A night in Harlem

It is with deep shame that I confess to never having heard of Arthur Baker. When his name was first mooted in my presence the excitable storyteller was visibly shocked that I didn't share her excitement.

I took a stab in the dark and suggested that he might be the love child of those Sixties and Seventies telly comedians, Arthur Mullard and Hilda Baker. Oh, the ignominy of it. Arthur Baker (it says here on a Google page) is a big noise in the music industry. He is a legendary DJ, a masterful remix man, a world-famous record producer who has worked with some of the greatest names in the music business. He is the man who put the 'hip' into hip-hop, for gawd's sake.

Anyway, Baker has now got his own food and drink gig in Harlem's London equivalent - Bayswater. Being a bit scared of venturing into these uncharted waters myself, I sent a couple of local food and drink emissaries to report from the front line.

Their early reports were less than promising, indicating that the groundfloor restaurant offered lamentable food, and that the basement bar was about as quiet as Christmas in London. I'm pleased I held off, because by the time I got round to visiting in early January I was pitching up with a trustafarian set and beatnik brigade from nearby Notting Hill - making a significant detour from their natural habitat - and the place had an air of edgy street-trendiness about it.

I went with a couple of seasonally affected non-drinkers and non-smokers, and headed straight for the dingy basement bar early on a Friday evening. One of the nice waiting staff clearly recognised our distress at being bombarded by the far too loud music (it was only 7pm) and offered us a table in the ground-floor restaurant instead. I used the word 'restaurant' loosely, because it is really no more than cafe-cum-brasserie.

And the food wasn't 'lamentable', it was merely indifferent. Vegetarian quesadillas with butternut squash, mushroom and red peppers - a similar offering was available with chicken --were enthusiastically priced at £7 and £8.50 respectively. And a bowl of battered onion rings cost £3. Other dishes on the menu included a salt beef on rye sandwich (£8.50), barbecue ribs (£9), a T-bone steak at £14, and a burger, which was reasonably priced at £6.50.

The wine list is extremely limited and equally enthusiastically priced with starting prices of £19.50 for a young, distinctly average Chilean cabernet sauvignon. It didn't strike me as the type of place where I would happily stretch to £195 for a bottle of 1998 Krug.

I returned again to the basement bar on a Saturday night and found the DJ-driven music to be less mind-numbingly loud. The place was packed. All of the
travelling Notting Hillbillies were sucking beers from the bottle, and the staff were having trouble keeping their service paced to consumption.

I hesitate to over-analyse Harlem's liquid assets, as by the time you read this, the legendary cocktail guru, Dick Bradsell, will be in situ and throwing together his holy grail ingredients. Bradsell's useful added-extras might just be what Harlem needs to get its pulse beating. As for me, I have a feeling I won't be meeting Arthur Baker after all.

Harlem
Westbourne Grove, London, W2 5RT