I go to the Cinnamon Club during the England v. Portugal
match. I don't mind too much. I just don't have the constitution for these things, I watched _
England v. Croatia but got so nervous that every time the ball came near our goal I had to put my head under the sofa cushions. This wouldn't have been so bad except every time it went near their goal I also had to put my head under the sofa cushions. In the end I didn't see much beyond the undersides of our sofa cushions, which are both shockingly dirty and disturbingly sticky. I'm a Rooney fan, though, and don't think it's nice of people to liken him to Shrek, even though he is the spit of him. How can some people be so cruel?
I emerge from Westminster Tube station at 7.30 p.m. and it's all so desolate: just the one cyclist pedalling round the square, presumably for the sheer traffic-free hell of it, and a perplexed Japanese tourist wondering if he should take a picture of him. The answer, of course is yes, 92 times. What is it about Japanese tourists and their cameras? I once went to an Australian national park — stunning trees and wildlife — which was full of Japanese tourists taking pictures of the information boards. Hey, Tanaka, why read about what we are seeing while we are seeing it when we can read about it back in Tokyo instead? I don't think the Japanese ever think anything's really happened unless it's happened at 400 ASA. I've nothing against the Japanese, but if one ever asked me over to his place and then offered to get out the photo albums I think I'd probably make my excuses and leave. Quick as a. . . flash?
The Cinnamon Club is on Great Smith Street, but I'm not sure exactly where, so go into the first place I see with a couple of wine glasses in the window. It turns out to be the Adam Smith Institute but luckily I realise my mistake and promptly exit before I am set to work making pins. (Of course, it if had been The Smiths Institute, and Morrissey had wanted to put me to work as his personal sex slave, that would have been a different matter.) The Cinnamon Club turns out to be further up the road, in the grand, red-brick lump of Victoriana that used to be Westminster Library. This is good news for Iqbal Wahhab — the former PR and editor of Tandoori News who is behind the restaurant — but bad news for books. Still, what the hell. The Japanese have probably photographed them all anyway. The interior is lovely: original herringbone flooring; vast domed lights; a mezzanine floor featuring shelves of the old library's books. The most transfixing sight by far, though, happens to be the male fiftysomething diner on the next table with the most staggering orange bouncy hair-weave. Actually, 'bouncy' doesn't do it justice. It is oceanic, peaking and crashing like surf waves. He has to be an MP. This place is popular with MPs, by all accounts, and MPs do have such bad hair. No, it wouldn't do to mention names, but for a typical example of such an MP you may wish to follow my gaze, which at this minute happens to be travelling Henley-wards via the editor's chair of this very publication. Now, why would that be, I wonder?
I am meeting two girlfriends who arrive late. Have you tried getting a cab during an England game? they ask. Bloody hell, check out the bouncy, if not oceanic, hair-weave, they add. I've been sitting on my own like a proper Norman No-Mates for 20 minutes and would have liked a little something to nibble on but nothing was offered. My friends and I spend a good 40 minutes yakking before we even look at our menus. Still no nibbles. I do think that if you are going to spend £70 a head, which we proceed to do, you have every right to expect nibbles. Certainly, whenever I go down to my local curry house it's poppadoms and lime pickle before your arse even hits the chair. I know, I know, the Cinnamon Club is not a local curry house. The Cinnamon Club's raison d'être is to be everything a local curry house is not: no flock wallpaper; no stinkypatterned carpets: none of that one-sauce-fitsall business which means that everything comes out of the kitchen swimming in the same Day-glo, table-staining, cuff-staining gloop. Still, a poppadom would be nice.
To the menu, which does look fantastic. We decide to order a dish apiece to share. For starters, it is stir-fry of king prawns with coconut and chilli (£10), green asparagus with aubergine crush and spiced yogurt (£7) and zucchini flower with spring vegetables and tamarind dressing (£7.50). The prawns are definitely the smash hit. Plump, staggeringly fresh, in a silky, fragrant sauce with a chilli kick. Yum. The asparagus? To be perfectly honest, I don't recall much about it. Our hunger, by then, was so overwhelming and the portion so stingy — three spindly etiolated spears — that I think we all walloped them down without much consideration for taste. There simply wasn't the time. The zucchini flower is stupendous. Crispy and crunchy on the outside, velvety, melty and delicately spiced on the inside. But it is a zucchini flower, which divided into three is barely a lick. Seven quid for a zucchini flower. What do you think the whole zucchini would have cost?
The main-course triumph is indisputably the tandoori breast of French black-leg chicken with fenugreek sauce at £17. (Revolting as it sounds, I am even dribbling into my keyboard as write. Take it from me, if I ever offer you a second-hand keyboard or sofa cushions, you'd do well to refuse.) The meat is obviously top quality. This chicken, I'm sure, was not only free-range but possibly had its own room, telly and aromatherapist. And it's been cooked in a the clay oven to perfection: slightly scorched on the outside, but juicy and moist within, with the most toothsome and, again, delicately spiced sauce. The seared Nile perch in Bengali mustard and chilli sauce (£16) provides an interesting mix of flavour and texture which, frankly, we'd have liked to have known more about. The thing is, though, no one at any point offered to talk us through either the menu or the wine list, which is extensive, This seems a pretty cheap way of going about things in a place that is anything but. Perhaps I am simply morphing into Richard Gere from Pretty, Woman: `I'm going to spend a lot of money, an obscene amount of money. Fawn all over me!' On the taste front, only the Rajasthani goat curry with garlic, chilli and cloves (£16) truly let us down. It was an off-putting colour (black, basically), too acidic and too string. I think this goat shared a dorm and never had aromatherapy. The rest of the food was very: prettily presented and served nicely.
The Cinnamon Club is good. The thing is, when you leave you just can't help thinking you might have paid too much. It doesn't help that the in-house taxis offered are exorbitant. We flag down a black cab instead, which takes us to our destination for half the price. We know the England score now, alas. Funny how the flags that were fluttering so hopefully hours before now seem so sad. I'm not sure I'd particularly wish to be Rooney's sex slave, by the way, but I like to think I could massage his poor injured foot without once looking up and going, 'Bloody hell, it's Stuck'. They think it's all ogre. It is now.
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