London,

The Little Bay

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Cuisine: Mediterranean

171 Farringdon Road, EC1R 3AL


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Description: "Exuberant" budget bistros (featuring "zany" decor and "OTT live opera"), whose "flavoursome" fare delivers "amazing value for money"; unsurprisingly, they're "always full".

Food:    Service:    Ambience:   

Phone: 020 7278 1234

Good for: Good food, Ambience.

 

 

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Little Bay is cheap at a price

 

Stagey setting: the over-the-top décor is a feature of all Little Bays

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How low can you go? Little Bay pushes the price for an approximately Frenchy, three-course bistro-style meal down to the bottom. Starters and puddings cost just £2.25 from noon until 7pm, rising thereafter to £3.25. Mains are £6.45 in the day, £8.45 at night. A bottle of French plonk, a table wine by J Moreau & Fils, costs £11.95. So you can easily be in and out of here, having had the works, for £40 for two.

And the word on Little Bay isn’t bad, including recommendations from the Evening Standard, with a listing in the recent London Restaurant Awards 2008 Guide — the general theme being that the food is far better than seems possible at these prices.

There are four Little Bays, in Battersea, Kilburn and Croydon as well as Clerkenwell. They belong to a Serbian restaurateur, Peter Ilic, who also owns a large hotel restaurant in Belgrade and has been running ultra-cheap restaurants in London for 25 years, including one called Just Around the Corner where customers were invited to leave whatever they thought the meal was worth.

All Ilic’s places have wildly over-the- top, operatic décor incorporating lots of Greek gods, often hard at it, feasting and raping. In Clerkenwell there’s a mishmash of gold and crimson, a ceiling of ruched velveteen in different shades of blue, suggestive of the sea, and an alcove that’s been bodged up into an imitation grotto.

In Battersea and Croydon there actually is opera sung to the piano in the second half of the week, and balconies and mezzanine floors are a big feature. You know you’ve gone out to eat here, regardless of what turns up on your plate.

That’s just as well. The dishes we tried weren’t great. Spiced avocado, tomato dressing and salad was some pieces of not especially fresh avocado clumped into a timbale and weirdly gingered up with what tasted like a raw curry powder mix. Warm mozzarella, caponata, crostini and rocket brought a couple of slices of average cheese, barely warm, with not very exciting caponata and toasted sliced bread, and a small handful of rocket. Fair enough at the price, but slightly lowering, nonetheless. Why bother? as Sir Arthur Streeb-Greebling unanswerably asked.

From the mains (chicken, lamb, duck, pork, salmon, etc) fillet of cod, crushed potato and fennel, putanesca sauce was a daft order on a Monday. The two pieces of cod, skin on, tasted a little tired, as though they had just seen the back of a long weekend. The buttery potatoes were nice enough, the head of fennel apparently just boiled rather than braised, while the olive-heavy sauce, trying to tart up tastelessness, didn’t much help.

Wild boar sausages with mash and beans, from the specials, was average pub fare — three dense, rubbery sausages on top of some mash that was reasuringly lumpy, indicating it had just been made, with a glutinous dark gravy, I suspect from a catering pack.

We could have moved on to apple cake with custard and vanilla ice cream, or profiteroles with cream and chocolate sauce. We didn’t. Instead, we tottered 50 yards down the road to The Eagle, one of the three great gastropubs run by Michael Belben (the others being Great Queen Street and the Anchor & Hope).

In these friendly surroundings a small glass of inky, velvety Borsao Tinto Garnacha 2007 felt suddenly restorative, a real bargain at £3. The most expensive dish chalked up here, grilled bream with purple sprouting broccoli and salmoriglio, cost £13.50 — but a little chicken and pepper risotto at £8.50 looked just as appealing.

So there’s a lesson. When money is tight, change your ideas, not merely your budget. There is absolutely no point in insisting on a simulacrum of a three-course bistro meal at a price that means it can never be much cop, however hard the restaurant tries. Instead, go for one fine plateful and a glass in the kind of place that wants you to eat that way. Simple.

Details are correct at the time of publication - please check with venue before booking.

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