Review: TED Restaurant
I’m a sustainability hypocrite. If I were at a dinner party and the host served bluefin tuna, I’d take great pleasure in making a scene. “How very dare you? Don’t you know bluefin numbers have dropped by 96 per cent thanks to intensive fishing? And while we’re at it, did you know they can swim at 43 miles per hour? Well, did you?” But I can’t remember the last time I bothered to check if my yellowfin tuna was line caught, and yesterday at the fishmongers I gave in to a craving for monkfish – a big no-no – without even asking if it was from north or south stock. What a jerk.
When I’m eating out, I tend to lazily assume that everything on the menu has been sustainably sourced unless I’m explicitly informed otherwise, which is never (the exception is eating out in Japan, when I assume every dish contains the last surviving member of a species). It’s easier to maintain this state of blissful ignorance now that just about every restaurant flaunts the provenance of its ingredients. But local doesn’t always mean sustainable, especially when it comes to fish – our stocks of cod, salmon and halibut, for instance, are in a right old state. So what is the ethically minded but fundamentally complacent diner to do?
Enter Jamie Grainger-Smith’s new TED Restaurant at King’s Cross – its entire raison d’être is to promote sustainability. It evolved from his consultancy business, which helps restaurateurs make their supply chain more ethical.
The venture has nothing to do with TED talks, although you’d be forgiven for thinking otherwise, given they are pitched at exactly the same market. In fact, whether or not you like TED talks is a pretty good indicator of whether you’ll like TED Restaurant. Do you think of them as an important melding of ideas that could help to shape a better future? Book a table now, you’ll love it. If you find them an unbearably smug circle-jerk for the pseudo-intellectual middle-classes, you might have a problem. I’m somewhere in-between: I like the idea of TED Restaurant but something about its execution sticks in my craw. Take the name: TED, it turns out, stands for Think.Eat.Drink, which I wish I hadn’t discovered, because it’s unbearable.
When you actually get there, though, it’s entirely inoffensive. It feels more like a cafe than a restaurant, with lots of primary colours and trendy (ethically sourced) furniture. It’s nice, in a “I’m sitting alone writing a screenplay on my Mac” kind of way. It reminds me of Urban Meadow on the north west corner of Hyde Park, and also of Drink, Shop & Do, the cocktail bar-cum-stationary shop just down the road from TED whose USP is allowing you to partake in handicrafts while you’re downing Bloody Marys.
So, TED Restaurant may assuage your conscience, but is the food any good? Not so much. I started with steak tartare (from Somerset), which was packed with so much chilli you couldn’t taste any of the other flavours that make steak tartare just about the greatest thing in the entire world, ahead of both material riches and close family. Also, the beef hadn’t been ground properly, leaving rogue clumps of unswallowable meat.
The burrata and bull’s heart tomatoes (from Liguria, Italy) were great; juicy and flavoursome, although £7 is rather steep for tomatoes, no matter how ethically sound they are. My main of pollock (Cornwall), chicken wings (undisclosed) and sweetcorn was homely but uninspiring, a coming together of various pastoral flavours that lacked some transformative element to lift it above something that my mother might have rustled up on a Thursday evening before carting us off to swimming lessons.
El Pye had the pappardelle with broccoli, anchovies and botarga, which did a splendid job of hiding the anchovies and botarga; I didn’t manage to find any before she’d finished it all. What I did taste was pleasantly rustic if, again, unremarkable. A side of chard gratin was inedibly salty – we conjectured that a lid must have fallen off a shaker at some point and the chef hadn’t had time to remake it.
For dessert we shared a pistachio affogato, which was excellent in the way that ice cream doused in coffee just is.
The danger in opening a restaurant dedicated to sustainability is that people will file you under “generally a good idea but not necessarily somewhere I’d want to eat”. Alas, TED doesn’t confound those expectations. No doubt it will attract a ready-made clientele who never forget to ask whether their yellowfin tuna was line caught and who haven’t ordered monkfish since 1997. But I can’t imagine many other people going out of their way to eat there.