Unrest in the kitchen

Until quite recently, launching a new restaurant in London was a fairly simple matter. All you had to do was serve pan-Asian cuisine. It didn't matter how unfashionable the location, if you added edamame to the menu your restaurant was guaranteed to succeed.

Indeed, at one stage pan-Asian food was so popular it looked as though black cod with miso was going to replace chicken tikka masala as the nation's favourite dish.

Judging from the reception given to Nozomi, a new restaurant in Beauchamp Place, this culinary trend is past its sell-by date. The reviews have been so hostile that the hot-headed owner, Marios Georgallides, has decided to fire more or less everyone involved and start again from scratch.

Consequently, on the night I went there last week, almost the entire kitchen staff and front-of-house team were new - and this in spite of the fact that Nozomi only opened on 2 July.

Part of the reason it has provoked the ire of my colleagues, I suspect, is because Georgallides has surrounded himself with floppy-haired aristos. Among those involved in Nozomi - whether they're investors or not is far from clear - are the Italian prince, Max della Torre e Tasso, and Jacobi Anstruther-Gough-Calthorpe.

There are no chips on the menu at Nozomi, but unless you were born with a silver chopstick in your mouth you're quite likely to have a few chips on your shoulder by the time you leave.

Georgallides used to be the owner of Attica, a once-trendy nightclub, and a good two-thirds of the customers in Nozomi looked as though they weren't planning to go to bed much before 4am (and preferably not alone).

It's the sort of place Prince William and Kate Middleton might drop into on their way to Boujis or Mo*vida - though probably for the vodka shots, rather than the food. Nozomi is a restaurant for people who prefer to ingest their carbohydrates in liquid form.

The décor is surprisingly tasteful, given how flashy the clientele is. It has one of those minimalist, cream-and-wood interiors that are sometimes described as Japanese Art Deco.

As you enter, you find yourself in a bar, with the restaurant located on a higher level reached by a small flight of stairs. Above that is a sushi bar and - as you'd expect from a restaurant started by a former nightclub owner - a VIP lounge. I searched in vain for some cosmetically enhanced ex-celebrities but, alas, Mickey Rourke was nowhere to be seen.