da Polpo: it's not you, it's me

da Polpo, 6 Maiden Lane, WC2E 7NA

Meal for two (with 50% off food): £50

For many, da Polpo is all about family. It's the youngest child trying to live up to the awesome foodie legacy of its older siblings. It's not the original (Polpo) nor is it the most iconic (Polpetto). It isn't even the slightly edgy one that your aunt suspects is on drugs (Spuntino). It's the Conrad Hughes Hilton of the Polpo Family. Poor da Polpo,  it must hope for a visit from one of the few people in London who haven't already fallen in love with its sisters. Someone, perhaps, like me. 

It's not that I wasn't keen to go and eat at this infamous family of restaurants before. I just never got round to it. This may have something to do with the queues. I made it up the stairs to Polpetto once but couldn't face the two hour wait. So da Polpo was to be my first encounter with The Family. I was so keen to see what every other right-minded foodie was on about, I even made it there before its official opening.

Mr F and I visited da Polpo at a relatively civilised hour on a Wednesday night, I drank a martini out of a squat glass and we hung about for 45 minutes before being seated. We occupied ourselves during this time by trying to work out why there were tins of tomatoes on the shelves at the back. Had they forgotten to put them in the cupboard during set up or are tinned tomatoes on the wall finally ironically cool? My, how the time just flew by. 

Wait over, we settled into our seats and immediately ordered a swathe of the menu: hunger and cocktails are a dangerous mix. That done, they brought us a little treat of bread and ricotta cheese whipped up with black sesame seeds. It was the sexiest cheese in the world: creamy and light with a little hint of nuttiness. I was getting pretty excited about what would follow. Then the food arrived and it was like the moment when a voyeur realises that pornography, for all its promise of titillation, is just watching other people having sex. There was no special magic, no defining dish to make me see the light.

The pizzette were inconsistently successful. On one, asparagus and speck were made interesting by the slight tang of melted taleggio. On the other, pickled pepper and pork shoulder sounded like the best pizzetta toppings in history but somehow didn't work as well as we'd hoped. The pickled peppers, reminiscent of a good Turkish kebab, were excellent but the pork was underwhelming when it should have been a highlight.

Mozzarella with broad beans was exactly as one might expect, although the mozzarella was bland and unexceptional. Likewise, the grilled thin cut sirloin was just that, a tiny sliver of steak with some slightly unadventurous salad and a slice of lemon. Both were nice enough but I can't imagine ever getting excited about them. The piadina meatball smash was good though, with its squidgy tomato sauce and stringy cheese. In it we had the spicy pork and fennel meatballs, which exemplified the virtues of pairing pork with aniseed flavours and chilli heat. However, the bread with ours was a little disappointing: not the thin crispy pizzetta base but something closer to a supermarket wrap. Gelato in a cone was perfectly nice but unexciting.

I left wondering what I had done wrong. Had I ordered the wrong things? Had I left it so late that the whole Venice meets New York thing they've got going on has become a bit passé? Had I allowed myself to get too carried away with the hype - reaching the point where only gold pizzette with diamond studded mozzarella and ermine-lined olives would suffice? Perhaps I should have gone to one of the others first - seen what all the fuss was about at one of the grown ups before chancing my luck with the new baby?

I fear I will never know. Whilst I might yet give Spuntino a shot, if only for the truffled toast, I saw nothing at da Polpo that would entice me to join the queues for the other Polps. I don't mind queuing, indeed several of my favourite restaurants involve a wait. However, I won't stand in a line to eat cooking so basic it feels a tad overpriced for what it is. It's not that da Polpo is hideously expensive, it isn't; but without the soft opening sweetener of 50% off, it isn't cheap either. In this fair city, which has a multitude of places where one can eat well without spending as much or loitering as long, I can't see the need to queue up for something mundane. They wouldn't do it in New York.