Ok , background first : this was a joint birthday celebration , a gift from our daughter ,my wife and I know our food and wine very well.
The venue : I could recreate it pretty well if I moved a random selection of vintage retro furniture into my garage and spruced it up with a selection of those horrid artificial flower arrangements from the 70’s........I believe the look is called ‘ironic’.
Any venue which takes eating and wine seriously has to manage the sensory ‘noise’.....it is impossible to savour anything while sitting in a room overwhelmed by unexhausted cooking smells and fumes which literally make ones eyes water for most of the time.
The service : earnest for sure , but with accents so convoluted that neither of us understood a word of the lengthy descriptions provided for each of the interminable ‘courses’.
The food : a procession of ‘food bites’ cloaked in the sort of pretentious presentation that leaves one desperately trying to work out what is the container , what is the frou-frou and what is the actual food. Worse still....an abject plagiarisation of Blumenthalisms but with neither the playfulness nor the sheer ‘good food-ness’ of it all......actually irritating elaboration for the sake of elaboration , with the cause of good eating left somewhere sobbing forgotten In the wings. Good ingredients somewhere in there so far as I could tell before the messing around got applied........ and before trying to eat in the equivalent of a garage with the engine running and a hosepipe running from exhaust to drivers seat.
The wine : top most entertainment of the night.......I have never seen a sommelier who openly managed to get through more drink from his serving station bottles than my wife and I between us managed to drink over the meal. Then we made the mistake of ordering a premiere cru chablis which had the distinction of actually being worse than a Tesco £10 meal deal wine. We commented on the wine being relatively sweet enough ....yes ! SWEET ! enough ! to be undrinkable and this prompted the entertainment to rise to even greater heights as we were treated to a truly ridiculous stream of vinobabble clearly premised on thinking that we must be impressionable morons. Eventually the said sommelier came to his senses and returned to the table claiming to have shared notes with a colleague and yes , they agreed , it wasnt quite up to the mark ( which I assume is a polite way of saying it might be best employed as a toilet cleaner). We were reassuringly told the wine would not be making an appearance at Clove Club in future.......nice to think that our handsome investment has gone to benefitting future diners....I take a note to remind myself of that in case I feel infuriated and conned at some later point in my life (like on the way home).
The Bill : the thing that speaks eloquently about ‘the bill’ is that even my wife pointedly ensured that I did not get sight of it. That can only be lest I actually started to physically throw chairs around the room such is my displeasure when I recognise that I have been
well and truly conned by an overhyped pantomime.
Summary : a joint birthday destroyed by a gang of muggers on Shoreditch High Street , an emperor of hype resplendent in new clothes , the sort of thing that gives fine dining a very bad name and tends to indicate that many diners enjoy access to more money than they do to calm appraisal of the qualities of food and wine.
