THE idea itself is a great one. No doubt about
that. The menu, devised by Nick Gill, who earned his reputation at Hamble- ton Hall; plays with the tapas idea — lots of little portions (each priced at £2.95) which arrive all at once: food for picking, or; as the new, American-imported term has it, grazing. It's a gimmick, but since it is probably my favourite way of eating an acceptable one. Yet it doesn't quite work.
It looks pretty enough: the food arrives, each little portion on its own little plate inside its own little bamboo steamer, but something has obviously gone wrong at the planning stage, as the tables are so small there is barely enough room for the place settings, let alone the three to five dishes the menu recommends you order per person. There were three of us, huddled round a table not much larger than a breakfast tray, and instead of being able to stretch a fork out to spear some delicious nugget from an assembled array of plates (which is what picking-eating should be about), you are stuck with eating your way laboriously through a two-foot high edifice, portion by portion. A tall order indeed.
The whole point, I'd have thought, is to be able to enjoy all the different tastes and textures as they are offset by one another. As it is, I began to feel as if I were a quality control officer sitting in front of a pile of specimen dishes, faced with the task of having to work my way down to the bottom, one sample at a time. Perhaps I wouldn't have minded even this so much had the quality been better.
My doubts were immediately re- awakened before the dinner had actually started, when the 'freshly baked olive bread with pesto and black olives' arrived and the pesto turned out to be a garlicky, mayonnaisy concoction with a few green bits in it. Nothing was wrong with it, only pesto it wasn't. As for the food that followed, it would be kinder, first, to give an account of the samples which passed inspection. This will not take long: they were the chicken with rosemary and potatoes, diced into small garlicky cubes and nearly crisp enough; the char-grilled quail with cous- cous and tomatoes, the quail a good fleshy leg, intriguingly ungamy, and the couscous scented and golden; and the marinated swordfish with beans and red onions. Swordfish crops up more and more on fashionable menus, but all too often the flesh is too dry and fibrous. Here, marinat- ing is obviously taken seriously enough, so there was no problem with the fish, which was firm-fleshed and juicily compact, but keeping the beans and onions which accompany it cold was definitely a mistake. And they weren't just not hot, they were cold, Fulham night air cold. Getting the temperature of food right is always of the utmost importance. Someone in the Tall Orders kitchen doesn't know this, of which more later.
Some of the little steamer baskets con- tained real horrors — the tartlet of caramelised onions with sun-dried toma- toes and feta cheese (vile through and through) or the cotechino sausage (greasier than an adolescent's parting) with emeti- cally oversalted lentils — some merely disappointments. The salami with artichoke hearts, three rounds of salami curled into ice-cream-cone shapes with a few, tinny-tasting and overvinegared artichoke hearts was real Oxford lunch party 'cooking', and the tortellini with smoked salmon, cream and lemon was the sort of thing you'd cook if you'd been working late and had time only for ten minutes in the supermarket before it closed.
Puddings — a chocolate mousse, a com- pote of berries with creme fraiche and brandy-poached prunes with Greek yoghourt — might have passed muster if they hadn't been plonked in front of us straight from the fridge. How can anyone who claims to take food seriously allow it to be served like this?
On top of all this, the restaurant (blue- toned and industrial-chic) is terrifically noisy. When the coffee machine is on it sounds as if you're in a foundry. Still, the place was full and has been since it opened. As Sam Goldwyn used to say, de gustibus ain't what they used to be.
Tall Orders, 676 Fulham Road, London SW6; tel 371 9673
Nigella Lawson
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