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'Sometimes you've just got to lie back and enjoy it'
I'm slinking into this review via the back door. No more boring the bahookie off us with pimped comfort food, I said. Or dude food or dirrrty food or whatever: enough already. So it's anyone's guess what I'm doing with a deeply boozy bloody mary in front of me, its glass crusted with steak salt, looking at a bowl piled high with gherkins, peppers and olives, and about to take possession of fries topped with buttered fried egg with gooey mornay sauce and mayo for overkill.
Ignoring this trend ain't going to make it go away. I've ignored a gazillion new burger joints, fried chicken dealers and hotdogeries, and still they keep coming. So why cave for this one? A place touting what has been described as America's best burger? That features French dips, bologna sandwiches (aka baloney, the US's trashiest cold cut) and desserts big as labrador puppies? I could drone on about the place's pedigree: it's basically an outpost of Chicago's wildly celebrated Au Cheval, in partnership with the Soho House Group– shared dishes, similar look – with that "gourmet greasy spoon's" chef owner, the marvellously named Brendan Sodikoff, consulting. I could do that, but sometimes you've just got to lie back and enjoy it.
And I am enjoying it. The tunnel-shaped room may brandish all the tiled floor, rusty light fittings, faux-pitted table tops and ox-blood booths of the knowing diner homage, but Electric Diner is less Brooklyn ripoff and more like somewhere you'd find in the US's less self-regarding cities: Boston, maybe, or Au Cheval's hometown. A place not designed for earnest, neophile tweeters, but where business is done over "strong drinks" by suited chaps who look like Alec Baldwin. Being Notting Hill, there are a fair few glossy suits, plus leggy trustafarian gals glued to smartphones and what look like wealthy rappers.
In the galley kitchen, with its heat-belching salamanders and flat-top griddles, the line chefs perform a balletic dance, tossing and flipping, assembling and drizzling, their good humour permeating the packed room. We've got a proper, grown-up waiter, knowledgeable, grizzled, with just the right amount of flirtatious twinkle. He piles on the dishes as they issue from the kitchen – you can only tell if they're starters/mains/whatever by the price point. It's a carnival of immoderation – even bibb lettuce salad comes laden with avocado and creamy, ranch-style dressing. There's an obscene-looking hotdog – brioche bun, smoky, dense sausage with just the right amount of snap, onion jam. Chopped liver is a Jewish deli classic, rich with chicken fat and arriving with a tub of butter in case your arteries aren't packing up fast enough. Everything comes with brioche, even one unforgettable dish: woolly mammoth-sized bones stuffed with wibbly marrow, the lot anointed with beef cheek marmalade, a ripe, sweet, meaty sludge.
Lemon meringue pie is deliciously silly, vertiginously vast. It's the kind of thing you goggle at on Man V Food, but done beautifully, the crumb base crisp, the meringue fluffy and ethereal, the lemon filling not the bland pap you get in yer actual diners, but sharp and tart as a scold.
If I have a criticism, it's the sweetness of everything else. But it goes with the territory: if you order something called beef cheek marmalade, you get what you deserve. Kvetching about fatty sweetness here is as redundant as complaining that salt'n'vinegar crisps are too salty and vinegary. It reminds me of Long Island's shortlived cult diner M Wells, which prided itself on the eye-popping richness of its offerings (foie gras, grilled cheese, horse bologna sarnie, anyone?).
No, I don't have the famous burger. I could say I'm sticking to my guns, when really I'm only human and there's only so much fat and salt and sugar even I can do. But if you fancy killing yourself with what might be styled "grande bouffe, yo", this is as good a place to do it as any.
• Electric Diner 191 Portobello Road, London W11, 020-7908 9696 (no reservations). Open all week, 8am-midnight (1am Fri-Sun). Three courses from about £25 a head, plus drink and service.
Food 7/10
Atmosphere 8/10
Value for money 8/10
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