Opium proves most unaddictive

This review was first published in March 2001

Opium is essentially a basement nightclub with an oriental theme. I wonder whether it is a wise idea to name a restaurant and nightclub after a dangerously addictive drug.

I'd have thought the authorities might have been a little tight-assed about such things. If I wanted to attract unwelcome attention to myself, my business and my customers, a great way of doing it would be to open a place called the All-Nite Barbiturate Bar 'n' Grill, or the Cocaine Caf?.

I dare say opium has charming, olde-worlde, Sherlock Holmes-style connotations. It was a street drug, but that was about a century ago when users would gather in opium dens in Limehouse and get wasted. However, while I understand that the consumption of opium and its derivative, heroin, is alarmingly prevalent, it has to be pointed out that it is a hazardous hobby. Still, if you can name a fragrance after this drug, why not a restaurant? I suppose that this is just another interpretation of heroin chic.

Happily, Opium delivers an ambience altogether more entertaining than watching addicts in pursuit of oblivion. Given the extremely unprepossessing canvas of a Soho basement perilously close to Oxford Street, a miracle has been wrought on Dean Street. The place is supposed to be a little bit of Vietnam in the West End.

In a spirit of cut-price opulence, an engaging sense of a non-specific oriental nightclub has been recreated. It is cutely decadent, in fact, rather sweet. So sweet that I have been twice and am becoming oddly fond of the place.

I don't know enough about colonial Vietnam to say whether the design is authentic, but given that it includes such features as windows that allow ladies to peek into the gents' loos, and vice versa, I would surmise that it is a reasonably liberal interpretation of the South-East Asian aesthetic.

Nevertheless, the look is a pleasing departure from the recent vogue for minimalist drinking dens. This has bits of carving here and there, mosaic walls, pretty puppets, plush ottomans, walls covered in black-and-white photos, even the odd - decidedly odd - water feature. It might all be a little Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen, but that only adds to the charm.

The only worry was that, on my first visit to the place, it seemed that in addition to being involved in some of the more outrageous aspects of the basement's design, Llewelyn-Bowen had also been let loose in the kitchen.

A dish of baked lobster with pepper and coriander butter sauce and stir-fried vegetables and noodles was so entirely sui generis as to transcend normal adjectival abuse. It is difficult to wreck lobster, but the evil genius at work in the kitchen of Opium that night must have been well satisfied as they relaxed and surveyed this butter-sodden disaster.

I am afraid to say that it made my stomach feel like a lava lamp. As I drove home along the Westway, I could feel this poor lobster sloshing about inside. At least my driving improved: I did not want to take corners too quickly lest the lobster try to escape my digestive tract.

It was a dish of such epic nastiness that it eclipsed other aspects of the evening, including the dreadful songstress-and-guitar combo that gave memorably chilling interpretations of camp, 'eezee-listening' classics along the lines of 'Fly Me To The Moon'. On any other occasion, this 'act' would have stayed at the forefront of my mind, and I would have described how I clapped, hollered and yelled 'Encore', but the lobster loomed large.