Review at a glance: ★★★☆☆
Collars up and heads hunched against the rain, approaching Dalston’s Marquee Moon I realised the weekend’s tributary flood of Dame Maggie Smith clips had made quite the impression. “A DJ?” said I, dowager countess in waiting, “in a restaurant, on a Sunday evening?” Home James, and don’t spare the horses.
Is this what it means to be young? I thought I had some idea until walking in. Daring to be 34 made me by some distance the oldest person in the room, save for one grey-templed chef looking suspect. But once the waitress, having initially attempted to vacuum-pack us into a window seat, agreed to our release among the general population, things picked up. Even the DJ, who skittishly spun between synth pop and doubtful Paul Simon remixes, worked: you would bring friends here on the promise of a good night. And so, I thought, maybe we could fit in here among the cool kids. We almost got away with it, too.
A long-abandoned boozer, the Marquee now considers itself a “restaurant, cocktail and hi-fi bar”. But sometimes the expectations of both customer and restaurateur are not always realised. The Marquee — handsome with its raw plaster walls and green Formica table tops — very much feels like a pub with grub. But it does not yet feel quite ready to be a restaurant.
That grub, though. Here is one of those menus where, budget and stomach allowing, everything could be ordered. Pub food might mean sausage and mash, but since the mid-Eighties might also mean Thai (Kensington’s Churchill Arms the innovator; the Heron in W2 the perfecter). The Marquee offers a bit of both. Who can fairly choose between szechuan chicken drums and salt and pepper-crusted cod’s cheek? Mushroom parfait is dolloped beside dominoed Ritz crackers. Plated with a nostalgic wink of irony? Who cares? I love Ritz crackers. A bowl of flailing onion bhaji arrived, a spit of Medusa, shining with oil under a green sauce. It’s a shoo-in for London’s finest bar snack. Alongside that was a “pickle boat”, a trio of fermented veg with a good showing of crispy chilli oil. Beef rendang pie, though, proved to be a billing of impossible promise; someone forgot the ginger and tamarind. Lovely pie, but no rendang. Ours was a table muttering.
By now we were full and met the platter of dan dan noodles with a weary sigh; on its own this was a meal for perhaps three, a great mass of flat noodles in sauce that cunningly hid its heat until, mouthful by mouthful, suddenly we were lit up with the amphetamine hit spice sometimes offers. It meant sai ua — the Northern Thai sausage curled like a Cumberland, where red curry paste binds the pork — was merely pawed at. A shame; its kimchi gravy could be slurped with a straw. The mash held its own.
We had not anticipated four dishes would be defeating. You might have thought they’d warn us. This is where the unreadiness to operate as a restaurant showed — it wasn’t just all the pints going out in lieu of plates of food. The Marquee has all the hallmarks of a top tier new opening: the good looks, that short, concise and inventive menu. Fantastic cocktails. But Sunday showed something missing: order. It is miserly to complain about service in columns like this and more-or-less futile too, given the rate of staff turnover these days. But someone needs to get the training sorted.
‘Remind me again what you’d asked for?’ said our waitress. We’d gone out for a meal, not a round of Mastermind
Ordering was a bit of a calamity in itself, given we had to do it twice. “Remind me again what you’d asked for?” said our waitress, returning without a menu and prompting an unexpected memory test. We’d gone out for a meal, not a round of Mastermind. Plates arrived at haphazard intervals. Staff would check on one table and ignore the others, overextended as they tended bar and tables at the same time. The bill was wrong. No soap or loo roll in the cubicles. Nothing to ruin a night, and a fourth star on this page is flickering in-and-out like broken neon. Yet the sense was that those of us eating were an afterthought. The kitchen mostly has it sorted. But someone, somewhere, needs to put a grown-up in charge.
