The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - The Telegraph Magazine
Michael Deacon at Rascals in Shoreditch
This temple of banter promises water pistols and ball pools – but delivers unmemorable food
SATIRE CHANGES NOTHING. It entertains, it amuses, occasionally it illuminates – but it changes nothing. In Soho in 1961, Peter Cook opened The Establishment, a club showcasing political satire. It was modelled, he said, on ‘those wonderful Berlin cabarets which did so much to stop the rise of Hitler and prevent the outbreak of the Second World War’.
Of course, it may seem a little unfair to ridicule a small number of 1920s Weimar comedians for their failure to avert the Nuremberg Rallies, the Reichstag fire, the Night of the Long Knives, Gleichschaltung, the Hitler Youth, the SS, the Gestapo, the Luftwaffe, the Kriegsmarine, the Anschluss, Kristallnacht, the invasion of Poland, the Blitz and the Holocaust. But even at a far, far lower level, satire changes nothing. Take Da Ali G Show. Everyone watched it. Everyone laughed. Yet a generation of white middle-class English boys continued to dress, talk
Photographs by Jasper Fry and act as if they were gangsta rappers.
Then there was Nathan Barley :the Channel 4 sitcom in which Chris Morris and Charlie Brooker, perhaps the two greatest British satirists of the past 30 years, eviscerated hipster culture. It contained characters who deliberately wore hats at least six sizes too small, rode around the office of their style magazine on a plastic tractor, adopted a pen name ending in a question mark (Jonatton Yeah?)… and, naturally, it changed nothing. Hence the arrival in east London of a café serving breakfast cereal at £3.60 a bowl; the revival of the
moustache; the drinking of cocktails from jam jars; the continued success of Vice News; and the launch, a couple of months ago, of Rascals.
Rascals is a restaurant in Shoreditch that embodies an unusual blend of hipsterism and laddism; its target customer, I imagine, being Danny Dyer with a lumberjack beard. Its website promises ‘food, drink, mischief ’, and urges patrons to ‘unleash your inner rascal’. It offers ‘London’s first waterproof dining room’, where, for a mere £59 a head, you can eat ‘a three-course banquet’ while squirting your friends with giant water pistols (‘The ultimate after-dinner escalation’). For an additional £10 you can sit, with other grown adults, in a ball pool, such as would be normally found at a small child’s birthday party. The lavatories are unisex, but the wall is gaily adorned with a mural of a man urinating.
Rascals is, in summary, dedicated with missionary fervour to the central tenet of laddist doctrine: thou shalt banter. It is a church of banter, a temple of banter, a towering monument to the bantering cause. Tables are booked by contacting naughty@londonrascals.com. Even the email address seems to wink at you.
In what no doubt constitutes a grave dereliction of critical duty, I’m afraid I didn’t book the waterproof dining room, but I’ve no doubt that, if you enjoy trying to eat while being drenched head to toe by gangs of elaborately hirsute young men, you will find no finer venue in London. Instead, I sat in the main restaurant, which turned out to be almost disappointingly civilised. At no point was I soaked, pelted with food, or hung by the beltloops from a ceiling fan. Each table kept itself to itself. Naughtiness and mischief were at a premium. This is probably the last thing Rascals would wish a critic to report, but it was actually quite nice. According to its website, the restaurant has ‘a zero-tolerance approach’ to ‘polite small talk’, but mercifully this rule didn’t seem to be enforced.
The menu was a small-plates job, featuring a jumble of trends. My friend and I started with the burrata surprise, the surprise being that it was served inside an outsize tomato. Great presentation, but the tomato was weak and watery, and the burrata not creamy enough. More great presentation with the seabass ceviche, which arrived billowing with dry ice, like Spandau Ballet on an
I did feel slightly like a high-court judge trying to review the Stormzy album
’80s Top of the Pops. Nothing so memorable about the flavour, though.
Next were the tempura squid spirals, overlaid by a vast black disc of griddled squid ink, the size of a Ladies’ Day hat. It tasted like burnt toast. The ‘cauli cod waves’ were odd: the coating of toasted nuts felt out of place, and the cod tasted strangely sweet. Needed salt. I also tried the ‘sticky pig belly’, flaccid and dull. (You see what I meant, incidentally, about a jumble of trends. Ceviche, squid ink, pork belly – no matter where in the country I go, these blasted things follow me from menu to menu. I’m almost at my wits’ end. My dreams echo to their mocking laughter.)
For pudding, I really liked the deconstructed Eton Mess, laid out as a pretty little picnic of chunks and blobs. Wasn’t so keen on ‘Ballie’s Chocolate’, though: a big tart orb oozing with sticky sour gloop.
On the whole, then, I wasn’t exactly wild about Rascals. Then again, I am an old man of 37, at least a decade outside the target demographic. I did feel slightly like a high-court judge trying to review the Stormzy album. If I were 15 years younger, I would probably find Rascals a pretty good place to get drunk. And if I were drunk, I’d probably enjoy the food.