Claro, London: Many of the dishes are wonderful, but the endless emails are a real pain – restaurant review
Claro, 12 Waterloo Place, London SW1Y 4AU. Smaller plates £9-£24; bigger plates £18-£48; desserts £14-£16. Wines from £42 a bottle
Email offers restaurants dreadful opportunities, and sometimes they grab them with both sweaty hands. Take Claro, the second venture from Israeli chef Ran Shmueli, following the success of the first in Tel Aviv. Let’s get the headline into the opening paragraph. At Claro, which serves food best described as eastern Mediterranean with Middle Eastern influences, I thrilled to some of the best dishes I have eaten this year, many of them plant-based. The cooking is smart, at times complex but most of all delicious. Which makes the whole email thing feel like dealing with an objectively beautiful but desperately insecure person, who is just gagging for affirmation.
My booking yielded six emails in all, two of which – a booking acknowledgment, a request for confirmation – were entirely reasonable. But then there’s the one gushingly headed: “We are excited, are you?” Always risky, putting a question like that. Because no, I wasn’t really, and I suspected they weren’t either. “Your upcoming visit promises an unforgettable dining experience,” it began, carelessly raising the bar. “I am committed, together with the team, to fulfil your needs to the best of my abilities.” Only to the best of your abilities? And what are those? I don’t know you. This email, which is meant to tantalise, served only to terrify.
Afterwards came the onslaught: the emails thanking me for coming, and asking me to give a rating. Now another arrives begging for feedback. “For example, ambiance, what you like or disliked and advice what you would like to add on in the restaurant,” it began. And then, “If you prefer us to call, please let us know and one of our Guest Relations Manager will contact you.” Good God, no. I only went for dinner. Now you’re stalking me. With terrible grammar and lousy punctuation. The lesson here: just because you can email your customers, doesn’t mean you should.
Claro occupies a huge, elegant block of a space at the southern end of Regent Street St James’s. The bankers have moved out. The eaters have moved in. If your eyes widen at some of the prices, do note that the tower-block high windows are hung with both curtains and blinds which, in a space where neither are necessary, is quite the design feature, and not cheap. High above you in the main dining room there’s an intricately corniced ceiling. If the altitude gives you agoraphobia, head to the other side and the counter around an open kitchen with a smoking grill. I can imagine sneaking in here to scarf a few dishes by myself. I would come for the chilli tasting plate, which has as many elements as one of those magazine partworks they advertise on the telly around Christmas. At its centre is an oven-hot pillow of Moroccan frena, a grown-up kind of pitta, with a thin, oil-slicked, za’atar-sprinkled crust, which puffs hot yeasty air at you as you tear in. Put it to work on the sherbet-coloured whipped chilli butter. Move along to the pile of pickled chillies, from there to the grilled chillies and finally to the green chilli dip. Each has heat, but there is subtlety here too; a recognition that chillies are a family, but not identical. Next to the bread sit shiny olives the size of quails’ eggs and a dish filled on one side by fiery harissa and on the other, to cool it down, by snowy labneh. Finally, there’s a tomato and chilli dip. All of this is £18. It’s also a lot.
From the same short opening list, we have Brussels sprouts, sliced crossways on the top and then deep fried until they have opened out like a flower. They are dark and crisp, reminiscent of the Roman way with globe artichokes, and come with the tang of caper aioli. That’s a seriously nickable idea. From further down the menu, we have a canoe of butter-roasted hispi cabbage, with soft grains of bulgur wheat stuffed in between the leaves, in an old-school butter sauce, dribbled with date molasses. The highlight of the night, however, takes pumpkin and turns it into a tap-dancing, high-kicking Broadway star. There is a crescent of blackened and blistered pumpkin, with a crisp skin which gives way to a sweet, fudgy centre. It curls around an undulating pond of smooth, citrus-boosted pumpkin purée, and tucked in between the two is a rose of lightly pickled, crunchy pumpkin. It is finished with toasted seeds. When you start shouting “encore” at your emptied plate, you know something serious has happened.
We have a plank of pork rib, as dark as the pumpkin, with heaps of crispy onions, resting on a paprika-heavy romesco, which puts the lightly fatty meat right in its place. There is a square of hake, its skin topped with salsa verde, which sits in another butter sauce, heavy with dill, with sliced yellow and red peppers. Both are smart, well-executed dishes. But it is the plant-based offerings that have me swooning. At which point you’re thinking that the first excitable email promising an “unforgettable dining experience” wasn’t far off the mark. Perhaps, but honestly, I prefer to have my revelations unprompted.
Likewise, having moaned about the stalker-y email threatening to phone me for a performance review, I will of course now give feedback. You wanted consistency? How sweet. While food prices are enthusiastic, with main courses topping out at about £45, there are ways to navigate a cheaper outcome, and at lunchtime they offer two courses for the price of a main. But the wine list, which runs from a perfectly acceptable Rioja at a chunky £42 to a Meursault for a micro-penised £6,800, is broad and outright punishing. Meanwhile, the murmuring club beats are aimed at a demographic who probably can’t afford these prices. I am far too old to appreciate the drop.
The dessert menu is a diverting read, though it doesn’t always quite deliver on the plot twists. Strawberries come with a beetroot sorbet. There’s a dish combining tomato sorbet and cherry tomato marmalade with goat’s cheese. We have something listed just as “parsnip”, and while the curls of shaved vegetable in caramel are intriguing, the carrot cake at the plate’s centre is a little dry. A bread and butter pudding made with challah, apples and cinnamon, which smells like an American shopping mall at Christmas, needs to be sweeter. But both represent proper baking and with tweaks, could be as rave-worthy as other dishes here. Claro is a serious restaurant. You have my affections. And now I’ve told you this, enough with the emails already.
News bites
The charity Centrepoint, which supports thousands of homeless young people every year, has launched its Christmas fundraising campaign. Each donation of £15 will provide a home-cooked Christmas dinner. There is also the opportunity to add a card which, as Centrepoint says, will let the recipient know that ‘somebody, somewhere is thinking of them’. To find out more and to donate go here.
The much-loved Malaysian restaurant group Roti King, famed for its flaky roti Canai and its nasi lemak, is to publish its first cookbook. Founder Sugen Gopal opened the first branch in Colindale, northwest London in 2003, before restarting in Euston in 2014. There are now five of them across London. The book, entitled Roti King: Classic and Modern Malaysian Street Food, will be published by Quadrille in April (rotiking.com).
The avowedly kitsch Crazy Bear Hotel at Stadhampton, just south of Oxford, is opening a new restaurant with Chris Emery, formerly of Jason Atherton’s Clocktower in New York, leading the kitchen. Oak by Chris Emery will, he says, have a menu ‘that focuses on letting the seasons guide us’. Dishes will include steamed brill with scallop and fennel and cured salmon with burnt cucumber, nori and lettuce puree (crazybeargroup.co.uk).
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or follow him on Instagram @jayrayner1
