David Shrigley at Sketch, London W1 – restaurant review

I bow to no restaurant fan in my admiration of Mourad Mazouz, aka Momo. In a landscape where nobody takes risks, where the sure-fire route to success is to pinch somebody else’s ideas (yes, Paesan and Tomboy Burrito, I am looking at you), he continues to go his own oddball way.

Of his remarkable Sketch, he said when it opened, “I could have opened a safe little brasserie like the Ivy.” Instead, in this grand, sprawling Georgian town house, he created a multi-venue pleasurama, a sensory overload of challenging artworks, alien’s egg loos and extraordinary and curious food. It’ll never last, said everyone, clutching their pearls. Yet here we are, nearly 12 years later, and the place as busy as ever.

Mazouz’s latest wheeze is not simply to open new restaurants, but to open new restaurants in his existing restaurant. The Gallery is the most protean of the Sketch stable, initially an operating theatre-white backdrop to early millennial excess. Latterly, it was handed over to Turner prize-winning artist Martin Creed, who cooked up a setting of such dreamlike randomness, it was like taking a wrong turn at the Mad Hatter’s tea party. It was less restaurant and more art installation, a notion Momo is clearly taken with. Because here it is once more, ripped up and started again, this time in collaboration with David Shrigley.

If Mae West and Barbara Cartland set up a restaurant consultancy, they couldn’t come up with anything more camply outre. Designed by India Mahdavi, it’s pink: powdery, Turkish Delight pink. Scalloped, pink velvet booths (impossible to shimmy into if you’re more than a size 6), metallic pink woodwork, a glittering copper bar-back. More than 230 of Shrigley’s whimsical black-and-white drawings (we covet Cruiseship Vulgarity and Stick Your Synthetic Burger Up Your Arse) are soaked in reflected pinkness. Place settings are designed by Shrigley, too, including a cruet set that looks like shrunken Moomins’ Hattifatteners announcing “dust”, “dirt” and “nothing”. I’ve never wanted to filch restaurant fittings so badly. It all defies fashion. And reason. It’s a wanton holler of bollocks-to-austerity decadence.

The menu is just as barking. Here’s one item verbatim: “Homage to David Shrigley. Tuna sashimi, creamy avocado with Peruvian chilli and lime, melon and liqueur vinegar, black olive gelée and mozzarella foam.” On the evidence of this lysergic dish – blobs and pools of strident oddness, especially the mozzarella-topped gelée that tastes like the stuff left at the bottom of olive tins topped with organic foaming facewash – Shrigley’s better off sticking to the art.

A bijou burger comes laced with foie gras and accessorised with a large cube of faintly farty blood-coloured jelly. (It turns out to be “red cabbage and Xeres”. Who knew?) Two small, woolly langoustine tails are decanted on to thinly sliced brassicas from a bamboo steamer that hiccups copious amounts of smoke. There’s bisque made from its shells and salty kelp, too. And 27 quid, ta – and that’s for a starter. There’s a dish featuring crab, tête de veau, a savoury profiterole and “cucumber and green apple water” that manages to taste of none of these things. “It’s like a Yorkshire pudding,” says its recipient helpfully.

Maddest of all is what’s described as fish and chips: a plate draped in a shroud of rice pancake, as though it conceals Naples’ Veiled Christ rather than some salad, peach – peach! – and blobs of tartare sauce. The actual fish and chips arrive separately in a pail: breaded pollock like a midweek kids’ tea and fried abstracts of swirly potato tendril. Everything lands with suspicious speed. Nominally, the legend that is Pierre Gagnaire is in charge of Sketch’s food, but I’ve no idea who’s actually cooking this stuff. Jeff Koons?

Even the staff uniforms are artful: boys in matelot stripes straight from a Jean Paul Gaultier homoerotic ad, or wet-dream mechanics in boiler suits. Every now and then, a tiny person dressed as a French maid pops up, her sole role apparently to sweep the floors – a truly sisyphean task.

This might be the most absurd restaurant in the UK, a Barbie-on-MDMA fantasy serving unintelligible food at prices to make your eyes water into matching pinkness. The bill comes in a sandpaper envelope; it might as well just say, “Ouch!” You’d probably hate it. Me? Well, darlings, I think it’s faahbulous. And hey, it’s art.

• David Shrigley at Sketch The Gallery, 9 Conduit Street, London W1, 020-7659 4500. Open all week, dinner only, 6.30pm-2am. About £60 a head for three courses, plus drinks and service.

Food 5/10
Atmosphere 9/10
Value for money 4/10

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