I know you know this pudding, this little choccy bubo, because it’s everywhere. It’s a gastronomic virus that infests every other menu in the country. The pudding — which has no history or geographical roots, and is called things like chocolate fondant, warm chocolate indulgence or congealing crap in a cake — is a simple hit. It’s just sugar and cocoa, the bourgeois equivalent of a supersized Mars Bar, but without the subtlety of flavour and texture. Its USP is that dribble in the middle, which makes it look like an alpha cook’s three-star trick and the soft centres of Quality Street. It appears grown-up, but actually it’s monoglottally childish.
The real wiliness of the ubiquitous chocolate pudding, however, is the wait. That’ll be 15 minutes, they say, smiling lasciviously. It’s the delayed gratification that’s so clever. Ordering the chocolate pudding says, “I’m not in a hurry. I want to make this dinner last. I want to listen to your rippling repartee for another 15 minutes. I’m normally pretty disciplined, but tonight I’m going to throw common sense to the wind. I want to share my warm mound with you. I want you to breach my soft walls and make me gush.” This pudding screams: “I’m a sure thing. I’m a done deal. Get your coat — you’re going to be wearing my ankles as earmuffs.”
But that’s not the reason I’m mentioning it here. It’s also an economic indicator, a sign of the times, the pie chart’s pie. The ubiquity of the 15-minute chocolate pudding should make restaurateurs and catering workers very nervous. The little ice age of a recession that’s freezing retail is also going to clobber restaurants like salmonella in the sugar bowl. And the chocolate pudding is the mark of the angel of deflation.
You’d think that menu competition in restaurants would offer more variety; that free trade and the market would mean more and more innovation and ingenuity. Actually, it means exactly the opposite. Every new restaurant is Italian, or sushi, or Italian sushi. Success kills the competition, so every hungry restaurant imitates every replete one. This works as long as the economic climate stays predictable. But if the temperature drops and you are doing the same as everyone else, you’re stuffed — and not in a gooey-chocolatey way. It’s beginning to happen now. If you’re left holding a chocolate pudding, you might as well consume it the interesting way. There’s going to be a winnowing, a great reckoning, in the refectories of the west.
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This week, we went to Deep, a new restaurant in a new arcade underneath new blocks of flats on that bit of the Thames that locals call the Taint (tain’t Fulham and tain’t Chelsea). This is a lump of speculative life that looks as if it has been expelled from the suburbs of Miami. Outside, billboards promised tranquil serenity, or maybe it was serene tranquillity. Either way, it was a euphemism for despair and loneliness.
The arcade between the blocks is, I think, supposed to be a food court. Most of the sites are boarded up, with big pictures of happy food being lusted after by happy giants. And, as with all these modern spaces knowingly designed to attract crowds, it repels. The wind hyperventilates, panicking between the glass cliffs. The fountains spit in your face. We passed a Chinese restaurant. The manager and a couple of staff formed a snatch squad and tried to feed us by force. Through the window, I glimpsed a chef apparently grilling his hand on the hibachi as an act of hysterical tranquil serenity.
We got to Deep and were welcomed into a big white dining room that could have been a modern set for Ibsen, directed by Bergman, designed by Eskimos. This is a Swedish restaurant, and they don’t care who knows it. It pulses with all the joie de vivre, exotic exuberance, erotic rhythms and bright humour for which the Swedes are justly famed. It does, though, have circular banquettes, which are convivial to eat in, but torture for waiters.
The Blonde and I took Danny Moynihan, his wife, Katrine Boorman, and Daisy Garnett. We ate the entire menu, mostly because there was nothing else to do. The starters, as you’d imagine, were a lot of crustaceans, bivalves and acidically abused fish hemmed in with dill. We had some exceptionally good mussels, which they said were wild, though all mussels look pretty tame to me, and some Norwegian prawns, which had a fullness of flavour I thought prawns had lost for ever. There was a really good puffy blini with salmon and arctic caviar, a nice ballottine of gravlax and a weird, though interesting, tuna and veal carpaccio with mint dressing and anchovy fritters. While these were generally excellent, drawing coos of delight and admiration, they were also Scandinavianly expensive: £4.50 for a Scottish langoustine; £11.50 for a gobble of salmon caviar. I want to eat it, not put it through school.
It is a cruel truth of all Scandinavian culture, and indeed history, that it has no second act: the main courses fall off a cliff. There was a bit of perch, which is freshwater mud pretending to be a fish, and a boring bit of zander, which is a pescatorial mule, half pike, half perch, and an improvement on neither; there was a tortured sole, and some turbot poisoned with truffle oil, which is about as Swedish as a limerick. The food of the northern lights is all starters. It’s smorgasbord and sandwiches and alcohol blotters.
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The service was friendly but appalling. We’d slowly consumed a bottle and a half before the amuse-bouche (fish paste) arrived. We sat down at 8.30, and the puddings didn’t arrive until 11. They were things made with those sour red berries that I always assume are reindeer haemorrhoids, and a tray of chocolate tricks, which were overly fussy.
As we left, I know that one of the waiters said to one of the chefs: “Sven, you know what we need? One of those chocolate cakes with goo in the middle. The Saxons love them.”
Deep
The Boulevard, Imperial Wharf, SW6; 020 7736 3337
Lunch, Tue-Fri, noon-3pm, Sun, noon-4pm. Dinner, Tue-Sat, 7pm-11pm. Closed Mon