Leon's not fit for a night out

McEvedy introduces the menu in her muddly, jolly hockey sticks way. In her current Notes on Summer, for example, she burbles: "Fruit — berries, peaches, plums, nectarines, figs, melon. Need I say more? Jump around for the fruit on the menu for the next few months. Anyone who doesn’t take full advantage is quite simply a plonker." She also grandly advises: "Consider having a water feature in your garden to keep the rosé cold." Surely one simply uses the lake?

Leon is thriving, nevertheless. The first branch opened in Carnaby Street (35 Great Marlborough Street, in fact) in 2004. There are now eight in the City and West End and plans to open at least two more before the end of the year. All are supplied by a main kitchen located in Hayes.

On a weekday lunch recently, the original Carnaby Street branch was buzzing. You are served at a counter, take the order in a cardboard box to a pretty basic table and tackle it with plastic cutlery. Despite these fairly strong hints that it’s a refuelling stop and not a destination, there were lots of groups — of women in particular — chatting and not moving on immediately after finishing.

The menu is short — a few starters such as hummus, some wraps, a couple of soups, some "superfood salads" and just five hot dishes: grilled Freedom Food chicken, Moroccan chicken tagine, Moroccan meatballs, roasted sweet potato falafel and Thai green vegetable curry.

The tagine (£4.95) was decent chicken, quite well prepared but a very small portion, bulked up with a lot of exploded and stodgy brown rice and raw, chopped vegetables. The curry (also £4.95) was sloppy and coarsely spiced — a lot of Leon’s food relies on quite heavy hits of chilli to wake it up.

Leon restaurants also open in the evenings, with waiter service, plates and cutlery, and even alcohol served in some branches. The menu, however, remains the same with the addition of some hot mezze — grilled halloumi, chargrilled chorizo, sesame chicken wings.

We tried the Ludgate Circus branch last Friday night and it was, quite simply, rubbish. At first glance, this big place — with a warehousey feel, kitted out with nondescript tables and chairs like a relaxed gastropub —looked promising. True, it was crushingly noisy, with thudding music that couldn’t quite be identified but might well have been Another One Bites the Dust all night long, and office parties actually screaming, rather than merely shouting, at one another.

But it wasn’t until we tried to get some food that we realised our mistake. It proved almost impossible. Lots of this brief menu wasn’t available. No chicken tagine. No chicken wings. No patatas bravas. Quite a feat, to run out of spuds so early in the evening. It was more than an hour before we got anything to eat: some unexciting halloumi and hummus.

It was another hour before any main courses — the perfectly decent meatballs, albeit accompanied by cold rice, the unappealing veg curry — were finally brought. None of this food would have been worth even a 10-minute wait. What’s acceptable as a pitstop is pointless as a night out.

We weren’t alone in feeling hacked off. Groups at other tables trying to order food were equally unhappy. This Leon, understaffed and badly managed, was functioning only as a raucous All-Bar-One-type pub.

Cocktails are £6 and there’s a short but handy wine list, opening at £12 a bottle — I ordered the top wine, a dependable Haut-Medoc, Château Caronne Ste-Gemme 2000 at £25, to try to salvage the evening but was presented instead with a bottle of the inferior 2001.

One dish was dropped from the bill, in recognition that all was not well, but another, the chorizo, which we had ordered but never received, was charged instead.

On Monday night, the friendly guys at the deserted Leon in the Strand said they had been told to go back to serving in boxes, not plates. The chorizo (£4.40) came as three slices of sausage sitting on some green olives in a Styrofoam beaker; the patatas bravas (£3.20) were tired and flabby potatoes in an overhot tomato sauce, also bunged into a plastic cup.

Thanks, but no thanks. There’s a difference between eating out on budget and being a refugee.

Leon
Strand, London, WC2R 0DE