Film for two,sir?
This review was first published in October 2000
The Sequel is a restaurant with aspirations. You'll find it in front of the cinema in Venn Street, and to ram home the point, there is a large screen on which cartoons and even relatively modern films are shown. This can distract you from your dinner, especially as by some strange alchemy your brain strives ceaselessly to match up the visuals with the entirely unconnected music that is playing.
The menu here is an intellectual challenge. Your starter for three: what are arepas, akadura, and chimi churri dressing? (To save you the internet research time, arepas is a kind of tortilla, akadura is an Australian bush tomato, and chimi churri is a lively red pepper sauce.) The food served here is fusion food; you'll spot influences from Australia, South-East Asia, Japan, the Middle East, China, Europe and a few dozen other places. Each plate carries a hitherto unheard-of combination of ingredients, and on the menu each dish is described in the most arcane way imaginable. How about 'cumin crusted groper, capsicum and samphire escabeche, aubergine' (£11). Presuming that 'groper' is not a tongue-in-cheek allusion to an exotically spiced dirty-mac specialist, but rather the Australian spelling of the fish that the rest of the world calls grouper, we are still left with the problem of 'capsicum and samphire escabeche'. Escabeche is a technique for 'cooking' raw fish by adding an acid like lemon or lime juice to firm the proteins ? it wouldn't work on samphire (which is a fleshy marsh plant) and red peppers. It's a puzzle.
Presentation is elegant but perhaps too ambitious; from the starters, crab marron, avocado and pink fir apple tian (£7) is not a tian (a small, flattish Chinese cooking pot); this is a tower. But you are left with good flavours, and good textures. Or there's seared foie gras, truffle ice-cream, apricot prune and pineapple (£6.50). The liver is well cooked and makes a great partner for the fruit; the truffle ice-cream (served in a physallis leaf) is cheesey, cold and truffly, falling into the 'interesting' category more easily than the pigeonhole marked 'delicious'. In a similar vein, grilled tiger prawn and white-anchovy Caesar (£7) is pleasant enough but would not stir a chord of recognition with the late Caesar Cardini, the great salad's inventor.
Main courses include char-grilled white tuna, new potato grebiche, rocket and water-cress salad (£11.50), a successful enough dish, with a good portion of accurately cooked fish but some way from Sauce Gribiche. English lamb chops, mustard-seed and akadura mash, red-onion and beetroot relish (£12.50) delivers good cutlets but a rather confused battery of accompaniments. Rare-grilled sirloin, yellow-corn arepas, baby spinach, chimi churri dressing (£12.50) was more a case of 'medium- grilled steak, on a solid, potatoey, vegetable cake, with a meat-glaze sauce'. Thick potato cuts (£3), which come lightly dusted with sumac, are very good in their way, both substantial and tasty. But why do they have to be served in a miniature witches' cauldron? There's some-thing rather arch about the presentation here, and it is hard to avoid a sneaking distrust of any chef who is trying so very hard.
The effusive menu descriptions don't help either, and the elaborate platefuls confirm your suspicion: 'Will the Emperor be wearing his new suit tonight?' All of which is a great pity, as some of the combinations of ingredients are both original and delicious, and the service, although scatty, is well-meaning. Even after you have dined at The Sequel, though, it's a fair bet that fusion food will still remain something of a puzzle.
The Sequel
75 Venn Street, SW4 0BD
