A select number of my London-based friends have just got new jobs – one is teaching, another is doing marketing, another is banking (boo, hiss) and yet another is doing something law-related but essentially indefinable. To celebrate this fact, and revel in everyone’s taking of life by the scruff of the neck, we decided to have dinner in central London.
We picked Vapiano because, as idealistic young professionals, it is ostensibly exactly the kind of place we can afford and want to be seen in. The Vapiano website defines the chain’s raison d’etre as “defining the future of fresh casual”, which to the average customer means that one does everything oneself – you find your own table, order your drinks at the bar and your meal from the chefs, collect your meal from the chefs and pay at a central till with a snazzy Vapiano card tab. I privately hoped this would mean that the staff aimlessly wandering around would aid us in other, less-expected departments: guided toilet visits, perhaps, or carrying us out of the restaurant in sedan chairs.
This clearly wasn’t forthcoming, and the lack of assistance was shown up painfully on a Friday night, when we searched everywhere in the 2-storey building for a table to seat the 6 of us for around 20 minutes. When we sat down, though, it became clear that the “fresh casual” Vapiano experience did work in terms of the eating itself. We ordered pizzas, and were given vaguely space-age remote controls which whizzed into life, flashing and ringing, when our orders were ready.
The hipness and technology thankfully stopped at the food, though – the pizzas were lovingly cooked, my calzone being just sloppy enough on the inside to work well with the charred, bubbled exterior. Pizzas which have become high-street staples, such as the capricciosa, were dealt with nicely enough, and the oils given to us – garlic and chilli, as in Pizza Express – were zingy and played well against the bread. The house wine, however, of which we sampled both white and red, was uniformly agreed to be pretty loathsome – a couple of notches up in price should be enough.
The hipness and technology thankfully stopped at the food, though – the pizzas were lovingly cooked, my calzone being just sloppy enough on the inside to work well with the charred, bubbled exterior. Pizzas which have become high-street staples, such as the capricciosa, were dealt with nicely enough, and the oils given to us – garlic and chilli, as in Pizza Express – were zingy and played well against the bread. The house wine, however, of which we sampled both white and red, was uniformly agreed to be pretty loathsome – a couple of notches up in price should be enough.
Although the whole experience was a slightly hectic one, the positives of Vapiano outweigh the negatives by some distance. Although the restaurant seems to concentrate too much on their innovations and departures from how one conventionally dines out – one fellow diner referred to it as “the Argos of restaurants” – none of this gets in the way of the food itself being fine for young professionals (the glory! The smugness!) looking to do things a little differently.
2 courses with wine £25-30pp
6/10
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