Grace Dent reviews The Cinnamon Club: there are many things to love, but the food isn't one of them

Grace Dent isn’t entirely convinced by The Cinnamon Club’s revamp
Hogwarts-esque: the tables are spaced far enough apart so Grace Dent didn’t have to endure the people next to her discussing their IVF cycle
Grace Dent24 September 2015

There are many, many things to love about The Cinnamon Club, the Westminster institution that has served high-end Indian cuisine to parliamentary big beasts and their back-biting retinue since 2001.

I can tell you this, because in the first seven minutes of being there — admiring its subtle £1m face-lift — I spotted all of them.

My first ten minutes through the door in any dining spot are crucial because, as you may have noticed, I really, really, really love restaurants. When all my idiosyncratic requirements and nerdy needs are being honoured — warm staff, sexy menu, good table — I experience a visceral foodie rush more glorious than anything one could buy off a man called ‘Party Trev’ who sends cryptic texts on Fridays offering to meet you in a Berwick Street back alley.

But I don’t need Trev, what makes me giddy is arriving in restaurants like The Cinnamon Club, which is located in a Hogwarts-esque converted Grade II-listed library, with towering ceilings and tables spaced far enough apart so I don’t have to endure the people next to me discussing their IVF cycle. Any waiter, incidentally, who in a deserted, pin-drop silent restaurant seats me a metre away from the only other diners, meaning none of us can talk freely, well, I hope you like hell, because that is where you’re going.

This certainly isn’t a problem at The Cinnamon Club which, on a Monday night at 8pm, had the audio levels of a genteel bear pit with each table telling a different tale. Westminster suits savoured snarky tête-à-têtes beside huddles of groomed Hollywood agents in search of an ‘olde English curry’. Holland Park power mummies drank champagne and poked at tiny bowls of sorbet, certainly not eating — as I chose for pudding — the green cardamom brûlée with rose petal biscotti.

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There was a Scandi rock band plus road crew and Scandi-rock WAGs, and a table of elderly moneyed males in turbans of deepest scarlet. My very favourite diner, a retired brigadier type, proceeded to get thoroughly trashed on claret and digestifs before leading the staff a merry dance looking for his reading spectacles, which were on his head. Not that this ruffled the staff remotely as service at The Cinnamon Club — or at least on the night we visited — is flawless.

By now, you’re possibly thinking, yes, Grace, but what about the food? This place specialises in imaginative, contemporary, luxurious Indian cuisine with a particular emphasis on game and fish. It’s almost like I’m skirting around the subject. Well spotted: I’m floundering because the food was not face-slappingly fabulous. A starter of a chaat of crisp spinach, potato skins and dried beetroot closely resembled strewn Pret Vegetable Crisps — and tasted no more interesting. Deep red vegetable cakes with raisin and kasundi mustard were one-note fierce.

A smoked Herdwick lamb escalope and galouti kebab mille feuille was a mound of sparrow-nibble-size lumps of meat that could have been delicious if style hadn’t hijacked substance. A main course of roast cauliflower in a truffled achari sauce arrived in a watery puddle, vivid yellow but untroubled by truffle, the naan forming a lid over the dish, a bit like a chain pub’s version of a pie.

A plate of Romney Marsh lamb arrived on a slightly congealed corn sauce with pickled root vegetables and cashew sauce. A bowl of home-style split yellow peas with cumin lacked any discernable oomph. The Cinnamon Club is much more fun to flounce into than Trishna in Marylebone. It’s easier to book than Gymkhana on Albemarle Street. It’s far less buttoned-up and bumptious than Chutney Mary on St James Street. But dinner in all these places leaves me enraptured. There are simply better places in London currying my favour.

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