Grace and Flavour: Bo London

Grace Dent has an X-treme reaction to crazy Chinese food and edible condoms
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Grace Dent15 March 2013

Recent vernal scenes in London — sporadic sunshine, the chance to unbutton one’s duffel coat — have been greatly spiriting. This week I even drank a fancy foamy gin and tonic outdoors, 38 floors up at Sushisamba, standing by its magical Enid Blyton-style glowing tree, wearing nowt more than a Westwood frock and slingbacks, and had one of those jolly dinners at The Delaunay where people arrive breezy and chipper, gushing of spring having sprung, not in bobble hats with nose stalactites.

Sensing my good mood, my chums in the ES office conspired to send me off for an X-treme Chinese meal by Alvin Leung at Bo London. I tried to keep an open mind, but in truth the mere sight of the word ‘X-treme’ spelled with an X — a writing style only favoured by virgins with an off-road buggy fixation — had made my mood malevolent. £138 for 14 courses of X-treme cooking. To my mind, tasting menus are a dismal plan at the best of times. Anything over ten courses in London will be a charming idea but in reality, the antithesis of dinner. Instead, it’s basically a long evening of starvation in captivity.

All efforts to chat with your dining companion will consistently be scuppered by a waiter bearing two more spoons of Bushtucker-trial gloop representing the chef’s nervous breakdown. This is not dinner. It’s edible immersive art catering to a no-repeat clientele of affluent tourists and bloggers on freebies.

Alvin’s case wasn’t helped by Bo London’s website, which features him wanging on about demons and spirits and threats to push my limitations and comfort zones, sounding a bit like a drama student employed at Alton Towers to liven up a roller-coaster queue. To these type of restaurants I tend to take my friend Matt Park; a childhood at boarding school means that his knee-jerk reaction to any food put in front of him is to eat it, unquestioningly.

Course one, entitled ‘Dead Garden’, was a small wooden box filled with soil and two twigs. But — surprise! — it’s all edible. It’s actually green onion, lime, avocado, enoki and morel. ‘It tastes like salty snot,’ I said. ‘Nonsense, it’s fine,’ Matt said, shovelling glumly. ‘OK, eat mine then,’ I said. ‘Bugger that, I couldn’t eat two,’ he said, ‘it’s making me gag.’

Course two: ‘Bed and Breakfast’: a smoked quail’s egg, warm, runny centred, covered in caviar. It tasted exactly like this. I should have won a gold star for eating this one. Next up, a dish entitled ‘Cloud’: a spoon of raw fish covered in an ominous black foam. Then foie gras covered in ‘Abby’s Sauce’ — Abby being Alvin's wife. Many wives might have pointed out that a sauce that sounds like a hospital discharge report might dismay customers, but not Abby.

At the course called ‘Tomato’ — featuring a marshmallow made of tomato — I began hatching a plot to go home via Balthazar for some proper dinner. I sent the sweetbreads course back untouched as it had an aroma not dissimilar to urine. The main course — I type this waving my ankles in the air with mirth — was Wagyu beef (one mouthful) on a black truffle skidmark.

Bo London’s signature pudding — £16 for two — is ‘Sex on the Beach’, a pile of what appears to be sand topped with an edible condom containing fake sperm. Then a bill appeared for £510, including service. For the first time in 20 years of dining in London, I felt truly sad for wasting that type of money. I wish I’d given it to a school. I couldn’t shake that awful feeling right through the following day either. And I didn’t even choose to go there. And it wasn’t even my money. So if Alvin was looking for an X-treme reaction, well, I suppose in an odd way, he won.

Bo London, 4 Mill Street, W1S 2AZ, bolondonrestaurant.com

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