The luxurious surroundings and extraordinary cocktails aren’t enough to make you forget you can find better food elsewhere
Rüya is a very fancy Anatolian restaurant in London’s Mayfair. It’s a place where you can rapidly rattle through handfuls of cash on wagyu kebabs, Black Sea pide and lamb-stuffed lahmacun. A clay pot of meatless güvec, for example, a vegetable stew similar to ratatouille, is £19.50. I do not normally begin reviews by dwelling on the cost, but in Rüya’s case the prices add prescience, because this is Turkish food by way of Dubai (Rüya’s original outpost lives in the first-floor lobby of Dubai’s Grosvenor House Hotel).
The folly in bringing the most lofty of Anatolian fine dining to the capital lies in the fact that east and north London are swimming in exemplary, family-run, pocket-friendly Turkish restaurants where a family of five could eat like sultans for 60 quid. Who this very beautiful restaurant – and, gosh, is it beautiful – is aimed at is mysterious. If one was a Turkish millionaire, would one eat dinner in a Dubai-influenced, Las Vegas version of Turkish-Middle Eastern exquisite luxury, pitched somewhere between president Erdoğan’s palace and Jafar’s gaff in Aladdin?
Related: Belzan restaurant review | Grace Dent
Continue reading...