Review at a glance: ★☆☆☆☆
Once upon a time, when menus at British restaurants all mimicked each other, wisdom had it that the way to tell a good place from a bad one was to have a nosy in the loos before ordering the ham, eggs and gruel. Clean and tidy? Mother, may I. But a pigsty? Watch out for the soup of the day, fag ash and Stella sweat.
This came to mind at Noisy Oyster, when at the end of the meal I walked through an abattoir-ish plastic curtain and into a bathroom stall to discover three lonely sheets of loo roll clinging forlornly onto their cardboard tube, and indeterminate liquid pooled on the floor. Par for the course in certain boozers, but not in a bistro where an abstemious meal for two costs £219. Strange, too, that random tiles have been smashed to expose the grout, leaving jagged edges on which to snag clothes. “It’s a design feature,” I explained to Josh Barrie, showing him the pictures. “I don’t think it can be,” he replied doubtfully.
Here would be the moment to say design is not a strength of Noisy Oyster, but that might be misleading — rather, design is another of its weaknesses. “SEAFOOD BISTRO OF THE FUTURE” is the billing on Instagram: this parlays into a bunker look that would better serve an am-dram Flash Gordon, or perhaps a particularly crap episode of Doctor Who. It’s genuinely surprising there isn’t any inflatable furniture. Grey is everywhere, apart from the pillars decorated with black corrugated hoses that run across the ceiling. It feels like dining inside an ancient computer, as if at any minute a giant floppy disk might crash through the wall.
The only flash of colour is the lime green of the menu, which will seem either very Brat or very 1990s rave-off-the-M4, depending on your age. There will not be time to ponder this, though: service — from the staff who talk, which curiously is not all of them — is overzealous in the extreme. “Drinks?” shouted our waitress. “Two minutes,” we smiled, and she was back so quickly she may as well have done an about turn and manically roared: “Ready yet?!”
Its look would better serve an am-dram Flash Gordon
This was time-limit dining, as though they’d double booked the table and the other party had turned up with baseball bats. We looked to the cocktail menu, which bears the legend: “Sip slowly. Be curious. Stay NOISY” (unforgivably Live, Laugh, Love). After a lot of miming — noisy is right, the vibe is turn-that-racket-down — a mini “oyster” martini turned up for my fiancée Twiggy, which tasted the way I imagine dead roses might. But better than the actual oysters, here milky and heavily spawning, meaning eating them comes with a risk of pregnancy (not really, but they are grim). Ours looked like odds-and-sods: the menu doesn’t say where they’re from. Cornwall and Ireland, bellowed the waitress, before tossing down the cutlery. The fork was half off the table edge, dangling like the coach at the close of The Italian Job.
Monkfish skewers followed, the overcooked flesh slathered unsubtly in a spiced colatura di alici — Italian fish sauce — and topped with lardo, curled to look eerily like the transparent exoskeleton of a prawn, and which added a distinct and unwelcome porkiness to things. Octopus con tomate, set down wordlessly, delivered better on the promise of its idea. A beautiful note of acidity in the tomatoes was the evening’s high point. A shame the octopus chunks were chewy, and cooked on a grill that can’t have been hot enough; never mind blackened, the tentacles barely had a tan.
Later came crisp, hot, well-salted fries. Whoever’s on potatoes needs a raise. So there are the highlights. What to say of hake in pangrattato? Dull is the word. Smoked eel and egg yolk raviolo — egg in a shawl half hidden under a hailstorm of chives — was plated so disastrously that I wondered if it had met the floor before the china.
Enough. It’s getting cruel now. We left affronted, and talked about it all weekend. Is this what restaurants are now? Or have I accidentally reviewed a piece of experimental theatre? I do not have the answers — unless the question is: “Should I go to Noisy Oyster?” Maybe you can guess that one.
2 Nicholls Clarke Yard, E1 6SH. Meal for two about £240; noisyoysterlondon.co.uk
