The Red Duster's menu, featuring Marmite potatoes and chicken liver with peanut butter, simply doesn't work
The Red Duster, 37 High Street, West Cowes, Isle of Wight (01983 290 311). Meal for two, including wine and service, £95
Words never fail me, but occasionally the will does. Sometimes when dinner has let me down, I close my eyes and try to find my happy place, the one with all the food that makes sense in it. For a few days after eating at the Red Duster in Cowes I struggled with how I was going to write about it. I considered bigging it up as a work of postmodern genius, a culinary game to rank alongside the moment in Mike Leigh's film Life Is Sweet when budding chef Timothy Spall declares his new menu will include black pudding and camembert soup, liver in lager and pork cyst. I quickly realised that would be tiresome. Anyway, the kitchen at the Red Duster thinks it's OK to sauté potatoes in Marmite. In the face of that, whimsy and satire scribble a despondent letter of resignation, and leg it.
The Red Duster looks like a cross between a bordello and a Torquay guest house. There are fountains of red napkin exploding from the glassware, church pews to perch on and on the walls, paper embossed with a leaf pattern in scarlet. No need to look at that for too long, for the menu descriptions are there to distract you. I especially liked the cannelloni made with "basil-enthused pasta". How does one enthuse pasta exactly? Do the chefs run around the kitchen tickling the dough with fronds of the stuff, shouting: "Cheer up, mate, it might never happen"?
My sauté of chicken liver and bacon "satay" was no less bonkers. Chicken livers. Peanut butter. And bacon. Believe me. However hard you try, nothing good could ever come of that, and nothing did. It was a mess of something dark and heartbroken. Duck & Waffle, which I reviewed a few weeks back, served drunk food; this is food for drunks whose partners have abandoned them, leaving them with an almost empty fridge. By comparison the hot smoked mackerel on a rhubarb and ginger relish sounded relatively sane. The brilliance here lay in the kitchen's ability to flatten the fillet's skin and stamp it with creases of the sort you normally only find in the shop-bought vacuum-packed kind. It came with two equally industrial-looking slices of brown bread and an undersweetened mess of rhubarb.
Onwards. Reasonably well-cooked fillets of sea bass came swaddled in a deadening blanket of unseasoned over-reduced cream. Alongside them were "laver bread croutes", which is what happens when you put that Welsh seaweed mush between two greased pieces of bread and into a Breville sandwich maker. Sweet and sharp chocolate-brushed duck – a version of which genuinely was on Timothy Spall's menu – brought chewy animal cooked to the grey of a winter seascape. It tasted of the sweet counter at WH Smith. The roasted sweet potatoes and butternut squash didn't really help. At least there was the distraction of those potatoes sautéed in Marmite, in a puddle of fat so deep you could measure it with an engine dipstick. Oh god. Never again.
The red velvet and cherry millefeuille, a take on Black Forest gâteau, stood out for being sensible and reasonably well executed. It was sweet; it was "bring me my insulin" sweet. But that's not necessarily a failing. Our other dessert, the vanilla chocolate-box surprise, sounded like a full-colour spread from the politically incorrect pages of Razzle, circa 1983. Never order anything with the word "surprise" in the title. Here the surprise was that, if you don't know what you're doing, you can turn what's meant to be a chocolate torte into something with the consistency of hard, cold butter.
If any of this was dirt cheap it might not have mattered, but it wasn't. Main courses are in the high teens, with some topping £25. Service, by a sweet young couple, is kind and efficient. It really wasn't their fault they had to bring us all the things we had to eat. Or didn't, as the case may be.