‘Well-priced and skilful’: Masala Zone, reviewed

There are cursed restaurants and cursed women, and this makes them no less interesting. One is Maxim’s in Paris, which knows it – it gaily sells ties in a charnel house decorated for the Masque of the Red Death – and another is the Criterion at Piccadilly Circus, which doesn’t. One day it might meet its destiny, which is to be an Angus Steakhouse (this might lift the curse, the Angus Steakhouse has its own magic) but it isn’t there yet. Restaurant after restaurant favours hope over experience here: Marco Pierre White (Mark White) passed through, spilling acronyms about. I suppose it serves it right for being in the neo-Byzantine style. Don’t restaurant developers watch horror films?

The last time I ate here was for Savini at the Criterion, about which I remember plant life and grey silks – where do the husks of restaurants go? – too much salt, and a dispute with British Telecom, which Savini claims felled it. Pah! It was the curse. The new suitor is Masala Zone, with no pun on Twilight Zone intended (though it should be). These are eerie rooms: a palazzo wrought in imperial pounds for display. In fiction Dr Watson first heard of Sherlock Holmes here in A Study in Scarlet. Bruce Wayne – or Batman to his anxious friends who knew he was an orphan and pretended he was a bat to soothe him – claimed he owned this restaurant in The Dark Knight. I should have liked to review that, but it is fictional. Did they serve flies?

To reality and hope: past the tourists snogging at Anteros (not Eros, that is an urban myth) into the glamour of Grade II-listed neo–Byzantine late Victoriana. It looks like Las Vegas so close to Lillywhites: a shimmering, duplicitous falsehood near other falsehoods, and I like it very much.