Seveni Bar and Restaurant, London: ‘As boisterous inside as it looks outside’ – review | Jay Rayner

With its fantastical decor and smoking BBQs, dining at Seveni calls for a sense of adventure

Seveni Bar and Restaurant, 82 Kennington Road, London SE11 6NL (020 3795 9921). Skewers £1.40 - £5.50. Starters £5.50 - £7.50. Main dishes £8.80 -£18. BBQ minimum spend £35

I come across the restaurants I review in many different ways: through sniffing the smoke-cured air in city streets, or stopping hopefully in front of menus in windows; through clicking bravely on links fired at me in emails and scanning press releases for words of promise. I came across Seveni, opposite the Imperial War Museum in south London, because I drove past it at night and it looked bonkers. It occupies a one-storey, many-sided space at the bottom of a neo-brutalist tower block like some geological outcrop. Through the plateglass windows can be glimpsed a low ceiling hung with twinkling, white Club Tropicana fairy lights. A series of hoses of the sort Noo-Noo had for a nose in Teletubbies appear to dangle from the edges of the ceiling.