“Our meal is so grim that I’m baffled it still exists at all,” says Marina O’Loughlin reviewing Beach Blanket Babylon in London’s Notting Hill in the Sunday Times.
I’d eaten at this bizarre restaurant in the past and vowed never again. It may have wowed the younger me with its daft decor: dank brick chamber after chamber, linked by chained mini drawbridges; fireplaces in the shape of lions’ mouths; faux-rococo furnishings. But even then I knew the food was bad. Today, the undeniably handsome Georgian townhouse feels less “sexy count’s exquisite torture dungeon” and more “1990s video game”; we’re plonked right beside that loud, large party in an otherwise deserted restaurant: do we now have to beat level two?