Taman Gang141 Park Lane, W1; 020 7518 3160
Mon-Sat lunch, 12-2.30pm, dinner, 6-11.30pm What’s the name for the back wall of a urinal? Does it have a name? Or is it one of those anonymous things that slides through life, a creeping refugee from lexicography, like the collective noun for the smears of dead bugs and bird droppings on a windscreen. Or the taste of those old, gummed photograph corners. Or the intense feeling when you suddenly remember an unreturned phone call three weeks later. Or the satisfying dottle and crud excavated from nails after hard manual work. Or the solitary blob of Blu-Tack too high on the wall to reach. Or the satisfaction in straightening a picture frame. Or a nanny-licked hanky. Or the act of listening intently at night for the repeat of a noise you think you just heard. Or the inability not to touch a plate a waiter has just told you not to touch.
All these things wander the hedgerows and wynds of life nameless. As our existence becomes ever more complex and international, as old languages and dialects die and new technologies are born, so more and more things become dictionary orphans, grow up never being called by name. When the last Inuit forgets indigenous Eskimo, what will happen to the other 346 names for snow? The Amish have a word for snow that falls off the roof and lands on you after you slam the front door, yet the sand people of the Kalahari have no word for snow at all.
The taxonomy of unconsidered trifles is itself a nameless discipline but one that I feel strangely drawn to. Indeed, I would happily devote the rest of my life to sticking labels on unnamed things. But I have to write this restaurant review first, so back to the gents and the nameless urinal splashback in Taman Gang, a newish “Asian-style” restaurant in Park Lane.
The gents’ loo is decorated with what looks like Hindu erotic carvings from the temples of southern India or Bali. Leaving aside the dubious Europhilic tastefulness of forcing men to micturate over athletically fornicating Indians while muttering “Boy, that’s a relief,” it does seem a touch insensitive to use someone else’s religious imagery as a renal water feature. Imagine the fuss from Mel Gibson if they put the 12 stations of the cross over the sewer (and don’t even begin to think about the 1,000 names of Allah, blessed be his name).
Oh, no, no, no. Write the name of the prophet in yellow snow and you might as well stone yourself to death. Mind you, find it miraculously written in the oxidising seeds of an aubergine, and you can open a shrine and charge £1.50 to see it. I don’t imagine that Hindus are necessarily going to take this sort of intimacy with their imagery lying down, on or off a bed of nails.
No, if you want to use anyone’s most precious spiritual artefacts as a sewer, I suggest you go for pacifists, like the Buddhists or Quakers. Unfortunately, Quakers don’t have any obviously recognisable votive artefacts, just a couple of nicely made chairs.
It’s the Asian-style bit of Taman Gang’s mission statement that I find worrying — style attached to a thing invariably means ersatz, cheaper, reduced, less than, lo-cal, fat-free, strained, toothless, caponised, neutered, and I say that as a style writer. They also point out that Taman Gang is Balinese for Park Lane. Well, Smetana is Yiddish for sour cream, but that doesn’t tell you anything about his music.
The gaudy bas-relief urinal is really only the flashing tip of Taman Gang’s decorative exuberance. It’s a cacophony of cartoonish reminders of Far Eastern stag nights and massage parlours. The overall effect is like being in the souvenir shop at Bangkok airport. The style notes point out that the carvings have been “done by Bali’s most famous sculptor, I Made Jojol, in four days”. I wondered what he was doing for the last three. Bali is an island entirely covered in carvings, and Mr Made Jojol only goes to prove that fame and talent are sadly not necessarily harnessed in tandem.
The large, glaucoma-dark bar boasts its own DJ and is obviously something of a social club for the serially unattached, shop assistants from Oxford Street and boys from the Middle East here to learn English and crash cars, and the last vestiges of a social subspecies called the Mayfair Mercenaries: glossy girls who wear their sunglasses as Alice bands, have a penchant for miniature suede racing drivers and cutting the crotches out of their boyfriends’ suits, and who are the spiritual descendants of Ruth Ellis. If you want to meet one, well, she’s here.
Finally, the Asian-style, food-style menu is that now rather passé school of Nobu-ish cuisine and, naturally, it needs explaining by a fantastically charming and attentive waiter, who talked to us as if he were a therapist encouraging new quadriplegics. All the dishes are communal and therefore awkward to share and eat: steamed scallops and beluga caviar in yuzu, mango and prawn spring roll, three-style sashimi sauce with Asian dressing, and the obligatory black cod, which again, predictably, isn’t as good as the Nobu original. It really is time to have a moratorium on this dish, not just for the sake of depleted cod stocks, but because it’s become a screaming gastro cliché. Savoury sticky-toffee pudding.
None of this is particularly cheap. Almost everything is in the high teens, so if you’re sharing, you can easily spend £70 or £80 a head. The various flavours range from moreishly attractive and sharply precise to sloppily pointless and unpleasant. For all its hard work, it’s finally unsatisfying. Like dining on canapés, you end up full but not replete.
It’s not disagreeable, but then neither is it memorable. Perhaps I’m being unfair. But Taman Gang, with its novelty cocktails and designer-style waiters (Ozwald Boateng for managers, Ghost for the “reception team”), seems to be rather old-fashioned and 1980s to me. It wasn’t my style first time around, but perhaps, for the Arab boys sucking their cigars and the carmine sneery girls, it’s all fabulous and new. They were enjoying themselves as if it was going out of style, which, indeed, it was.
This week's star rating guide:
Pieces of eight
Peace of mind
Peasouper
Mushy peas
Pissoir
