If, as Dante imagined, Hell is where sins are punished with your own bespoke and exquisite torture, mine might look a lot like the new Nova complex in Victoria. I’ll be condemned to wander its echoing concrete corridors, blasted by a gritty wind, lugging myself from spreadsheet-designed outlet to concept-driven “fast casual”, forever cramming joyless food into blighted face, eating, bloating, never satisfied.
There will be awful “happy hours” at Jason Atherton’s The Drunken Oyster above his basic-bitch Hai Cenato, where the grimly flirtatious barman spends way too long creating “the best martini you’ve ever tasted, laydee”. A weeny glass of unremarkable spirit that has been shoogled with ice: 12 quid aye-thank-yew. Or a “taptail”: dear God, I’m sorry for my sins already. There’ll be days spent painfully ingesting the bottomless brunch at sports bar Greenwood, while bellowing salarymen play ping-pong or pool; or feeling the tinny jangle of my fillings as they flinch from the sugary, Oliver Bonas tweeness of “Aussie-style” Timmy Green and an eternity of flabby popcorn shrimp, while nobody can be arsed to clean tables. There will be chain pizzas and doughnuts: torment by mass-produced carb. Should Satan momentarily turn his back, I’ll scuttle to the estimable Aster for smoked fish, where the al-fresco seating, desperately prettified by floral garlands, looks like a pass-ag reproach to its surroundings.
I spend a whole day at Nova; I can only imagine what for ever would feel like. The complex is a testimony to the interior designers’ art of making something out of ugly boxes of nothing. Whoever is responsible for my main destination, The Stoke House, deserves some kind of medal in the face of an impossible task: transforming what looks like a Vegas airport buffet into something approaching glamour. There are shelves of books and tchotchkes, and one wall is a Union flag made of beer cans; the servery, where you line up with tray, is given a farmers’ market flourish with baskets of fruit and veg. There’s a lot of copper accenting and a “salad wall”, which I manage to miss. It’s all very Clerkenwell design pod does bucolic.
“An updated rework of the great British carvery” is what we’re promised from owner Will Ricker (E&O and other noughties pseudo-Asian sleb magnets), and – with the exception of a heavy emphasis on the smoker and some imaginative and rather delicious salads (sweet potato with chilli; a butch red cabbage coleslaw; fat Israeli-style couscous with roast veg) – the, uh, joys of a British carvery are what we get. The short ribs are fibrous and taste of yesterday’s roast dinner, despite a modish flourish of pickled red onion and chilli; the chicken is cotton-woolly with no sign of the promised embrace of smoke; “smoked” cauliflower cheese, too (“bit on the side”: how very Travelodge), served in a dinky copper saucepan and pleasingly cheesy, is unsmoky. Salmon comes as pallid, morose and wanly pink as an unwilling bridesmaid. There’s a good pork bun – slow-roasted collar given a touch of sweetness from “burnt apple sauce” and the aniseedy crunch of fennel – but it’s not about to worry the streetfood fraternity any time soon. I feel, with my tray and ticket, as though I’ve regressed decades: as though, rather than the cool, friendly, young thangs dishing out the various meats, I’m waiting to be served by hair-netted school dinnerladies refusing to hold the custard.
The music is deafening, the place full to the rafters: my hell doesn’t seem to be other people’s. The menu makes a song and dance about being “pocket-friendly”, but we manage, with two cocktails each, no wine and no dessert, to ramp up more than a ton of a bill. The staff are lovely despite it being open from breakfast to fall-down; the cocktails are decent. Ach, who am I kidding? To get me near the place again, I’d need to be pitchforked.
Brittle, glassy Nova doesn’t look like London; it doesn’t look like anywhere much, less destination and more giant step forward in the soulless mall-ification of our cities. It makes me feel like shrieking, “Bring on Brexit!”, when surely the fragile foundations on which these kinds of Hades are built will come crashing down. The Stoke House may not be Nova’s most hellish corner, but it’s still my idea of Purgatory.
• The Stoke House, Nova Building, 81 Buckingham Palace Road, London SW1, 020-7324 7744. Open all week, 8am-11pm (9am Sat; noon-6pm Sun. About £30 a head for three courses, plus drinks and service.
Food 5/10
Atmosphere 2/10
Value for money 5/10
