‘Our salt beef is the best’, announces our waitress.
Bold claim, lady. I don’t know much about French-Med fusion, which is the remit of The Ninth, this new restaurant from chef Jun Tanaka. I couldn’t tell you what makes a mouclade a mouclade, and I possibly can’t pronounce it either. There are a number of prominent things on the menu that I couldn’t pick out of a police line-up. I make a note of them for more thorough googling later, to the excitement of my guest who fondly assumes I’m writing Important Things about textural subtleties. I’m actually writing a text to myself saying ‘Barbajuan – like a PIE?’
It’s not, on further research, anything like a pie.
So there’s plenty here to outfox us, including the menu concept – which is unfolded in some detail but ultimately seems to boil down to: share stuff or not, whatever you like.
But salt beef? This much I know. I want our waitress to be right about how amazing it is, although I also don’t want to lose my heart to a beef dish from Fitzrovia. I need more accessible beef than an occasional high-end dinner in a slick fusion brasserie. And it is pretty slick. Low music with a heavy bass, plate and silverware changes so lightning fast it feels like street magic, and great people-watching opportunities from the tables facing onto Charlotte Street.
Ross elects to share stuff as per the Dining Concept, on the basis that we both know I’ll be prising a lot of his food away from him either way, and it’ll feel less like a violation if he pretends he had a choice.
We run through a menu of raw, cured, hot, cold, and bite-sized subsections. And those are just the starters. But if the ordering process feels convoluted, the cured pork belly and pecorino, and the king prawn and ginger macaroni are brilliantly simple. The whole roasted seabream is enormous, impressive, and the fact that I feel it’s outshone by the aubergine caviar it comes with shouldn’t be considered a slur. Nothing wouldn’t have been outshone by the aubergine.
The beef, when it arrives, comes with oxtail consommé and charred plantlife – a sleeker and more grown-up dish than my usual beef encounters. It’s not an everyday beef. But it is a beautiful one. And we share dessert, a Pain Perdu with honeycomb ice cream. Ross likes it unreservedly. I like it, with the reservation that it’s not salt beef, which I kind of wish we’d just ordered twice.
So, The Ninth: complicated on paper but unpretentiously lovely on plate. And their salt beef? It’s the best. But it’s for Sunday Best. Fingers crossed for a Jun Tanaka StreetBeef spin-off for every other day of the week.
The Ninth London, 22 Charlotte Street, London W1T 2NB. Tel: 0203 019 0880. Website.
