Pan-Asian menus are the Da Vinci Code of the London restaurant scene: the critics scoff at the craven reduction of what were once high and clearly defined ideals to a mass-market crowd-pleaser, but the public just keeps on lapping it up and coming back for more. And if pan-Asian is the Da Vinci Code of cuisines then Ian Pengelley – formerly head chef of the briefly epochal E&O – is its Dan Brown. (Mark Edwards of Nobu is its Wilbur Smith, Rainer Becker of Zuma is its Tom Clancy… is this helping?)
Speaking as a punter, then, rather than as a critic, I was over the moon when I heard that, with the closure of Pengelley’s in Sloane Street (a short-lived venture in collaboration with Gordon Ramsay Holdings which came about largely, I think, because Gordon, like everyone else, fancied a piece of the pan-Asian pie), Ian was to cook at a new venture called Gilgamesh in Camden Town. I live less than a mile up the road and, ubiquitous though quality pan-Asian is, Camden is one place ubi it is not available. And it would be damned handy for swift working lunches midweek.
Furthermore, the name Gilgamesh suggested that Ian’s Sino-Japo-Vieto-Thaio-Pacifico-Rimmo style was to be blended with a dash of Ancient Babylonio (goat in figs?), perhaps to give it a bit of breadth.
When I called to book, a recorded American lady’s voice said, “Thank you for calling Gilgamesh.” Why is she American? Is it meant to fool me into thinking that the restaurant is not 12 minutes’ walk away through a couple of stabby and dog-shit-speckled estates, down the back of Sainsbury’s, up the side street where the dealers get the drugs out of their pants, just inside the market where John Paul II still lives on 100,000 “I like the Pope – the Pope smokes dope” T-shirts? (When, by the way, are the T-shirt-makers going to get around to changing it to Ratzinger? Or is it that Herr Ratzinger doesn’t smoke dope?)
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Aaaaanyway. This Yank answers the phone. Then an English woman comes on and says, “What’s your first name?”
Lawks. I don’t know. I never have a first name ready.
“John,” I say. Brilliantly.
“What’s your surname, John?”
“Oakeshott,” I tell her. Because that I had prepared. I always have a surname ready. But to have given a first name as well makes it feel like a worse lie than usual. Because I have created a whole man: John Oakeshott. Normally it’s just a half-anonymous “Mr”. But I feel John Oakeshott really ought to have a job, a home, a wife. (On the spot, I decide that he dreamt of joining the RAF but failed the eye test and ended up in the City. He married a violin teacher from Dubrovnik who used to look exotic but now looks like Boris Yeltsin, and lives in Mortlake).
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“What’s your phone number, John?”
Aarghhh. Stop calling me John. I’m not called John.
“OK, John, see you tonight.”
And I hang up with the horrific, “omigod what have I created” feeling of a Frankenstein or an Oppenheimer (now, those are ideas for pseudonyms…).
The thing is, I had been planning to take my girlfriend and my mother. But my mother, being my mother, remembered only a couple of hours before dinner that she was meant to be playing bridge in Harrow. She wanted to postpone to the day after.
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I called them back.
“Helleyo, thank yeoo fer carlin’ Gilll-Ga-Meshhhh.”
“I need to move a reservation.”
“Name?”
“John Oakeshott.” By now I had said it so often I was beginning to feel it was true.
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“We have no record of your reservation, John.”
“Well hang and blast it,” said John Oakeshott, because that is the sort of thing John Oakeshott says. “I only made it this morning.”
“Sorry, John, it’s not there.”
John Oakeshott – wiped from existence as easily as he had been created.
“But I can book you in for tomorrow.”
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John Oakeshott was worried.
“How do I know you’ll have a record of me tomorrow?”
“I can assure you of that.”
John Oakeshott was still worried. John Oakeshott did not get where he is today by being left standing at reception like a lemon, while bouncers looked him up and down and ditzy receptionists claimed his name was not on the list.
So, anyway, next evening, down we go to Camden, me and Mrs Oakeshott (who doesn’t look at all like Boris Yeltsin, by the way), and my mum, Old Ma Oakeshott (my father, Alan Oakeshott, the famous Times columnist, being temporarily indisposed).
The bouncer says there’s “valet parking for a small charge” and, this being Camden, John Oakeshott thinks this sounds like a good idea.
The Oakeshotts ascend from the grotty market via an escalator into a vast hall decorated with an interior carved, they are told, by ten – count them – ten thousand artisans working for three years in India. It depicts scenes from the epic of Gilgamesh, which John Oakeshott read during his time in Mesopotamia. He does not understand why this is considered meet for a restaurant serving the food of the Far East. Or why they have thrown in a retracting roof like one sees on a baseball stadium. Or why there is very loud music being played by a DJ. And a VIP lounge. And gold urinals. In Camden.
It was very much how John Oakeshott imagined the restaurant would be in that sphinx-shaped casino in Las Vegas. Though he does not know for sure, because John Oakeshott does not gamble.
John and his family are shown to a table at the edge of the dining room on the lowest of three dining levels, so that everyone else looks down at them (it is by the window, on whose sill assorted gunky empties are left festering all evening). John asks to move to a nicer-looking table 3ft above him, and is told he cannot. It is being kept for someone else. No doubt one of these VIPs.
The staff all wear black and the nice-looking, hard-bodied waitresses are snotty and unhelpful. But Lawrence London, John’s waiter, is charming. One of the evening’s true bright spots.
The food is good. One is encouraged to eat sushi followed by dim sum (which is odd, because John’s three-year posting in Hong Kong taught him that dim sum is strictly a lunchtime affair), followed by a big plate of something from somewhere else.
The nigiri is decent, though expensive and of limited range (four fish only – usual suspects). The maki rolls are well-made, standard-issue Cali-Jap. Scallops on cubes of sweet belly pork is a very good dish indeed. Dim sum are cleanly executed and tasty. Miso sea bass is Nobu’s miso cod as usual, giant lobster chunks are maybe a bit hefty for the tempura treatment.
If the menu were a musical score (rather than a roistering potboiler) it would be marked “trad. arr. Pengelley”.
At the end of the evening I went, as instructed, to the back door, where one of the bouncers asked for £10 (this after a bill for three of £242.10) and held out my car keys. Then he pointed me down a dark alley to where, 50 yards away, the Oakeshott family Ford Fiesta (Zetec, mark you) was parked in the Morrisons supermarket car park.
Classy.
Gilgamesh
Stables Market, Chalk Farm Road, NW1 (020-7482 5757)
Meat/fish: 5
Cooking: 6
Incongruity: 7
Score: 6
Price: As above (which included two £36 bottles of wine and a £12.50 pea-shoot salad that we didn’t order or receive, which I’ve only just noticed now. Oh, and £5 for some har gao we did order but never got. Jeepers: £17.50 extra plus 12.5 per cent service – so £19.68 – for stuff we didn’t have. That’s nearly as much of a bargain as the valet parking).
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Nobu Berkeley
15 Berkeley Street, W1 (020-7290 9222)
Very popular offshoot of Mark Edwards’ Nobu where you can, in theory, get a table. Pan-Asian. Great food. Different sort of vulgarity. W*****s from a different part of town. Shoot-me-now prices. (I scored it 6.67).
Roka
37 Charlotte Street, W1 (020-7580 6464)
Very popular offshoot of Rainer Becker’s Zuma. Pan-Asian. Great food. W*****s from all over the place. Shoot-me-now-prices. (I gave it 9 for its food but 4.5 overall.)
E-mail feedme@thetimes.co.uk if you know a pan-Asian joint that isn’t full of w*****s, and maybe we’ll go there together