The Barbican centre - a City cultural mecca and architectural mess - has always been a bit crap for food. I can’t see why this should be the case, but like Tube overcrowding and the inevitability of death, it’s something one comes to accept.
However, the times they are a-changin' – as nobody who has ever played at the Barbican would say – and the tired old Waterside restaurant, with its overtones of French service station cum staff canteen, has been revamped into a ‘food hall’.
God, but it sounds great on the website:
"Barbican Foodhall will offer a brand new foodie experience.Offering an amazing selection of foods within a spectacular street food market the Barbican Foodhall overflows with stimulating and surprising ingredients, deli-tables, counter-top service, restaurant, a stunning ‘jar-delier’ light installation and book bank!"
'Brand new food experience'? Only if they mean that they've pissed me off in a slightly different way to any I've experienced before. Sure, they’ve had the designers in, with racks of lightbulbs in jars and those faux-athentic white tiles. But the rest? Where is EVERY SINGLE ITEM in their description?
At the entrance, a large table of pastries and breads looked very pretty and offered three loaves of bread, some cakes and olives for sale. However, scouring the joint for the promised riches, the only other evidence of groceries turned out to be a single bookcase of boutiquey chutneys and Spanish tinned tuna with, bizarrely, Heinz baked beans, Ribena and petrol can-sized olive oil - as if someone had learned the concept of ‘food hall’ via a virus-ridden copy of Google Translate.
How about the food to eat on site? "Be tempted by an intriguing choice of food stalls selling marjoram infused mackerel, fennel, glazed damsons and goats cheese pie and New Orleans shrimp étouffée, all of which visitors can buy to eat in or to take away." Nope - none of that.
In a layout largely unchanged from the old Waterside (which I was starting to remember with increasing affection), three hot mains of seafood rissotto (sic), pork or beef roast and something even less interesting were served from a hatch.
Though the plate looked pretty enough, the roast pork was leathery, the crackling criminally flaccid and rindy, the potatoes uncrispy, the gravy insufficient and the "roast vegetables" non-existent. The broccoli was near-raw. All had been assiduously sandbagged with salt.
Across the aisle, the salad station proved little better.
Shoved to the side for staff to bicker about how busy they were, I was denied the lettuce with lentils ("it’s a main"), leaving me with beetroot salad (basic cooked beets with an anonymous dressing), beans (tinned bean selection largely au naturel, with minimal interference from cooking professionals) and egg noodles (drastically undercooked, and slathered with a revolting teriyaki-type sauce of 90% sodium).
The ‘main’ of gammon was not, as I asked, picked from the less fatty slices, though the addition of piccalilly was welcome.
Coffee was served by a surly barrista, both in a mug and dribbling down the side, and a tiny carton of coconut water, as every soft drink, was painfully expensive.
After this depressing repast, we went looking for the ‘book exchange’. Do they mean, perhaps, the single shelf of books bought by the weight, some without covers, placed spine-to-spine at above head height, so their titles are invisible? Or do they mean the 20 brand new copies of the Queen Mother’s biography plonked on the windowsill? This place gets madder and madder - and not in an interesting way.
The Barbican food hall has promise – not least because of the location in the interval hang-out of multiple cinemas, theatres and a concert hall (as well as hundreds of flats). But after its total revamp, it's only 10% better than it was, with minus 9% for sheer bloody cheek. Had the design team and kitchen employed a single person with an ounce of common sense or a solitary tastebud, it would be an awful lot better. Acceptable, almost.
And for god’s sake, stop calling it a fucking food hall.
Attagirl. Up to your usual standard. I guess the people who wrote the PR blurb were just fantasising and never went near the place.
Posted by: El Encuadernador | 02/07/2011 at 08:34 AM