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Restaurants
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Rowan Moore's rating
Reader rating
Description: The "super-stylish" surroundings aren't to all tastes, but early reporters praise the "amazing bread and sandwiches" and "superb coffee" at this self-consciously hip new café, in Chelsea.
Food:
Service: 
Ambience:
Phone: 020 7352 9832
Website: http://www.napket.com
Good for: Good food, Ambience.
Payment options:
The other day I arranged to meet London’s most intelligent property developer at Le Flâneur, a deli/restaurant in Farringdon which, although a bit overwrought and uneasy in its own skin, could turn out a nice light lunch. I found him standing in the street, outside a stripped, locked and closed husk. To judge by an internet posting, Le Flâneur may most be mourned by people who prized its spacious and under-supervised toilets, which were seemingly perfect for what might be called inter-course intercourse.
I tell this tale partly to hold your attention with a bit of smut, in the hope that you will get as far as the less exciting things I must later report. Also to point out that times really have changed, and that there will be more places like the ex-Flâneur littering the streets, like bourgeois versions of closed northern steel mills in the Eighties. Which makes it brave — heartening, even — to open something like Napket in Piccadilly, which brands itself as “Snob Food”.
Its décor descends from the Philippe Starck/Ian Schrager Hudson Hotel in New York — a bit louche, a bit street — with gold-framed mirrors and repro Rembrandts on bare brick and mucky concrete, and multiple Murano chandeliers hanging edgily off galvanised steel cable trays. Designed by one Peter van Hooreweghe, it has dark wood panelling and blown-up glamorous photos. There are red-shaded wall lights on gold brackets, as in a provincial theatre, and the toilet paper is printed with gold fleur-de-lys.
It calls itself “a daring reinvention of the urban café” and is London’s fifth Napket, the others being in King’s Road, Mayfair, the City and off Regent Street. There is also one in Kuwait. The concept has been lunch-y — salads, pasta, sandwiches, cakes, coffee, delivered with a fashionable flourish. “If fashion could be captured in edible form, it would look like Napket,” went one review.
The Piccadilly branch breaks new ground by offering dinner as well as lunch and breakfast, and if its proclamation of luxury didn’t quite seem to hit the zeitgeist, one might appreciate its defiant decadence. With big windows onto the street, I hoped it might be a good place to make merry while watching the world end.
This hope was dented by the fact that it doesn’t yet have a licence to sell alcohol, a drawback for non-Methodists and non-Muslims, which a decent range of fruit juice cocktails only partly allays. This hitch is said to be temporary, but then the food doesn’t deliver on the promise to “take things that are everyday and simple and make them into the most luxurious things in the world”. Cream of chicken soup, for example, is too flour-y. The menu’s tendency is to overdo the creamy, cheesy stuff and add a few acrid, almost Domestos, undertones.
Pasta is more as the Americans understand it than Italians do — shreds of stuff like chicken, mushroom and bacon compiled rather than cooked but with the rigatoni a touch overdone. It was oddly difficult to order both a starter and a main course, as the elaborate salads compete with the pasta dishes rather than complement them.
There was also a lack of soul, as if the elements too closely resembled the powerpoint presentation made to investors.
As you enter you see the compact kitchen, which seems nice, but on the way out you realise that its size might contribute to the limited range of dishes and techniques you have just been offered.
Even so, the management could easily provide things such as gazpacho or pâté to vary the pace and weight. For dessert you can get “mini” versions of the four dishes on offer, to share, which serves to reveal the sameness between pannacotta, tiramisu, banoffee and rice pudding. All are variants on the theme of sweet gunk.
So I don’t line up with the fashionistas who reportedly love the other Napkets, and the unexciting thing I have to report is that the food is unexciting. Allowance might be made for the pangs of moving from lunch to dinner, and the staff were perfectly nice and efficient but, ultimately, it failed the whisky test. Did it, that is, leave me craving a stiff drink to take away the aftertaste? Yes, it did, and not just because we had been compulsorily teetotal all evening.
Details are correct at the time of publication - please check with venue before booking.
