Garlic Tiramisu: A bitter end to the meal
NOTHING tastes quite as divine as Tiramisu. Rich, coffee-soaked sponge, fluffy cloud-like Italian cream, curls of chocolate sprinkled on top. Unless, that is, you lace it with pungent garlic.
And that is what you’re letting yourself in for if you eat at Garlic and Shots, a restaurant in London’s trendy Soho where everything, including puddings, comes with lashings of the abominable bulb.
This tar-like chocolate gloop, doesn’t taste of coffee, is topped with thick, tasteless cream and has the overpowering aftertaste of garlic. A bitter end to a disappointing meal.
With branches in Palma and Stockholm, Garlic and Shots, founded by the Swedish Olsson brothers, is aimed at the hairy biker, Ozzy Osbourne fan or heavy metal head-banger.
Mounted stag’s heads, photos of skeletons and a papier-mache Michelin man adorn the walls. It’s trying to be edgy but with the wipe-clean, laminated menus and toilet facilities featuring peeling paint and graffiti, it’s just a bit, well, dirty.
As rock classics blare from the stereo, our pink-haired waitress brought me a garlic and honey vodka shot. Sweet at first, it hit the back of my throat and made me shudder. It was like hearing ragged fingernails scratching across a blackboard.
I tried to console myself by thinking of the health benefits of garlic. A member of the onion family and closely related to the chive and the leek, it can prevent heart disease and cancer – and of course it wards off vampires.
Amateur: Steak with a garlic cross
The main course fared slightly better. The ‘Transylvanian vampire steak’ melted like butter when I cut into it, but was ruined by tomato and peppercorn sauce that tasted like something a hard-up student had knocked up from a tin of tomatoes and far too many peppercorns. Topped with a ‘garlic cross’, literally two shreds of garlic in the shape of a cross, it looked amateur.
The lamb shank was tender and juicy, accompanied by a garlic and malt whisky butter, red wine jus, and trees of asparagus wrapped in bacon. But the lamb and steak, as well as all the other main courses – chilli con carne, bangers and mash, seafood stew or burgers – are dishes you’d expect to contain garlic. Nothing special.
Another dessert, Swedish radio cake, was a tarted up Rich Tea chocolate biscuit cake. The chocolate tasted cheap and the garlic hit left a bitter aftertaste.
I thought the chef would caramelise the garlic to make it sweeter,then expertly combine it with other ingredients to enable the flavours to marry. No such luck.
The restaurant felt like a gimmick. Like paying to meet Dracula, and then discovering it’s your dad’s mate wearing a pair of fake fangs.
The tin pots full of parsley on the table did little to dampen my garlic, death breath. Leaving my half-eaten dessert I couldn’t get out of the rock-style restaurant fast enough – like a bat out of hell.
Garlic and Shots, 14 Frith Street, London, W1D 4RD, 0207 734 9505
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