Review of Kopapa - March 2011

Where: Kopapa, Covent Garden
How much: £60 a head (including wine) for 3/4 tapas plates each and dessert
Come here if: your mother told you to stop playing with your food, and you never listened



Peter Gordon, one of the chefs responsible for bringing fusion cooking to mainstream London and the man behind Marylebone foodie Mecca the Providores, has finally opened a new restaurant in Covent Garden. Several notable meals at his old place mean I'm bound for a visit, and so round up an eclectic (read weird) bunch of friends for the visit. Two of them got married after meeting on a plane, one I met running shoeless round a wedding and another lives with me. As I say, weird.

The space is cleanly bistro crafted. There's no sign of zany imaginations here at least. Small tables squeeze into rows and solo diners seated at the long marble bar. It's open all day, for brunch, coffees and main meals - like the Wolesley's chain restaurant style brother, with slightly less style.

A measly four mains appear to follow an enormous number of starter sized tapas plates on the menu, it's clear where you should be ordering. It's truly lip-smacking stuff on paper and not a single item fails to tick my boxes. The joys of fusion cooking are to paraphrase, that you get to try every flavour combination that you walk past in the street. Go and have a look at the menu, seriously, it's hilarious. The delicious agony of shared plate negotiation would be real fun for two or three gastronomic diplomats but it swiftly gets unwieldy for six, not helped by the speed of the service. Apart from a rush of plates at the end it's two hours after we start before anyone is feeling remotely sated. Too often solo single plates arrive leaving the eater looking round guiltily while five forks hover. There's a yawning pause in the middle explained blithely as 'busy kitchen, they're getting to it'. I get that its tapas service, but know that it doesn't have to be like this. A trip to Dehesa, Fino or any of a number of others would tell them that.

So many dishes came listed with 2 or 3 ingredients more than you could identify, or need, or want. It's a style of flavour fusion that relies on throwing a lot of tastes together in your mouth and letting them fight for supremacy. When it's good it's very, very good and when it's bad it's, well, pretty pointless.

Highlights included fluffy, sweet, roast Cassava chips with a tangy chilli sauce and meaty fillets of pan fried John Dory on a garlicky bed of ratte potatoes. Char-grilled aubergine came stuffed with tahini tofu, slightly overpowering the black bean miso and ginger dressing alongside, but stickily tasty. A simple plate of grilled sardine was spot on. It came with a caper, olive and tomato salsa, a marriage of fresh fish cooked expertly and a sharp, made for it, accompaniment. The only total misfire was a dish of lambs sweetbreads. They were cooked well, but totally obliterated by an over reduced sticky sweet mess of Madeira jus that rendered the thing inedible.

Seared scallop on the other hand, didn't have enough caramel colour or texture to stop it rather blandly merging into the pinenut purée it came with. Alongside this a thin pressed Jamon toastie was a welcome textural addition, though I was slightly bemused by the tasteless hibiscus jus slopped on the plate like spilt Ribena. The other no score draw was the panko crusted, rough chopped Iberico sausage stuffed with Cheddar (really? why?!) and shiso (what? a Japanese minty herb, flavour not strong enough to come through) - the bastard son of a corndog and a Scotch egg. Served with Vietnamese coleslaw and a seemingly there for the ingredients list Tamarind Caramel. A double baked cheese souffle is just that, and tasty with it, though I've no idea why it's served with pomegranate seeds. Texturally interesting, but unnecessary and fairly irrelevant.

Like the fusion style it espouses, Kopapa should be much more than the sum of its parts. Sadly they hit the high notes just too rarely for me to rush back, and at the price, it's just not worth the risk. A shame, as there's quite obviously real talent here. I'd be tempted back for a fairly reasonable £15.50 2 course pre-theatre set menu, but not much else.