Review: Maai, Clapham

After four weeks in Greece on a (delicious!) diet of spanakopita, yogurt & honey, stifado, grilled octopus and moussaka I was ready for some stylish and refined London dining. Enter Maai: a new neighbourhood restaurant in chichi Abbeville Road from a recent Masterchef and Great British Menu winner, Nikita. It’s a lovely dining room, warm and inviting decor with seriously comfortable chairs. Service is also top-notch and friendly with it – something hard to pin down that tells you its a family business.

The chaat tartlet is a nicely refined dollop of chaat, bright yogurt and sweetly-sour tamarind flavours, on one of those little tiny pastry cases used for amuse bouches the (Michelin) world over. The takoyaki donut is a more serious affair, a chewily satisfying little donut dusted with plenty of lip-tingling spices and filled with salty nuggets of cuttlefish. Good snacking.

The other dishes we shared were steak tartare from the starter-ish section, a mussel crumpet from the next section, and monkfish from the larger mains section. The tartare was made up from very good beef – full flavoured but also a lovely texture – and the gochujang made a warming addition, albeit too delicately for me. Rice crackers made for a nice way to enjoy it. The mussel crumpet was just that: a little cluster of plump, sweet mussels on top of a nicely toasted crumpet with just the right chewy, yeasty interior, surrounded by a pool of cosily gently curry sauce. Lovely combo that tasted better than it plated.

The monkfish was “tare glazed” which I confess I had to look up, but is basically the mixture of soy sauce, mirin, sake and sugar that I use in a lot of our Japanese home cooking. On this occasional it didn’t really show up, though the monkfish was nicely roasted with a little caramelisation. The bed of onion puree added some much needed flavour, the confit carrots were nice enough, the crisp chicken skin bits on top were tasty. I’m afraid I just can’t help damning this dish with faint praise: it looked okay-ish, was well cooked, tasted fine. And was £34, of course.

Pudding was lovely: a really scrummy walnut financier, two quarters of softly, sweetly caramelised comice pear that were dreamy to eat, and a good chunk of ripe Pevensey blue cheese that paired perfectly with the rest.

I basically enjoyed my meal at Maai, while feeling that the dishes didn’t quite live up to their high price-point. It’s really great cooking for a neighbourhood restaurant, you’d be lucky to have it nearby, and yet the dishes as presented didn’t quite match up to the decor or the bill.