’s the last thing. Could I have another glass — and before you ask, it’s also for me — and could it perhaps contain nothing but ice? It was brought just before all the ice had melted. He watched as I decanted the juices. “Do you want me to do that?” he said, with a smile that could have peeled a hard-boiled egg.

The drink cost £8.50. The rest of the service wasn’t up to this high standard. It was alternately intrusive and absent, possibly because they were serving some of the worst Middle Eastern food in London (and that’s a league tough to get to the top of). What was particularly depressing was that our table of eight accounted for over half their covers. It reminded me of the service English restaurants used to offer when English food was an intercontinental bad taste joke. As the nation’s menu has pupated over the past two decades, so the service has blossomed, and that’s mainly because it’s not done by English people. The international flow of minimum-wage staff has blown away the old snobbery, the judgment, the grim civility and jobsworth laziness that was the proud hallmark of the English at table. I see a lot of waiters, and I like almost all of them. They’re better at their jobs than most cooks. I like them because they do a lot for a very little, and are employed by a collection of the most venally stupid people in the world. I wanted to grab Fakhreldine’s manager and say, why are you doing this? The meatballs in piping microwaved yoghurt were an accident in a sheep-insemination laboratory. You plainly don’t like running a restaurant; you take no pride in your product; you find the customers irksome and annoying; you palm off unpleasant food to people you despise; and there’s barely anyone here. Why on earth don’t you do something else? I didn’t say any of that, because the umpteenth rule of hackery is don’t argue with the story.

Three or four people have told me I must go to some pop-up restaurant or other. They then add that I probably missed it, and I feel like the apocryphal judge who says, “Good learned counsel, please inform the court, who exactly is this Connie Lingus we hear so much about?” or “Pray, who is the King of Leon?” Is a pop-up restaurant the latest incarnation of the conveyor-belt restaurant? Does your dinner smack you in the face? The Blonde gently enlightened me as we drove down the King’s Road. “Do you see those shops that used to sell frocks, and now they’re selling framed prints and jewellery made by locked-ward schizophrenics and hand-painted T-shirts and Free Tibet hats? Well they’re pop-up shops. They’ve temporarily taken over the empty space to undermine capitalism and run off into the night. Pop-up restaurants are much the same. Often they’re run by artists or DJs. They do limited-edition samizdat dinner for the kids who are too cool for school.”

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