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Hopelessly Divo'ted
With traditional Ukrainian dishes at Divo, Jay Rayner tried the food of his forefathers. He was just grateful they'd emigrated
Sunday November 4, 2007 - The Observer
Address: 12 Waterloo Place, London SW1
Tel: 020 7484 1355
Meal for two incl wine and service: £140
A little over a century ago my Jewish forebears fled that part of Eastern Europe then known as the Pale of Settlement. Having eaten at Divo, described as London's first luxury Ukrainian restaurant, I now know why. It was to escape the cooking. There are many words I could use to describe the food served here, but this is a family newspaper and none of them should be available before the watershed. I can't deny my disappointment because the remaining candidates - awful, calamitous, the horror, the horror - don't quite do it justice without the visceral attack of the expletive.
Divo, which occupies a once imposing space at the southern end of Regent Street, is a very special kind of disaster; the sort Hollywood used to make films about in the Seventies. The decor is a mixture of overblown kitsch - swirly carpets and drapes that Middle Eastern dignitaries might favour for photo opportunities - and a down home babushka, cottage look. It's as if two completely different teams from Changing Rooms have been let loose, armed only with half a million quid each of someone else's money, crystal meth and a taste bypass.
More disastrous than that are the poor waitresses' cherry-red outfits: lace-up bodice up top, a two-length skirt down below, so that it resembles a mumsy apron on one side and something so short on the other you worry they might catch a chill. One dining room is brightly lit, the other gloomy. If you go - perhaps because you are in the grip of a terminal illness and need a laugh - I recommend the latter. That way you won't have to look at the food as well as taste it.
The menu is long and over-priced and the three-figure caviar dishes are only the half of it. Fourteen pounds is an awful lot of money for pickles. It's an outrage for sloppy, limp strips of cucumber, huge, peeled-plum tomatoes and a couple of slices of mushy pear. One part of the menu, described as Divo Specials, lists dishes which 'were traditionally served to visiting dignitaries and the nobility of the Ukraine'. I can only assume Ukrainians have a healthy disdain for their dignitaries.
Top of the list is the Cossack Pork Sausage. Any comedic value obtained from the innuendo in that name was completely trounced by the appearance of the dish itself. The lengths of gnarled, under-seasoned gristly sausage arrived atop a lattice covering a ceramic bowl, which held a reservoir of burning liquor. Heaped on the sausage were crisp onion rings, which were immediately ignited by the flames from below. 'Now you blow it out,' the waitress said, her anxiety rising with the plumes of smoke. 'Now, please! Now!'
This was the Red Army's scorched-earth policy realised in food. My companion Amanda is a game girl. Not only did she blow out the flames, she even tasted the food. Now she knows what carbonised onions taste like. They taste like charcoal.
I had Grandmother's Golubzi, which sounds like an ailment of old age: floppy white cabbage leaves, wrapped around under-seasoned pork mince beneath a gloopy tomato sauce. I wish grandma well.
No matter. Here comes the main course, the venerable chicken kiev and surely they can't bugger that up? 'Ah,' said Amanda, as it landed before us. 'Mum's gone to Iceland.' And it did indeed have that uniform breadcrumb shell-like-armour-plating look of the mass-produced item, which is amazing given they must have made it themselves. Two hockey-puck rabbit 'burgers', rolled in oats and served with half-melted lumps of a red Leicester-type cheese, were as bad as they sound. Though not as bad as a side dish of 'buckwheat with fried onions and lard'. It had a weird plastic flavour which reminded me of the taste you get when you blow up a new lilo. This is not a good thing in a plate of food.
We finished - and I use that term loosely, for we did not finish anything - with a grim slice of cherry cheesecake with a jelly topping so solid you could have used it to culture bacteria in a petri dish. The other dessert was a curl of cold pancake, buried beneath more sodden cherries. The pancake tasted like it had been made earlier in the day. In short, a load of old crepe. The wine list is priced with oligarchs in mind, though it does include a Ukrainian merlot at £17. We checked the alcohol content. Somewhere between '10 to 13 per cent' it said. Ach. It's only wine.
Apparently Divo is Ukrainian for 'amazing', a name I cannot argue with. It is amazing that anybody thought a restaurant like this would be a good idea, amazing that they invested a reputed £2 million in the conversion, amazing that the result is so staggeringly, comically, bowel-twistingly poor. As we left, I was overcome by a strong feeling of gratitude, and not merely because the meal was over, but to my great-grandfather, Josef Boruchowicz. He was the one who had the gumption to escape the region of Eastern Europe which has supplied Divo's inspiration.
He saved me from having to eat this stuff every day. Thank you Josef. I owe you.
jay.rayner@observer.co.uk
With traditional Ukrainian dishes at Divo, Jay Rayner tried the food of his forefathers. He was just grateful they'd emigrated
Sunday November 4, 2007 - The Observer
Address: 12 Waterloo Place, London SW1
Tel: 020 7484 1355
Meal for two incl wine and service: £140
A little over a century ago my Jewish forebears fled that part of Eastern Europe then known as the Pale of Settlement. Having eaten at Divo, described as London's first luxury Ukrainian restaurant, I now know why. It was to escape the cooking. There are many words I could use to describe the food served here, but this is a family newspaper and none of them should be available before the watershed. I can't deny my disappointment because the remaining candidates - awful, calamitous, the horror, the horror - don't quite do it justice without the visceral attack of the expletive.
Divo, which occupies a once imposing space at the southern end of Regent Street, is a very special kind of disaster; the sort Hollywood used to make films about in the Seventies. The decor is a mixture of overblown kitsch - swirly carpets and drapes that Middle Eastern dignitaries might favour for photo opportunities - and a down home babushka, cottage look. It's as if two completely different teams from Changing Rooms have been let loose, armed only with half a million quid each of someone else's money, crystal meth and a taste bypass.
More disastrous than that are the poor waitresses' cherry-red outfits: lace-up bodice up top, a two-length skirt down below, so that it resembles a mumsy apron on one side and something so short on the other you worry they might catch a chill. One dining room is brightly lit, the other gloomy. If you go - perhaps because you are in the grip of a terminal illness and need a laugh - I recommend the latter. That way you won't have to look at the food as well as taste it.
The menu is long and over-priced and the three-figure caviar dishes are only the half of it. Fourteen pounds is an awful lot of money for pickles. It's an outrage for sloppy, limp strips of cucumber, huge, peeled-plum tomatoes and a couple of slices of mushy pear. One part of the menu, described as Divo Specials, lists dishes which 'were traditionally served to visiting dignitaries and the nobility of the Ukraine'. I can only assume Ukrainians have a healthy disdain for their dignitaries.
Top of the list is the Cossack Pork Sausage. Any comedic value obtained from the innuendo in that name was completely trounced by the appearance of the dish itself. The lengths of gnarled, under-seasoned gristly sausage arrived atop a lattice covering a ceramic bowl, which held a reservoir of burning liquor. Heaped on the sausage were crisp onion rings, which were immediately ignited by the flames from below. 'Now you blow it out,' the waitress said, her anxiety rising with the plumes of smoke. 'Now, please! Now!'
This was the Red Army's scorched-earth policy realised in food. My companion Amanda is a game girl. Not only did she blow out the flames, she even tasted the food. Now she knows what carbonised onions taste like. They taste like charcoal.
I had Grandmother's Golubzi, which sounds like an ailment of old age: floppy white cabbage leaves, wrapped around under-seasoned pork mince beneath a gloopy tomato sauce. I wish grandma well.
No matter. Here comes the main course, the venerable chicken kiev and surely they can't bugger that up? 'Ah,' said Amanda, as it landed before us. 'Mum's gone to Iceland.' And it did indeed have that uniform breadcrumb shell-like-armour-plating look of the mass-produced item, which is amazing given they must have made it themselves. Two hockey-puck rabbit 'burgers', rolled in oats and served with half-melted lumps of a red Leicester-type cheese, were as bad as they sound. Though not as bad as a side dish of 'buckwheat with fried onions and lard'. It had a weird plastic flavour which reminded me of the taste you get when you blow up a new lilo. This is not a good thing in a plate of food.
We finished - and I use that term loosely, for we did not finish anything - with a grim slice of cherry cheesecake with a jelly topping so solid you could have used it to culture bacteria in a petri dish. The other dessert was a curl of cold pancake, buried beneath more sodden cherries. The pancake tasted like it had been made earlier in the day. In short, a load of old crepe. The wine list is priced with oligarchs in mind, though it does include a Ukrainian merlot at £17. We checked the alcohol content. Somewhere between '10 to 13 per cent' it said. Ach. It's only wine.
Apparently Divo is Ukrainian for 'amazing', a name I cannot argue with. It is amazing that anybody thought a restaurant like this would be a good idea, amazing that they invested a reputed £2 million in the conversion, amazing that the result is so staggeringly, comically, bowel-twistingly poor. As we left, I was overcome by a strong feeling of gratitude, and not merely because the meal was over, but to my great-grandfather, Josef Boruchowicz. He was the one who had the gumption to escape the region of Eastern Europe which has supplied Divo's inspiration.
He saved me from having to eat this stuff every day. Thank you Josef. I owe you.
jay.rayner@observer.co.uk
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