“You forget you are in grotty Croydon”, when you visit Joby Wells’s three-year-old “gem”, which – on many reports – is “just what the area had needed”, thanks to its “cleverly constructed but not over-fussy food”; at times though, service “needs sharpening up”.
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It was pure obstinacy that sent me to Albert's Table in Croydon. Or an instinct for self-preservation. Or the streak of snobbery that runs through me like the gnarly varicose veins in an old dear's legs. The fact is that as a seeker after truth, there is only one food story in Croydon that I really ought to cover right now: the arrival there of Britain's largest restaurant. Cosmo can seat 800 people, has a menu of 300 dishes from nine Asian countries – why settle for sushi when you can have rogan josh, too? – 10 cooking stations and a live Bengal tiger in a cage. All of this is true, except for the last bit, though I wouldn't be surprised if there was a big cat tucked away in a corner somewhere. It's that sort of place. It reads like a restaurant on anabolic steroids.
Jay Rayner (11th January 2011)
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