London: Ottolenghi's Strong Flavours

The tempting baked goods dispayed at Ottolenghi's restaurant in Spitalfields

Yotam Ottolenghi is a well known Israeli-English chef, restaurateur and cookbook author. He also hosts podcasts where he cooks for a friend at home and they talk about... "simple pleasures". I listened to him on the flight back to Hong Kong, which helped me fall asleep.

He has six restaurants and delis in London and is the author of seven cookbooks. The recipes that I have tried in his book Plenty are not too difficult and delicious.

Cumin roasted cauliflower with tumeric yogurt and cherries

We went to try his restaurant in Spitalfields which has a bakery attached to it, featuring a cornucopia of sweet treats, like massive raspberry and chocolate meringues, cookies, peanut butter s'mores, chocolate tarts, tangerine and pistachio cakes, carrot and walnut cake, and so on.

I wish we had come here during the day to sample these baked goods, as the dishes in the restaurant for dinner left more to be desired. It's packed and noisy for a Friday night and we got an online reservation at 8.30pm, though we were able to sit down earlier.

Our table is by the window so we can see people walking by from tourists to locals. The room is not well lit and each table has a live candle that melts away and a new one is added on top of the pile of wax accumulated at the bottom.

The prices on the menu range from £9.80 to £19.50 (US$12-US$24) and our server tells us for two people we should be choosing five to seven dishes; we chose to be conservative. It's a good thing we did as we struggled to finish what was in front of us.

Roasted beetroot, grilled nectarines, and whipped feta

When the dishes arrived, almost all of them were surprisingly cold, including things like the onion squash, cumin-roasted cauliflower, and roasted beetroot with grilled nectarines that one would think would be at least warm.

Another shocker was how strong the flavours were, to the point of extreme tartness. I actually like eating sour foods like pickles, but this was too sharp to the point where we made squinty faces, and it revealed how the ingredients weren't properly mixed together or too much lemon or lime juice was used.

A dish we tried featured prawns that were covered in tiny bits of coconut and flavoured with lemongrass that overpowered the delicate sweetness of the prawns (or was it because they were frozen)?, while the roasted squash were marred by bits of licorice that left a horrible taste in my mouth.

Stir-fried king prawns, oyster mushrooms and coconut

After dinner we went to the bakery next door to take a look and were shocked to see several of the same dishes we tried available for take-out. So what is the point of eating at Ottolenghi then at those prices? It was disappointing to say the least.

One of our main dishes was good, chargrilled Chalkstream trout with masala and mango chutney. The trout was cooked perfectly and while we were warned there might be bones, we didn't encounter any. The mango chutney on the other hand, was another tart experience.

The combination of roasted beets with grilled nectarines was interesting, along with roasted cauliflower with cherries, but they weren't enough to keep us sated.

The one saving grace was the dessert, a new item on the menu: moist chocolate cake with Bailey's cream. It was indeed moist and not too sweet.

Moist chocolate cake with Bailey's cream

So while I will still like flipping through Ottolenghi's cookbooks for inspiration and the fact that he makes vegetables the main ingredient of a dish, dining at his restaurant was not quite what I had expected...

Ottolenghi Spitalfields
50 Artillery Lane
London
+44 20 7247 1999
ottolenghi.co.uk