RESTAURANTS AS THEATRE
EATING NEW LABOUR
:WA NEW YORK remains stubbornly more fash- ionable than London. Even in the restaurant trade, watering-holes like Nobu and Vong give deprived Londoners bite-sized replicas of Big Apple cuisine — which must be very upsetting to New Labour, who would have us believe that Britain boasts the sexiest models, the most happening designers and the hippest bands in the world, thanks to Mr Blair. Anything Manhattan can do, Manch- ester can do better.
Step forward Oliver Peyton, ubiquitous eatery entrepreneur, promising the dining equivalent of the Millennium Dome Cool Britannia on a well-spun plate. It's loud, it's regional, it's beer-drinking, it's orange, and now it's in Great Portland Street. Mr Peyton has opened a London branch of his successful Manchester restau- rant, Mash, bringing beer-gut chic to the heart of the metropolis. 'I want', he said, `this restaurant to reflect what modern Britain is today.'
The search for a modern British identity seems to be the political topic of the hour, the subject of speeches by Gordon Brown and pamphlets from Demos the think-tank. Mr Peyton's culinary approach to this com- plicated cultural conundrum sounded inter- esting. Presumably, coming from Manch- ester, Mashed Britannia would be straight- forward, uncompromising, gritty and an opportunity for a tough taste of the north without leaving the Central line.
We went on Saturday night — party night — a night, we hoped, to remember. The first disappointment was my person- alised message from the 'Love Machine'. Imported from Italy (so much for the best of British), this entrance-hall bulletin board greets each new customer with a cryptic message concerning their love life canned Cupid for the lovelorn. Sadly, on the night I visited it was broken, so I got the same chat-up line as the several hun- dred customers already in the restaurant. By the time I arrived 'His heart was not home for her; it was a hotel' had lost its pulling power.
We were led up a pebbledashed stairwell that looked, and for some reason smelled, like a municipal swimming-bath. Here, per- haps, was an authentic flavour of Manch- ester. Entering the first-floor restaurant, we were guided to a Formica table and seated in the kind of chairs — in a fetching pistachio colour — which make your bottom sweat. The ceiling was low and the music was loud. As a theatrical restaurant experience, it was aiming at the cool intimacy of the Donmar Warehouse, and emerging somewhere in the concrete wastelands of the South Bank.
Everything in the restaurant has been carefully thought through, which makes its failure all the more depressing. The pink uniforms of the waiters — it may be fash- ionable, but not in this particular hue were cut by the Savile Row tailor Richard James, and the shoes are special edition Hush Puppies. No doubt another new-wave designer was responsible for the ashtrays, shaped like a contraceptive device and unnecessary in my case: the experience of eating here was prophylactic enough.
We ordered champagne, although Mash specialises in beer brewed on the premises in huge vats, visible behind a perspex screen at the end of the restaurant. The aim is reportedly to make beer trendy again, but it is served in rows of glasses which look like specimen jars, and the spe- cial `biere de la cuisine' sounds suspiciously `Look, I don't know who you think I am, but will you please go away.' like an attempt to make something chic by giving it a Continental name.
The menus worked as a conversation piece, if not a culinary experience. None of us could work out which part of a tuna the loin came from, and the waitress — imm- peccably polite, and definitely not from Manchester — seemed bemused when we asked her. A quail starter led to a discus- sion of the use of the word in Boston, where it denotes a chick, a bird, a floozie or crumpet — that was the most fun we had with the food. The bread-sticks which came with my starter tasted like doughnuts. The doughnuts, when they arrived as part of one of the puddings, looked very similar to the bread-sticks. Other parts of the menu —pizzas, fruit shakes with names like Pas- sionart, even a lonely helping of mash seemed out of place, refugees from some other equally unappetising selection. The low point of the meal was a pudding con- sisting of small pieces of partially frozen fruit scattered between chunks of flavour- less gelatin. It was a failure in conception, execution and presentation.
Conception, however, seemed to be very much on the menu in the unisex loos, if the activities of one couple in a cubicle were anything to go by. The harassed bouncer on the door had completely lost control, and I realised for the first time the value of the single-sex loo, a haven of privacy rather than an embarrassing comedic interlude. Emerging, I firmly directed my husband to the segregated facilities downstairs.
Inside, he explained, the fashionable urinal lies flush with the floor, not a hygienic option. Both upstairs and downstairs, wash- ing your hands involves caressing a bulb on the end of a small metal rod until it senses your attentions and squirts a jet of liquid soap onto your hands. Rarely has the experi- ence of getting clean been either as inconve- nient or as dirty.
The other patrons were all under thirty and wore slightly too much white Lycra and blue eyeliner. Despite opening only a few weeks ago, the restaurant has already developed a bad case of special occasion status. There were groups of what seemed to be hen or stag parties, and most of the couples, to judge by their body language, appeared to be on not very successful first dates. Of course, they may have been mar- ried for years and were simply deeply uncomfortable with their surroundings.
If this is the culinary version of New Labour, it has the fashion sense of Robin Cook, the common touch of Lord Irvine and the sophistication of Frank Dobson. Arrogantly put together, it patronises its patrons and demeans its Manchester ori- gins. Like the government, it is instantly unfashionable because it tries too hard. This is no vision of a new Britain in lime- green Formica, but an exercise in restau- rant hubris, to be followed, we trust, by commercial nemesis.
By Alice Thomson
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