Azerbaijani cuisine appears in SW1
Baku
164-165 Sloane Street, SW1X 9QB
FOOD **
SERVICE ****
ATMOSPHERE **
Cost per person without wine: £50
HAUTE-AZERI food – that’s cuisine from Azerbaijan – sounds terribly interesting, doesn’t it? Certainly, I hastened to take myself to Baku on Sloane Street (of all places), lured by the promise of Asiatic exoticism, Knightsbridge-style. A quick look at the menu revealed a beguiling mixture of hearty meats, spices and fruit – reminiscent of Turkish cooking, combined with Eastern European accents (think caviar and chestnuts and sturgeon).
With a prime, spacious location only a moment or two from the Mandarin Oriental and Harrods, Baku looks like a big deal – it needs to be a big deal, really, otherwise heaven knows how the rent can be justified. Yet when we turned up, the bar – a big, Oriental-style space – was virtually empty and the restaurant, to which we descended after a really good set of cocktails, lacked buzz. To be fair, it was a Wednesday in January; a few weeks later, a friend drunkely texted me from the bar on a Saturday night where she was necking champagne.
The iPad menus seem closer to the restaurant’s heart than the soulful Azerbaijani food I had imagined – even the cocktails, named things like Caspian Sea Flip and Baku Bay Fizz (and very reasonably priced, in fact, at around £8.50), unfurl in a series of brilliant screen images.
But downstairs, a strangely cold space (bare but without a sense of deliberate minimalism), we pushed aside the iPad in favour of good old fashioned paper. It didn’t seem particularly helpful to see the food all photo-pretty before eating it – if this isn’t a case of the proof residing in the pudding, I don’t know what is.
Food is divided into soups, seasonal fresh greens and salads, main courses from the oven, kebabs from the grill, vegetarian and “to share from the tandir”. Yet these labels aren’t particularly helpful: the tandir sturgeon we had was small and the flavour we’d expected (perhaps wrongly based on experiences eating Indian food) was not apparent; the sturgeon from the grill, served with pomegranate molasses, was also small. Sturgeon, in case you hadn’t realised, makes frequent appearances on this menu (you could have a sturgeon trio “from the oven”, cooked three ways), but beef is probably the better way to go. The “beef turshu govurma” was an amazingly tender, fatty bowl of rib-eye slow-cooked and servied with onion, plum and chestnut, though the amusing Romanian waiter was reluctant to serve such a calorific dish to two ladies. Perhaps Baku’s elite – used to keeping themselves in tight Gucci – would have declined.
While the main courses are overpriced given their size and quality, there are gems to be found. The same can not be said of the salads and appetisers – “choban salad” was a microscopic bowl of tomato, cucumber and herbs that anyone could knock together at home, yet it cost £8.50. Blinis (stuffed with lamb or cheese) were dry and miniscule – at £7.50, not worth it. That said, our dessert of exotic fruit was incredible: a massive plate of exotic fruit that arrived on steaming ice.
Cocktails a few doors up the road would cost twice as much. So I recommend dropping by Baku for drinks – familiarise yourself with the iPad’s pictoral list of vivid preparations – and, if you’re starving, pop downstairs for a bowl of meat stew. For an authentic taste of Baku, though, I fear you may need to go elsewhere.