Meat-free restaurants don’t usually span a very wide range. At one end it’s an earthenware bowl of earthy, nutty, lumpy splodge, served with a nutty crust and some earth. At the other end, it’s big white plates, dotted with vegetarian versions of classic British favourites (i.e. things we borrowed from other countries in the early 90s): something Asian with the rice in a pretty pile, or roasted things with peppery leaves and a balsamic reduction.
All of which can be very tasty, but all of which I’ll make at home some time or other. So I was hopping from foot to foot and squealing a little bit when we decided to go to Saf, a vegan restaurant that does the contemporary cuisine thing: little fiddly towers of things I don’t normally eat, plated with smears of contrived juice I’d never bother to make myself.
When we arrived, the place was all mood lighting and elegant furniture, and packed with Shoreditch’s finest. (For the benefit of non-Londoners, this means beautiful people, with surprising haircuts and serious spectacles). It looked very clean and a little bit special. Which, being nothing like our kitchen, is a good prelude to getting food I wouldn’t get at home.
First of all, we were presented with a fancy cocktail list. It’s extensive and exciting, and nearly makes you drunk reading it. (That, combined with the dim lighting means my photos are rubbish). Unfortunately, we had to wait nearly 30 minutes for them, after which a lot of the hand-rubbing anticipation had worn off. Kim’s Mojito Rosa (a mojito with sour cherry infused rum) was the best – still recognisably a mojito, but you could really taste the cherry. My Jasmine Pearl Martini, however, pretty much tasted like a Martini. Overall, these cocktails were very good, though not really as excitingly different as their names would suggest.
We loved our starters. The raw butterbean hummus was creamy and the wafers of bread were crunchy. The gazpacho (above) was very interesting: it involved tomato, red onion, and melon, if I remember correctly. It looked stunning, and tasted good. Most exciting of all was what I assume to be something of a signature dish: cheese and caviar on biscuits. The cheese was made of cashew nuts, the biscuits were raw and very, very crispy, and the caviar was introduced to us personally. Apparently someone had injected some kind of fruit juice into some kind of seaweed-based jelly, thousands and thousands of times, to create these little clusters of wobbly balls.
The mains were definitely less unusual and exciting. The best dish was the buckwheat risotto, which was creamy and had a lovely bite to it, was definitely something I might have made at home. The Buddha Bowl (tofu, sambal, kimchee etc; below) was also excellent, but again, a disappointingly ordinary concept.
The two raw dishes we ate were the most exciting-sounding things, yet not so pleasant to eat. A mushroom stack gave us a thrill of excitement followed by mild nausea, both feelings due to its profoundly mushroomy mushroomness. You could just about manage half a forkful. The lasagne, presented beautifully (in a stack, again) was a fairly unappetising mix of dull and similar earthy flavours, and was on the chewy side of chewy.
When it comes to desserts, I’m not so sure that novelty and interest are necessarily good things. I guess Saf agrees, because the dessert menu was largely ordinary but delicious-sounding, and desserts turned out to be largely ordinary and delicious. The ice cream was excellent and when the Ganache Tart was shared around, everyone make little moaning noises. But, because I’m obsessed with novelty food, I stupidly went for the Superfood platter. I can’t remember exactly what it involved any more, other than some goji berries made an appearance, but I can remember that it was a smorgasbord of tough, dry, dull, and sickly morsels. (And some nice ice cream).
We finished with a pretty hefty bill, but to be fair, this was because we’d all got carried away with the booze. The actual food, considering the work that’s gone into it, was pretty cheap.
Overall, the experience left me impressed, excited and cynical at the same time. A bit like the prospect of an Obama presidency.
On the one hand, exciting-sounding food often tasted disappointing, and the best tasting stuff was quite ordinary in concept.
On the other hand, it was wonderful to see absurdly elaborate food and drink, presented impeccably to a packed out venue of trendy-somethings, who were presumably either unaware or uninterested in the fact it was mostly-raw vegan. Interestingly, most of the marketing literature calls it ‘botanical’ food; I am very happy with this because I’m increasingly uncomfortable with the label ‘vegan’, and what’s more, I doubt it would be so full if it was called “The Virtuous Vegan”.
In the end, the caviar and cheese dish is what really streams out rays of slivery light in my memory. It made me think that taste and presentation are only two thirds of the ingredients of a really good meal. The other third is a good story. A hand-syringed drop of fruit juice encased in seaweed jelly makes me think of a bent-over, squinting, line cook, swearing under her breath about the smug scientific chef who came up with the bloody idea. Caviar just makes me think of dead pregnant fish.
