Lucknow forty-nine, 49 Maddox Street, London W1S 2PQ (020 7491 9191). Starters £6-£sixteen; mains £12-£17.50; cakes £6; wines from £29 While it would be incorrect to argue that most of the Indian subcontinent’s meals are brown, it’s easy to see how a meal at Lucknow forty-nine, the second London organization from chef Dhruv Mittal, would possibly make you attain that conclusion. It’s a parade of dishes that, on a coloration chart, would run the gamut from “dark earth” through “silted river bed” to “plowed area”. I don’t have any trouble with brown food; many of the most extreme, strident dishes I have ever eaten have been brown. In cooking, caramelization is your friend, and caramel is brown. Others experience differently. This might also explain why, halfway through way via dinner; I watch a lightly sauced cauliflower dressed with a thin scab of shimmering silver leaf.
Some will protest that treasured metals as meal ornaments are a cultural factor with a venerable record in Indian cooking. But I’m now not in India. I’m on Maddox Street on the brink of London’s Mayfair, wherein there’s already too much needless gilding. I wouldn’t say I like consuming matters that serve no nutritional purpose. I, in particular, don’t like consuming things that can be destined to travel instantly through me so that the product at the alternative stop turns out so glittery you can grasp it on a Christmas tree if, say, Tim Burton was in charge of the decorations.
Apart from supplying the possibility to make poo jokes in a restaurant review – by no means to be overlooked – there’s a more severe factor here. How do we evaluate a restaurant like this, wherein the giant bill will undoubtedly pay for things like a silver leaf on the cauliflower, which doesn’t have anything to do with the meals? For a beginning, Lucknow 49 is an entirely relaxed restaurant, actually so. The upholstered bench seating is stacked with throw cushions and bolsters – such a lot of, indeed, that I chuck a few off to create a space wherein to wriggle my colossal arse.
There is olive green paintwork and blocky floral prints, in addition to what seems like a hand-published ornament around the archway into the back dining room. It’s a self-aware take on the domestic, the type of secure fashion that costs good money. Accordingly, the most inexpensive bottle of wine is £29 for something drinkable, the name I can’t remember, and the dinner invoice for two will spoil £a hundred thirty without difficulty.
