M. Nadra’s cuisine “improves with every menu”, and his Chiswick yearling is starting to give the nearby La Trompette (where he used to be head chef) a good “run for its money”; ambience-wise, though, overcoming the constraints of these “cramped” premises is always going to be a challenge.
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The critic visits a new Chiswick venture, where the cuisine is “heartbreakingly effortful”. This degree of “ambition, dedication and graft”, however, can lead to “long waits between courses”, and the elaborate conception of the main courses can “risk inducing taste bud exhaustion”. The dining room also leaves a lot to be desired: “No amount of tra la la on the plate can make up for skimpy bare tables, dismal photographs of octopus suckers and other fishy detail and intermittent bursts of canned music”.
Michael Nadra opened his first solo restaurant Fish Hoek (later Fish Hook) in Chiswick in 2005 after a stint as a sous chef at La Trompette, and jobs with chefs such as Stephen Terry and Bruce Poole. In 2010 he has reverted to cooking meat as well as fish, and put his name over the door. The simple dining room is in two main parts, with tables without tablecloths, fairly closely packed.
Fay Maschler (15th April 2010)
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