Casa Cruz London
It wasn’t always thus, my hate/hate affair with west London. On any given weekend throughout the late 1980s and early 1990s I would be tearing around nightclubs in leather jeans, Vivienne Westwood biker boots and various Portobello thrift to a riotous Jeremy Healy DJ set, or some random trustafarian’s palatial W11 abode, before the long journey back to my parents’ Penge home on one night bus or other (one an hour on each route in those days). West London was edgy and awesome and I really had no reason to be there, other than to breathe the same air as a delirious and incoherent John Galliano, staggering out of Subterania at kicking-out time in crocodile skin loafers, pirate shirt and hot pants.
There was, in particular, an uproarious Valentine’s Day supper involving too much Fernet-Branca and a bunch of thirsty transvestites
I still have no reason to be there, and today I don’t go. I live in east London, and my perception of the city centre shifted three miles in the direction of Hackney Wick around ten years ago. The West End is one uniformly banal mix of gaysians buying sale-rail stuff at full price at Selfridges, bars full of secretaries from Croydon who read about them in ES Magazine, glorified fast food restaurants with queues and ampersands and names that include the words “dirty” and “dogs”, and M&M’s World. As for actual west London – I need to start breathing slowly into a paper bag as soon as I get past the Serpentine Gallery.
And yet, I was persuaded to eat out in west London this week. Not just in “west London”, but in that part of town that falls squarely between any useful Tube station – not quite Notting Hill, not quite Ladbroke Grove, not quite Holland Park. It is a part of London that I invariably find myself in, already unhappy, being drenched by entirely unforecast rain, miserably far from shelter, without umbrella. I always imagine that Uber’s “surge rate” kicks in while I’m underground, somewhere around Marble Arch. I was persuaded to head this way because Juan Santa Cruz has opened an offshoot of his Buenos Aires restaurant, and I have fond memories of the Argentine original. There was, in particular, an uproarious Valentine’s Day supper involving too much Fernet-Branca and a bunch of thirsty transvestites.
Casa Cruz is, as Adam Hyman put it so perfectly on Twitter, “a West End restaurant in west London”. Imagine Le Chabanais, but in a converted pub in W11 instead of on Mount Street. And with people actually eating inside it. It’s located on one of those streets full of pristine, gorgeous, largely empty real estate. The only local grocer’s is, arrestingly, more Peckham than Holland Park, but I guess there’s no call for anything better – the few homes along here that aren’t owned by non-doms or offshore investors likely have well-stocked wine cellars, and housekeepers.
Casa Cruz London
As I approached the corner of Clarendon Road, I realised this must be the place: a gentleman in a colourful bowler hat was opening the door for a man whose sweater was thrown across his shoulders, a continental styling affection that imparts a sensation in me not unlike violent acid reflux in the middle of the night.
The interior of Casa Cruz glows with backlit copper panels, bathing everyone in a light so amorous that you expect Joan Collins to make her way down the Escher-like mirrored staircase dressed in full regalia from The Bitch: voluminous fur coat, chauffeur’s hat, basque and suspenders. Indeed, the whole thing feels like a tarted-up 1970s classic destination – a bit Trampy, with a whole lot of hurly-Birley.
Upstairs, where the decor is a rich verdant green, there are tables full of shiny twentysomethings, blissfully unaware of how much it costs to rent a room within fixie-cycling distance of the Rochelle Canteen these days. There was also, on my visit, Gina Bellman (who has something of the Joanna Lumley national treasure magic – mention her to anyone and they invariably say “Oh, I love…”). Downstairs there’s Juan himself, hosting; so handsome, so groomed, wearing such a beautiful suit, that he makes André Balazs look like something the cat dragged in. And in the basement, there are what will be the most Instagrammed toilets in Europe. After, perhaps, the ones at Sketch. They are bewildering, and reminiscent of the closing reflective funhouse scene of Enter the Dragon. On my two visits, all I could hear was “ooh, sorry, I didn’t realise someone was in there”, while several other people scrabbled in vain to find any kind of door.
Downstairs there’s Juan himself, hosting; so handsome, so groomed, wearing such a beautiful suit, that he makes André Balazs look like something the cat dragged in
Then there’s the food. We had already torn the cocktail list a new one: I thought the drinks too small and anaemic, another diner at my table said they were “quite simply dreadful”. We’d moved on to straightforward martinis and a decent, albeit overly pricey Malbec, and hoped for better with the food, which I remember from Buenos Aires as being fancy, tortured in presentation, but always delicious: muscular Argentine flavours in a tryst with a fluffy bit of Eurotrash.
Things started well – my wild sea bass crudo was delicious, and a beef carpaccio dish was startlingly, cleverly presented – covering a dome of leaves, to give the appearance of an impossibly huge mountain of raw meat. Charred beetroots with horseradish were… charred beetroots with horseradish, flavourful and fine. But the mains were uniformly bleak: all of the meat, poultry and fish that hit the table had been overcooked and overseasoned. My blackened chicken had so much going on with its crust that it really needed to be sent to a quiet room to engage in some mindfulness meditation.
The kitchen here likes to char and smoke, but it doesn’t yet quite know how to cook. I took perverse delight in the chopped smoked cauliflower with parmesan, which hits the flavour thesaurus dead on; I loved it, but the sensation was also akin to eating the crunchy remnants off the Breville toaster, long after you’ve devoured the grilled cheese sandwich. A raspberry soufflé was standout and sweet, but a fruit salad seemed to have come straight from the galley of a British Airways Dreamliner (Economy class). All it lacked was its little white plastic tray.
It’s early days. And so much money and love has been thrown at Casa Cruz, that fine tuning is inevitable – Juan Santa Cruz is nothing if not a perfectionist. We felt somewhat disingenuous for visiting so soon after it opened. But such is the problem with a restaurant that’s clearly conceived to be on everyone’s lips. Everyone wants to be the first to go. One change they may implement swiftly is adding to, or retraining most of, the staff. We waited half an hour before anyone even looked like they might be interested in taking an order. Then, once they’ve sorted the cooking times and seasoning out, if they take the whole thing brick by brick and move it to, say, Clapton, I might go back. But seriously, west London? I really can’t be doing with it. That said, I’m sure everyone in W11 is probably saying the same thing about Hackney right now. Maybe we should just agree to disagree and all be snarky about south London. Because that really is crap. C
Casa Cruz, 124 Clarendon Road, London W11 4JG
020-3321 5400; casacruz.london