Archipelago

I'm not, if I'm honest, the world's most adventurous eater. I like food, and by my father's standards I'm positively audacious in my tastes, happily accepting cous cous as a standard carbohydrate accompaniment to many a dish, and knowing the difference between pastrami and Parma ham. Dammit, I've even named my blog (if with a certain sense of irony) after a posh salad leaf. At the same time, I'm still marvelling at the fact that my nephew-to-be eats olives as a standard part of his diet and can and does demand pizza "with artichoke hearts on it" (WHAT??? You're FOUR! What's wrong with Monster Munch and Dairylea?) and I'm inclined to avoid things with foreign names I can't pronounce. So Archipelago - a restaurant name, incidentally, which I've only just learned to spell - would not have been my first choice of venue.

Archipelago markets itself as providing "exotic cuisine in the heart of London", and to me this immediately begs the question: why? Why is there a need for "exotic" cuisine in South Camden, and anyway who defines what consitutes "exotic" in the first place? The aforementioned cous cous is considered the preserve of the terribly culturally-aware middle classes when labelled "Be Good To Yourself", sold for £2.99 and drowned in Philipo Berio, but it's a staple diet of much of the Middle East. Similarly, I should think Yorkshire pudding would be considered fairly exotic in, say, Indonesia, but this doesn't mean the Indonesians would necessarily want to start eating it. Certainly it seems to me that, given the diversity available in food in the UK these days, the not inconsiderable effort and money it must take to bring a crocodile over here and serve it up to me in a stew is probably not proportionate to the enjoyment I might then get out of eating it. I have heard tales of the weird and wonderful culinary experiences of friends who've travelled to far-off places (and, often, the effect it had on their respective digestive systems), I'm just not sure why you'd choose to have those culinary experiences just off Tottenham Court Road.

It doesn't help, perhaps, that the reason we are here in the first place is that the last time we all had a meal together, someone inadvertantly spoiled it by dropping dead in between the main course and the pudding, and UCL, in its well-meaning attempt to make ammends for this admittedly pretty awful experience, suggested a mere month after the event that we all went out for another meal together with the now-deceased notable by her absence. In fact, we are all feeling rather awkward and a little anxious, and perhaps not in the right state of mind to choose from a menu where we can barely identify most of what's on offer. In the same way that my Bradford-born dad thinks Tabbouleh is some sort of musical instrument, I'm confident that I wouldn't know what a gnu was even if it came up and bit me on the arse, so I am certainly in no position to decide whether or not I might fancy it as the main ingredient of a terrine.

Designed, I think, to look "exotic" and mysterious, the restaurant is laid out with all the order of a returned gap-year student's bedroom. Wooden elephants and little stone buddhas decorate the tables, the benches (possibly pews?) are covered with multi-tasselled, brightly-coloured cushions and throws, and mbiras, panpipes and what look like ill-conceived violins inexplicably adorn shelves around the room. The menus are little scrolls rolled up inside a jewelled metal box at the centre of the table, and the glasses could have come out of the cupboard of any self-respecting student, in that none of them match.

Unsurprisingly, perhaps, the most adventurous of our group turns out to be an Old Etonion who has indeed been on a gap year and has been globe trotting on and off ever since. He seems torn between the duck (that reliable staple of the Fine Diner's menu, but maybe a little too ordinary under the circumstances) and the crocodile, which he reliably informs me tastes like chicken. To me, this begs the question: why not just eat chicken? I would hazard a guess it's rather easier to get hold of a chicken in London than it is a crocodile, and I've no doubt they're considerably less bother to prepare in that you don't need to descale it first. After much deliberation he decides he can't pass up on this rare opportunity to savour a large carnivorous reptile, and meanwhile F orders the zebra. I took rather longer to make up my mind as there was not one item where I could confidently identify all the ingredients. I know perfectly well, for example, what a kangaroo is, but I've no idea what one would taste like after being "zhug marinated". Similarly, I'm somewhat suspicious as to how the "vegetarian option" of "wok-seared frogs' legs" (which incidentally also taste like chicken) would turn out, or how on earth you could have a vegetarian option of an amphibious-based dish in the first place. I won't tell you what I ordered but I can assure you you'd be disappointed.

Perhaps most amusingly - certainly it left me chuckling for days - was the "dessert". Spotting such choices as baklava I was much more in my comfort zone, it presumably appearing as there weren't any exotic mammals you could conceivably put into something sweet, though this didn't stop them trying. My right-hand neighbour ordered some safe-enough-sounding concoction called "Baby Bee Brule" which claimed to be "orange blossom honey and ginger stem brule"It arrived looking and smelling safely edible, until you noticed it had been unceremoniously decorated with a small dead bee. The dessert looked nice enough, but the little (presumably baby) insect that adorned it looked considerably put out.

I've been trying to work out since whether the staff were looking genuinely smug because they worked in such a reputable establishment and felt a cut above, or because they realised that z-list celebrities in a jungle eat this sort of thing as a test of macho endurance and to gross out the nation's viewers, whereas the likes of us gamely pay well over the odds for anything sold to us as "an experience". Yes, they saw us coming.