One more nail in the coffin | Review: Rex & Mariano, London

I’m always bemused when film posters or trailers include the words “from the producers of” such and such a successful earlier film – not the stars, not the director, but the “money guys”. You imagine cinemagoers (well, illegal downloaders) in a quandary: “Darling, I know you love Julianne Moore’s acting and the directorial flair of Ben Wheatley, but I hear these guys had some really useful meetings with the distributors when they were looking for funding…” Soon they’ll have to start doing this with restaurants: forget that way a particular chef has with carefully sourced ingredients, or the innovative technique a kitchen brings to its dishes – here’s the latest from the guys behind that place where they first made you queue outside in the rain for a table!

The space was always big and busy, though as Soho changed around it – all Fernandez & Wells and Crossrail – a very large bar serving gallon jugs of cosmopolitans had long since seemed something of an anachronism

And so to Rex & Mariano, which is “from the guys behind” Burger & Lobster. R&M occupies what used to be Vodka Revolution on St Anne’s Court in Soho, that cut-through from what I think of as the Soho where I can remember the street layout to the bit where it all gets a bit hazy. The space was always big and busy, though as Soho changed around it – all Fernandez & Wells and Crossrail – a very large bar serving gallon jugs of cosmopolitans had long since seemed something of an anachronism. No such trouble for Rex & Mariano, the most A/W14–15 restaurant imaginable: white-tiled walls, no soft surfaces, gadgetry privileged over the human, and an abundance of youthful serving staff in Breton tops that remind one unavoidably of those at Pizza Express: perhaps a subliminal way to constantly remind diners to get through the food quickly and get out. Even its name, oddly difficult to commit to the memory (I struggled to remember it later on. Bullion and…?), is so of-the-moment it feels like the poor overworked ampersand, seemingly inserted into the name of every other restaurant opening you can think of, might be allowed 2015 off. It’s a completely denuded signifier now, no indicator of a collaborative effort between two proprietors, simply a kind of boil-in-the-bag way of suggesting a long and noble heritage. Once upon a time, Mr Marks and Mr Spencer operated a grocers’ stall together, but the eponymous Rex and Mariano are likelier to be two people who’ve favourited one another’s Twitter feeds but never actually met. (Mr Burger and Mr Lobster, I regret to inform you, never even existed.)

Picture: Twitter

The “thing” here is seafood. The menu at Rex & Mariano is concise, and covers oysters, a selection of ceviches, tartares and carpaccios, an abundance of dishes based around prawns (including the unusual Sardinian striped variety, served either raw and cooked), and sundries including salads in which what seemed to be cheese on toast feature prominently. The “grilled” selection, confusingly, includes a lot of fried dishes. The prices are low, the portions generous, and everything seems geared to diners rushing in, guzzling down a couple of small plates and a 500ml decanter of picpoul, and heading on to whatever Soho has to offer these days, perhaps the chance to gaze through windows in hoardings at the broken ground where your favourite bar or restaurant or lap-dancing emporium once stood.

Food arrives swiftly, but is brought by a human being, slightly anticlimactically

We went on the restaurant’s soft opening night (a sign outside: “We’re open until the fish runs out!”) and there were one or two minor snagging problems: the promised serving of aioli (c’mon, guys, just say “mayonnaise”: aioli is so 2003) didn’t accompany our courgette fries, for instance. That’s not a problem. What is a problem is a fritto misto made, one suspects, by rolling great fistfuls of seafood in batter mix and tossing them into the fryer, with the resultant clumps of fishy “stuff” forming a kind of game for diners: what deepfried chimera did you get? “Well, there’s a crab-claw poking out, and there’s a sort of tentacular mass here, and half a whiting stuck to it…” There’s a lot of fried goods here: the zucchini chips were fine, though the amount of oil in which the last few in the bowl were swimming was a little unalluring; an artichoke flower allegedly grilled is a waste of time and energy, with scant flesh left for the hapless diner/wrestler to scrape from the petals (a trickle of something pestoish dribbled over the whole thing is an afterthought). A portion comprises two full such heads, and so is superficially generous, but that just means double the disappointment and waste. That ’choke, you might be forgiven for suggesting, isn’t funny any more.

Picture: Twitter

A couple of other Zeitgeisty innovations: just as even the post office has started to experiment with making customers utilise self-service checkouts rather than interact with those pesky, money-grubbing human employees, so R&M’s menu is given on an iPad mini, by means of tapping which you order. Food arrives swiftly, but is brought by a human being, slightly anticlimactically. It makes it much easier to add extra dishes as you go along and request another look at the menu; intriguingly, R&M’s standard service charge is only 5%, not the more usual 12.5% (at least until the iPads start demanding a rise). It’s a talking point, but subtracting the human element from the ordering process, which is perhaps being dressed up as “giving the diner more agency”, makes me imagine that soon you’ll be invited into the open kitchen to make your own dinner. You’ll pitch your handful of seafood spare parts into the hot oil; it will feel simultaneously like throwing a fish into an aquarium pool for a dolphin to eat, and being the dolphin.

It was relentlessly buzzy at 8pm, and the buzz will probably never die down, day or night. We gave up talking, waited for a human being to take our cards for payment (surely only a matter of time before you “contactlessly” touch your card to the iPad screen to pay the bill), and then fled, pausing only to wash our hands at a Belfast sink which works as a kind of communal fingerbowl in the middle of the dining area. Outside, Friday night Soho seemed subdued by comparison. Like those mystifyingly advertised films (“from the makers of Arnold Schwarzenegger Needs a New Conservatory II!”) it will do phenomenally well. C

Rex & Mariano, 2 St Annes Court, London W1F 0ZA
Rexandmariano.com