Richardson Reviews: John Doe, Notting Hill
‘John DOA’
John Doe on Goldborne road in Notting Hill sells quite a lot of venison, hence its name. A doe is a deer (a female deer..), get it? Being about deer, John Doe reminded me a bit of the Disney animated film Bambi. Specifically, the scene where Bambi's mother gets shot because that also made me feel a bit sad.
Friday evening and I'm running late. Benevolently, I call them up to advise them. I stress I'm only 10-15 minutes delayed for a table booked for 9:30pm but the guy at the end of the phone says I have to be there for 10 or he'll have to "give the table away".
Fuck me, that was optimistic. Fair enough, it's a late booking but the restaurant isn't particularly busy. Less than a third full and that's being generous. The main guy (the manager maybe? The owner?) sits us down at quite a small table for two, gives us the menus, and then sends some other guy over to take the drinks order.
I order a bottle of wine. Not really sure which one, it didn't matter as I'd been drinking for two hours beforehand so I wasn't looking for a fine vintage or anything. The waiter returns with a bottle of rose in an ice bucket. Why has he brought the ice bucket? There's no space for it. Never mind.
He places the oversized ice bucket on the undersized table, takes out the wine and then pours a couple of glasses. Then he puts the bottle back in the ice. And leaves it there. I'm not making this up, it actually happened.
I look at him, trying to express my amazement and disbelief, like he's forgotten it. Trying to make a point, I take the ice bucket from the (I stress quite small) table and place it on the floor by my feet but he just grins stupidly and gives me a thumbs up. A fucking thumbs up. Is he stoned? He looks high.
Briefly, I think about the poor decisions in my life that have lead me up to this moment, that I am eating in a restaurant where it is normal, de rigeur, for people to put wine on the fucking floor. Maybe I didn't try hard enough at school. Maybe I'm cursed.
I don't believe in Karma but I still find myself asking myself if I'd done something bad, something ghastly, something truly awful even, earlier in the week to deserve this kind of treatment. Like maybe burning down an orphanage or registering as a buyer with Foxtons or something, but I can't think of anything bad I've done and then I remember I don't deserve this because I'm a good person.
I close my eyes and, briefly, pretend I'm somewhere else. For a few glorious moments, I'm in the middle of my favourite daydream. The one where Ian Duncan-Smith has an extremely rare and potentially fatal illness that, amazingly, can only be cured with a sample of my blood. He is on his knees in front of me, apologising for all his wrongs, begging for my help and mercy. I look down on him, thinking about his decision to hire ATOS for the DWP. "NO" I'm saying "no, no, NO!"
I realise that the manager guy is looking at me. Pen and notepad in hand, ready to take my order with a quizzical look on his face. Maybe I just said that out loud?
So, with a deep breath I graciously let the ice bucket incident go and order the butter poached lobster with melon for a starter. I order this because having Lobster in a restaurant is the same as being a cool and interesting person.
It was an interesting choice as it happens. Now, I'm not saying that the dish was excessively salty or anything but you'd swallow less sodium sucking off 20 unwashed fishermen who've just returned for shore leave after 6 months in the North Sea. Fucking hell. (Dad, if you're reading this, that's a metaphorical analogy for narrative purposes, it didn't actually happen. I mean, I did order the Lobster but I didn't actually...never mind).
On brief tasting, the other starter ordered, grilled octopus and chickpeas, is also briny enough to make a convincing case for investing in a table salt manufacturer. Now, if you think combining octopus and chickpeas is an interesting combination, then you're right. Provided, of course, you think "interesting" means 'what were they thinking'.
Plain chickpeas are really one of the most miserable and pointless things in the world, on the same level as the editorial team at the Daily Mail. The only thing you can really do with chickpeas is to make hummus, which basically means drowning them in water overnight and then violently mashing them up till they are no longer recognisable from their previous form. This would also work quite well for the editorial team at the Daily Mail as it happens, though the resulting product would, naturally, be far more bitter.
For the main, and I'm sorry I don't know what came over me, I ordered the 'Vension and Goat Kofte with cauliflower cous cous'. Now, regular cous cous is pretty horrible as it is, so constructing it from the vegetable you always pushed to the side of your plate when you were a child seems a bit pointless to me. It tasted dry and unhappy.
The koftes themselves were, predictably, not spectacular and to be honest you'd get better at your local Turkish grill (big up to Fez Mangal on Ladbroke Grove). The other main ordered was the 'Grilled salt marsh lamb leg and breast' (or 'lamb', to you or I), which was a far better choice than mine but still not going to keep Gordon Ramsey awake at night.
"How was it" the manager guy asks as the plates are cleared, rushing over with a dessert menu.
"Great, thanks" I say, like he's just given me a haircut I didn't like, and then I ask for the bill. I don't have the appetite or patience for another course.
I get the cheque and very quickly I'm out into the warm summer evening air. Waiting for an Uber, I take slight comfort when I look in the windows of West Thirty Six, a place that should be heaving like a battery farm on a Friday night, and see it's actually pretty empty too.
Now, I don't think any business deliberately tries to give their customers have a bad experience (with the exception of Estate Agents of course), but there are always ways to improve. In this case, better service, more adventurous food and not using the same amount of salt you'd use to grit the North Circular.
Maybe it's because it's new, wobbly on its feet - like Bambi trying to skate on ice - and just needs time and patience. Unfortunately, patience isn't one of my strong points, but facts are and here's a fact for you now: The term 'John Doe' is often used to identify corpses with no known identity. This is quite fitting, because unfortunately, this John Doe was dead on arrival.
