Brinkley's raises the volume

This article was published in January 2002

Citizens of Fulham: stop the bellowing! Nobody is convinced you're having a better meal/time/life than the rest of us simply by dint of your decibel levels.

Nothing - and I mean nothing - is so funny that you need to broadcast your amusement to eardrum-puncturing levels: all you're doing is making yourselves look even more foolish than your twill pants and turned-up collars do already.

What might have been a perfectly pleasant meal in Brinkley's was polluted by the inability of other customers - local to a man - to keep their braying voices down. As the surrounding faces got redder and sweatier, we increasingly lost the will to live.

This is a fantastically popular spot, something to do, perhaps, with the unthreatening, just-like-mummy-makesback-in-the-home-counties menu, anodyne decor and - not least - the management's commitment to serving wine at off-the-shelf prices. It's all pleasant enough stuff, not clever or authentic or challenging: deep fried brie (cooked in too-hot oil so the middle hadn't properly melted) with cranberry sauce; Caesar salad with boquerones, the incorrect anchovies; 'Thai' green curry with lemon and poppy seed rice - an anaesthetised, emasculated version; overcooked fillet steak with good bearnaise and frozen chips... Well, you get the picture.

Service remains pleasant and commendably unflustered despite the rabble and prices are wallet-friendly. If this is your kind of thing, you'll no doubt think it's a hoot; for me, it brought on a fit of the vapours cured only by a darkened room and an ice-pack.

Brinkley's
Hollywood Road, London, SW10 9HX