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7 hours ago
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Gilgamesh, 4a Upper St Martin’s Lane, London WC2H 9NY. Small plates £7-£19, large plates £9-£42, desserts £9, wines from £38
A Monday lunchtime, and my phone pings. There’s a text. “Gilgamesh London. It’s our Birthday! ONE milestone gift to you,” it says, with a dizzyingly random use of capital letters. “50% OFF A la Carte Menu. Online bookings.” Which is all very nice. Except I’m already booked to go to Gilgamesh. The next day I’m served up a trio of their ads across this paper’s homepage online, offering “3 courses for £20”. It could be described as pathologically needy were that not an insult to needy people.
Gilgamesh is the rebirth of a bonkers restaurant which opened in 2006 inside The Stables at London’s Camden Market at a cost well north of £12m. It could seat 570 people and had a hilariously garish interior of sculptures and gold-effect reliefs telling the story of the Babylonian King Gilgamesh. As both god and man, he smote people, built mighty walls and generally made the weather across what is now the Middle East. Therefore, the food was pan-Asian. Well, of course it was: creaky stabs at sushi, dim sum, Thai curries and the rest. It was eventually taken over by Richard Caring of the Ivy group, before closing in 2018.
A year ago it reopened on a site at the top of St Martin’s Lane which used to be Marcus Wareing’s Tredwells. So why my interest? I’m a completist, my time on this column is coming to an end and I simply needed to know: would Gilgamesh Mk II make any more sense than the original? As ever, it depends on your terms of reference. Despite the desperate come-hither ads and texts, they appear to be doing fine. On a midweek night, the place is rammed. They have a private party upstairs, so there’s no room in the cloakroom for my bag “because we have, like, 50 backpacks there already.” You can hear that crowd honking and hooting at each other at maximum volume over the mezzanine balcony into the vault at the front of the restaurant, where high mounted outdoor heaters have been fitted to fend off a chill. We are seated beneath their glow, before being moved so that we don’t slowly grill.
We now have a lovely view of the same ludicrous gold-effect interior which, we are told, is the original from Camden. Given the cracks, ragged joins and bubbled marquetry on the tables that’s believable. There’s plastic foliage including a bay tree, which looks as knackered as I’m already feeling, and a thumping bass line that makes the very air tremble. But look, we’re here for what the website calls “a culinary journey inspired by the ancient epic of Gilgamesh, where East meets West”. Apparently “every sip and bite takes you further into the epic tale woven within our restaurant – a sensory experience that transcends time and cultural boundaries.” Which is nice. That immense journey starts with the sort of prawn crackers delivered in a white plastic bag with a cheap Chinese takeaway. They are accompanied by a salsa made with the flesh of pale pink tomatoes which taste of almost nothing.
The best dish of the night is the £16 popcorn shrimp served in a stainless-steel pot the shape of a large martini glass. They are hot and crisp, though when we ask where the advertised spicy chipotle mayo is, we’re told airily that it’s been mixed in. From the sushi list we are mistakenly brought a Gilgamesh dragon roll. It’s coated in a thin, slimy layer of wagyu beef, which has the texture of something you might use to salve a burn. When they deliver the actual dragon roll we asked for, made with barbecued eel and avocado, it’s solid enough. Meanwhile, a crispy duck and watermelon salad, with a handful of cashews expertly removed from their bag and chucked on to the plate, is a disaster. The duck and melon are both excruciatingly sugary. The combination can work, but only if there’s a sharply dressed leaf salad as counterbalance. Otherwise, it’s just a weird trip to the sweetie shop.
There is then a long wait for the main courses, but they were always bound to turn up, weren’t they? The least offensive for simply being dull is the grilled, cotton-wool thump of the lemongrass chicken, which tastes of very little including either lemongrass or chicken. Then there’s the beef rendang, which should be cooked long and slow until the reduced gravy has a profound warmth, depth and toastiness to it. This one is a sloppy blight upon the dish’s very name. It’s astringent and harsh, as if it were pressure-cooked for 30 minutes and left at that. The roti are greasy and flaccid as, by now, am I.
We’ve also ordered cauliflower and asparagus fried rice. It smells like it’s been made with the leftover cauliflower that comes alongside a cheap pub Sunday roast; the stuff overcooked yesterday, so that it can be eaten today without recourse to teeth. Of course, asparagus is grossly out of season but if it’s in the dish description, it should be there. It isn’t. It’s just 50% massacred cauliflower. I point this out to our brilliant waiter, who is dealing with the noise and the chaos and a kitchen which doesn’t always send the right order, with grace and dignity. He offers to replace it and though we decline, brings it anyway, but by this point we’re done.
We’ve tried to take the edge off with a £38 bottle of Spanish Sauvignon Blanc headache wine, the cheapest on the list. It hasn’t done the job. Perhaps we should have ordered the Don Julio 1942 tequila at £950 (available online for £146). This evening my cultural boundaries have not so much been transcended as wildly violated. I have indeed had a sensory experience, just not quite the one they intended. Of course, I’ve made a category error here, just as I did 18 years ago. I came to a restaurant thinking the food mattered. But apparently it doesn’t, not even when the bill comes to £175 (I’m told the discount in the text applies only between certain hours). A lot of restaurants are stage sets, Gilgamesh it seems more than most. It’s a space in which to play at having a certain kind of watermelon martini-fuelled night, which is not my thing. We retreat to Anita, the ice-cream parlour next door, for tubs of mixed berry pavlova and chocolate sorbet, which are my thing. It doesn’t transcend any cultural boundaries. It isn’t epic. But it really does make things a little better.
News bites
Gordon Ramsay’s restaurant group is taking over the site of what was Le Gavroche, which was closed in early 2024 after 56 years by Michel Roux, son of the late co-founder Albert Roux. According to industry magazine restaurantonline.co.uk, Ramsay’s company has successfully applied to take over the premises licence, with the supervisor named as Silvano Giraldin, the legendary maître d’ who ran front-of-house at Le Gavroche for 30 years. The new restaurant will be a platform for Matt Abé, who has been chef-patron at Restaurant Gordon Ramsay on Royal Hospital Road in London’s Chelsea since 2020. Ramsay was a junior member of the brigade at Le Gavroche under Albert Roux in the late 80s.
Ayesha Kalaji, chef-patron of the highly regarded Queen of Cups in Glastonbury, is bringing a menu of her key dishes to the Intercontinental London Park Lane for Iftar, the meal with which Muslims break their fast during Ramadan. The half Welsh-half Jordanian Kalaji, who trained at Leith’s School of Food and Wine, has put together an a la carte menu that includes braised pressed hogget with Persian lime and lavender, Queen of Cups laverbread falafel, and a rice pudding flavoured with rose water and saffron. It will be available for a month from 29 February. Book here.
Bath BID, the business improvement group for the city, has announced the first ever Bath Restaurant Week, which will run from 3 to 11 May. Hospitality businesses in the city will be encouraged to run special menus and dishes spotlighting their offering, which will be promoted by Bath BID. To launch the event, and to raise funds for the charity Hospitality Action, they are staging a Waiters Race on Monday 7 April. Follow them on Instagram here for more information.
Email Jay at [email protected] or follow him on Instagram @jayrayner1
