Grace and Flavour: Shaka Zulu

And lo, the world arrived in London. There’s no better time to show off this city’s culinary prowess. Unless something’s gone very wrong in the meantime, as this issue of ES hits the stands, several chums and I should be blowing up an enormous Costco paddling pool and daubing ‘Brazilian Men’s Diving Team! Yummy empanadas this way! Mmmm GOOD!’ on a piece of cardboard with a neon Bingo Blotter. It’s important to extend the hand of friendship. Lord knows London’s visitors get hoodwinked into enough sub-standard tosh. Spare a thought for the poor souls in Madame Tussauds examining a pile of ear wax with a moustache attached that may or may not be Tom Selleck. Or the tourists down by the Punch & Judy in Covent Garden watching a berk wrapped in BacoFoil bodypopping.

I add to my list of heinous tourist experiences this week’s restaurant: Shaka Zulu in Camden, a nosebleedingly expensive South African ‘high-end’ theme restaurant, which is beyond doubt the worst dining experience I’ve had, even counting the time I was hit on a zebra crossing in Newham by a drunk driver and woke at 6am to find an auxiliary nurse slinging a bowl of supermarket-replica Sugar Puffs with UHT milk at me while picking her nose. Actually that’s unfair on Whipps Cross Hospital; at least they endeavoured to keep me alive, while Shaka Zulu pushed me into a suicidal malaise — not that I had privacy to kill myself in the bathroom, as an attendant kept banging on the door trying to sell me a Chupa Chup.

Do not eat here. Go to the Toby Carvery at Snaresbrook — at least there you can get unlimited veg and they do an ‘everlasting custard jug’ (this means refillable btw, it’s not something from Harry Potter). But if you do plan to eat at Shaka Zulu — perhaps you have visiting family whom you despise and paying £500 to get them out of your life is cheaper than becoming a Scientologist — arrive early to behold the décor.

Imagine a fictional, vast, bewildering Las Vegas South African hotel called ‘IT CAME FROM AFRICA!’ bedecked in mountains of the tat you buy at the ‘local’ section of Cape Town airport, with shonky escalators separating the floors. After ordering a ‘Prosecutor’s Passion’ and a ‘Rhubarbamboo’ in the holding area, we were called to our table, down an escalator. There’s no waitress service to take drinks down the escalators because the waitresses are all downstairs by the DJ booth (oh, did I forget to mention the disco?) wearing body-con dresses and visible thongs and ‘warming the audience up’ with dancing. There is no audience, just depressed-looking tourists gazing at menus of grilled zebra fillet, crocodile and loin of springbok while a DJ plays ‘Professional Widow’ by Tori Amos so loud that one has to shout.

The food is so many shades of awful I considered asking for this column to be extended to a six-page thesis, so I could fully cover the monstrous misery of opening foodstuffs such as herbed breads with biltong butter that arrived steaming as if from the microwave, or the soft-shell crab that tasted of old chip fat and North Sea effluent, or the Crocodile Cigar — a vile spring roll filled with what looked like processed ham in flavourless gloop.

The mains were less successful. The springbok loin was so tough it reminded me of the pairs of 1970s Clarks Polyveldts trainers my mother kitted me and my brother David out in, made from a sort of treated vulcanised leather amalgam, which we hated but soon found to be indestructible. The prawn curry came with Cape Malay yellow rice, which was a fetching neon colour, neatly stacked in a perfect bowl-shaped heap almost as if it had just been tipped from a microwave package.

In a normal restaurant a waiter would ask why entire dishes were going back almost uneaten, or why at one point I had my face on the table mooing with displeasure. At Shaka Zulu, this is clearly chalked up as a triumph. I bought a Chupa Chup before I left and had a squirt of Impulse ‘Frottage’. It was the best quid I spent all evening.

Shaka Zulu, Stables Market, Chalk Farm Road, NW1 (shaka-zulu.com)