Curious name, tasty cuisine

This review was first published in October 2001.

I lose count of how many restaurants there are on that small stretch of Kensington Park Road around Blenheim Crescent, but whatever the number was, it is now plus one, as e&o adds to what one might have thought was already a crowded market.

The restaurant is the creation of Will Ricker, who owns a couple of dining rooms/bars/turbopubs in East London - fashionable affairs trading on a reputation for good, mildly adventurous food and well-chosen, well-priced booze.

He is a nice man, from the Antipodes, a bit of a lady killer in a Duffer of St George-meets-faded-Levi's sort of way. He sprung to national prominence in the late Nineties when he was outed as a member of the puffin club.

Ricker had eaten puffin - wind-dried I believe - while travelling in Iceland and had been immensely impressed by its tangy, piscine flavour. Once he returned to Britain, he was keen to share his experience with like-minded gastronomes. In fact, Ricker became such an eloquent puffin proselytiser that he was paid a visit by the police who wanted to check that he was not putting puffin on the menu, which he was not, as for some reason this would have been a contravention of the law.

After Puffingate, Ricker went underground and now, with the opening of e&o, I know what he has been up to. As is fashionable these days, the restaurant opened before it was finished, thus on the afternoon that I stepped in for lunch, a man wearing a pair of baggy jeans, a pencil behind his ear, a belt-mounted tape measure and a philosophical expression, was examining an area of plasterboard and bare metal, as if it might yield up the very deepest mysteries of the human condition.

If he carried on in such a manner I very much doubted that he would get round to finishing what I felt would be the fireplace but was at the moment a hole in the wall. Nevertheless, the look of the place was pleasing enough, in a dark-wood-panelled and large-pale-drum-lampshades-hanging-from-the-ceiling sort of way, and once it is finished it will look just fine.

On the banquette behind me was Nicola Formby, aka AA Gill's Blonde, lunching with Patrick Cox. And in the corner was that husky-voiced siren Mariella Frostrup. Among the other customers was a man who had various crop-circle designs shaved into the back of his head and a woman who insisted on wearing sunglasses throughout her meal. All in all, just another normal lunchtime in W11.

Food here is pan-Asian, ranging from salmon sushi to sorbet; pumpkin and lychee curry to char sui pork, but having said that, the menu makes no pretence to further push back the boundaries of culinary experimentation. There is plenty enough to be going on with and wisely Ricker has decided not to make his customers' tastebuds a testbed for exotic theories about traditional Thai cooking. It is instead a nice place to come, sink a few drinks and eat some pleasant food - if only all places in London were so uncomplicated.

The emphasis is on informality; cutlery and chopsticks are to be found in a central tub on each table and there is no rigid ordering pattern; so we asked for a couple of dim sum dishes, some salmon sushi and tuna sashimi, followed by some crispy-skin chicken and prawn phad thai. The winner had to be the crispy fried fish, sparked up with a tangy dressing and a bargain at £5.50. A close runner-up was the small steamer basket of scallop dumplings, or knodel as I called them out of deference to my German guest, which were surprisingly light and delicate. Salmon sushi came interestingly arranged, cut to match the cylinders of rice. The tuna sashimi was adequate. The prawn phad thai was tasty if a little stodgy, but the prawns came with their tails attached for extra verisimilitude. Better was the crispy-skin chicken, which came with a spoonful of chillies to sprinkle over the top.

We arrived ravenous and left sated, having consumed a minor banquet for which we paid less than £60 for two with drinks, service, coffee and the presence of both the husky Frostrupand the fragrant Formby chucked in. The only disappointment was that the police did not raid the place to seeif there was any illicit puffin-eating taking place.