Clik here to view.
'The bill makes me swoon like a Regency heroine; no amount of fried strawberry pastry ampersands with dehydrated white chocolate dust is going to sweeten this baby'
A wealthy-looking man near us winces as if in actual pain. The chilly, granite-lined restaurant is pretty empty, and even over Cilla honking, "Alfieeee" we can hear him. "Look," he bleats to his stony-faced date, "the thing is, I'm spending my own money!"
It's the menu from self-styled "Demon Chef" Alvin Leung, owner of Hong Kong's Michelin-starred Bo Innovation, that's scaring him. It offers only two options: "Ode To Great Britain" at £98 and "Chefs Menu" at £138. Without booze. If this traumatises what looks like a hedge funder, imagine what it does to us. According to the formally suited staff, we "must" have the chef's menu. Well, if we must, we must.
Tiny mouthfuls start arriving, displayed in curious ways. There are trivets of funereal marble; stainless-steel trees; test tubes of tapioca bubble tea scented with chilli, hawthorn and basil, and inserted into light fittings so they glow with radioactive eeriness; metal bowls that belch rose-scented dry ice… All designed by the Demon Chef himself.
In punky chef's blacks, autodidact "X-treme cuisine" chef and former sound engineer Leung works the room like a stocky, Asian Ramone. We're spared his ministrations, but eavesdrop as he lectures fellow diners; their grins become rictus by course six. It's all about pushing boundaries and challenging comfort zones, apparently. It makes me, most obsessed of food obsessives, want to screech, "It's only yer tea!"
It would be tedious to describe each tiny course – though that does not stop Leung and his myrmidons – but much of it is mesmerising. One flawless oyster on a sliver of seaweed jelly, bathed in sherry-like Shaoxing wine with lime, ginger and onion, is an exhilarating earth-and-sea slurp. "Tomato" brings three treatments of the fruit: one almost confit in sweet Chinese vinegar, one wrapped in an armadillo-like shell of lightest pastry, one a snowy "marshmallow" that combines fairy-wing lightness with astonishing intensity. Wagyu beef, a luxurious two bites of marbled meat, comes with stout little chive jiaozi in a bouillon of limpid purity and staggering savour.
There's "X-treme", a play on xiao long bao (Shanghainese soup dumplings of joy): spherified molecular nonsense that bursts warm, porky broth into your mouth. It's clever, but I'd rather have the real thing. Then the misfires: a slab of foie served in iceberg lettuce (a play on sung choi bao) has a gluey spit of vaguely saffrony "Abby's sauce". "Abby is the chef's wife," our server says. "It's not chef's special sauce." Which is, I think, a joke.
Perhaps this humour is the house style – after all, Leung's most famous dish is Sex On The Beach, a pink condom fashioned from starches on biscuit crumb "sand" with the hot-and-numbing effect of Sichuan peppercorns and, er, chef's special sauce of condensed milk. Proceeds to Aids charidee. It's like eating deconstructed porno cheesecake.
Like the smiles on Leung's guests' faces, our first bottle of wine has disappeared by course six. It's either order another bottle or go boozeless for the remaining 10. The resultant bill makes me swoon like a Regency heroine; no amount of fried strawberry pastry ampersands with dehydrated white chocolate dust is going to sweeten this baby.
I've eaten in the Hong Kong Bo and it was a lower-key, cheaper affair: currently HK$980 for the chef's menu, or about 80 quid. At these prices, even in rarefied Mayfair, I can't imagine who is going to use the place once the Michelin-groupie plate-sniffers have moved on. Expense accounts are business, and who wants to put up with the client for three hours of tortured food? And for the food nerd, this is already old hat, so very Adrià circa 2007.
Perhaps Leung should expand the bar section, where exquisite dim sum are served at lunchtime, and keep a small area at the back for the grandstanding and voluptuaries. As it stands, he may be a brilliant chef, but this is not a brilliant restaurant.
•Bo London 4 Mill Street, London W1, 020-7493 3886. Open lunch, Mon-Fri 12.30-3pm; dinner, Mon-Sat 7-11pm. Meal for two with drinks and service, £350 upwards – yes, really.
Food 8/10
Atmosphere 6/10
Value for money Your guess is as good as mine
Follow Marina on Twitter.