Northern Europe doesn’t get salads: Claro reviewed

Claro is at 12 Waterloo Place, St James’s, and, when I tried to find out what it used to be – it has the energy of a bank – I found an advert from the Crown Estate offering the lease for a ‘retail or wellness opportunity’. 12 Waterloo Place was pictured in pen and ink, with a woman holding a yoga mat idling past, and a woman in cycling shorts hanging back. I wonder why the Crown Estate is pushing wellness, which I think is being rich, bored and female while not dying. (I have never heard a woman with a good book talk about wellness.) The price is upon application. I looked further: 12 Waterloo Place is 20th-century Baroque pastiche, it was a bank, and it wants to be a wellness opportunity. It should talk to the ducks in St James’s Park. They live inside a wellness opportunity.

We eat frena bread, hot puffs of flour and olive oil, with labneh, matbucha, harissa and olives

Instead Claro is an Israeli-owned restaurant specialising in eastern Mediterranean food, and too understated to ruffle the maniacs who walk past at weekends, shouting in praise of murderous dictatorship – because this is a decadent age where former banks push wellness opportunities and former leftists push Hamas.

It is a vast banking hall decorated in the style beloved by the current rich, a form of gilded nothingness out of some-thing. Anti-culture. There is ancient brickwork, old marble floors which I suspect the designer would have gladly axed, and a glorious faux-Tudor plaster ceiling. This, though, is mixed with tables and chairs too small for the room (it should look like the Café de Paris and it needs showgirls and Trollope heroes) and meaningless, monied lighting designed for wellness opportunities. I know each wealth aesthetic washes through London like the tide. I just don’t like this one. It isn’t honest and it isn’t beautiful. This cannot be what money is for.

This is called a farm-to-table restaurant – though all restaurants are farm-to-table restaurants – from Ran Shmueli, whose first Claro is in Tel Aviv. The menu would upset the former leftists (if they could recognise an Israeli restaurant – they prefer to attack Starbucks due to brand recognition) because they would call it cultural appropriation, because they think all Israelis are native to Warsaw.

Claro is expert in salads and vegetables, which northern Europe cannot do. (This may change as the climate does. We may get good at salad, wine and storms.) We order yellowtail sashimi with an exquisite tabbouleh salad, yoghurt and pomegranate; and frena bread, hot puffs of flour and olive oil, with labneh, matbucha, harissa and olives. Then we eat lamb with tzatziki and pickled vegetables (£88 for a platter for two). I am not sure about the pickled vegetables – when you leave Poland, you shouldn’t look back – but the lamb is perfect: dense and sweet, though I am not sure why it is lying on a bed of what looks like raw cabbage. The problem is the salad. It’s a small problem but this is a restaurant column – we don’t have big problems. The salad – mint and varied leaves – isn’t dressed, and I feel curiously disappointed. I suppose I could wrap the pickled carrot with it, but I expect more from Israel.

Still, it is a fine place to eat fine Middle Eastern food, though it has none of the rigour that I associate with Israel, where I eat falafel from holes in city walls, and haunt pre-medieval churches. I read that Keir Starmer is chasing the international rich from London with wealth taxes and vibes. When they go, Claro will go with them. The wellness ducks will remain.