Give this Cuban menu a miss

10 April 2012

Whatever happened to the gastrodome? When Sir Terence Conran opened Quaglino's in 1993, this new concept in fine dining, whereby a restaurant could serve several hundred people a night and still preserve an air of exclusivity, was hailed as the Next Big Thing. Today, we only have to examine the plight of Mezzo to see just how unfashionable the gastrodome has become.

Mezzo, a 600-seater on the site of the former Marquee Club on Wardour Street, opened in 1995 and initially enjoyed some success with Soho's preclubbing crowd. However, it began to struggle after about five years and, in 2004, Conran finally put it out of its misery.

Today, the space is occupied by three restaurant-cum-bars, all of them either exclusively or part-owned by Conran, and by far the most successful of these is Floridita. Named after the bar in Havana that Hemingway identified as his all-time favourite watering hole, it's a supper-and-dancing club that stays open into the small hours.

My days as a Soho night owl are long gone, but I like South American food and I've wanted to check out Floridita ever since it opened, so I called up last week and booked a table for lunch. Imagine my surprise, therefore, when I turned up at 100 Wardour Street, only to find myself in a large, anonymous dining room that looked suspiciously like Mezzo. Was this Floridita, I asked the maitre d'? That depended on what I meant, apparently.

The restaurant I was standing in was part of an establishment called Meza-Floridita, he explained, but if I was after a Cuban meal, I'd have to come back in the evening since the downstairs area was closed at lunchtime.

Unfortunately, I'd arranged to meet a colleague, so with great reluctance I decided to honour my reservation in the upstairs restaurant. The two-course lunch special was only £8, which struck me as pretty reasonable until I tasted the food. I started with two tapas dishes - manchego cheese with quince jelly and salchichon iberico --and, for my main course, plumped for something called paella de verduras.

The tapas were among the worst I've ever had - the cubes of quince jelly were the size of microchips and the salami tasted old and stale - and the paella turned out to be vegetarian, something the waiter had failed to warn me about. My companion scarcely fared any better with his starter of sardines and caramelised onions on toast followed by a grilled pork chop with lentils and vegetables.

It was a really wretched meal, a throwback to the kind of cuisine Londoners were forced to put up with before the culinary revolution of the Eighties and Nineties. The cavernous dining room was almost completely empty and I began to suspect that, like me, the only customers were credulous boobies who'd booked under the impression that they were going to be having lunch at Floridita.

A couple of days later, I returned to 100 Wardour Street, only this time in the evening, and ventured downstairs to the Cuban area. It was only 7pm, but it was already heaving with young men in suits who'd clearly come straight from work.

It was dark and the air was thick with cigar smoke, but the atmosphere wasn't entirely unpleasant. I could easily imagine that in six hours' time, with a live band playing and as many women present as men, it might be a fun place to hang out.

Not surprisingly, the tapas downstairs was no better than upstairs. I ordered some cheesy nibbles that tasted of stale oven chips and some fried pork wrapped in bacon that was 75 per cent fat.

The barman rather snottily informed me that they don't do either banana or strawberry daiquiris, since they aren't served in the original bar in Havana, so I opted for a Floridita daiquiri which consisted of a shot of Havana Club with a spoonful of brown sugar in it.

All in all, then, not a great dining experience. If you're interested in going to Floridita, my advice is to arrive after midnight, having already eaten somewhere else.

Floridita
Wardour Street, London, W1F 0TN

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