This place should really be called The Long Thin Corridor with a Sunken Room at the End. The term 'drawing room' evokes space..high ceilings, roaring open fires..thick shag pile. Well I'm afraid the Drawing room has none of the above.
I went there the other night to a friend's private jazz soiree. Having been to his other jazz nights at the somewhat grander basement club of Pizza on the Park, I was expecting great things.
Of course, if there's one thing to be said about long, thin corridors, it's that they are intimate. My friend and I settled down at a small - funny that - table along the spartan corridor some distance from the sunken room at the end where the jazz was playing, thinking that it would be a good compromise - within earshot, but not earsplitting. So far, so good. The double bass was plucked, a soulful few notes were heard.
Next came the dinner. We had paid £12 per head which included the live entertainment. Now £12 is not a lot of money for dinner and a night out but the food was decidedly unmelodious.
It was a buffet, and as we all know (much better than restauranteurs think we do) it's a chance to get rid of all those leftovers.
You could either have everything on the list of about 6 things, or make a selection. As I didn't really like the look of all the things on the menu, I chose four of the options. This amounted to two slices of tomato and a thimbleful of mozzarella, some tasteless paste masquerading as houmous, an untoasted, uncut piece of pitta bread and some passable taboule. Oh and some cajun chicken that was 96% bone, 3% skin and 1% meat.
It was edible, and I daresay if I had just returned from a long spell in a famine-stricken country, would have been sensational. But I hadn't and it wasn't. read more