Alfresco Dining at Del'Aziz
Eating out on the first sunny day of the year
What better way to celebrate the arrival of spring than to find somewhere to sit out in the sunshine, just to make sure we didn't miss a single drop of it? There was a holiday atmosphere when we arrived at Del'Aziz on Westfield's Southern Terrace. The restaurant's folding doors had been thrown open so that even those dining inside could enjoy the weather, while we were lucky enough to arrive just as a much-coveted outside table was being vacated.
Del'Aziz describes itself as serving Mediterranean food, but the menu covers a much wider area and offers several Iranian dishes as well as a whole variety of burgers, all made from 'grass-fed Scottish beef'. Perhaps 'fusion food' would be a better way of describing what's on offer here: you could quite happily start with a mussels and pepper salad (£4.50) followed by a Del'Aziz humous burger (£5.50) or perhaps a chicken tajine (£10.50) with a bit of tomato ketchup or HP sauce on top.
Disappointingly, the Xpress lunch, which was advertised at being £6 a throw and served to your table in 10 minutes or less, was unavailable and the waitress was unable to explain why. Perhaps it had something to do with the number of waiting staff present (two) because it took them far longer than ten minutes just to bring us our drinks. Thankfully, the house white wine, an Italian Trebbiano, was worth waiting for.
From the extensive menu, we ordered a Moroccan harira soup (£4.50), Persian minced lamb kebab (£10), and a salmon dish from the 'specials' menu (£13).
As we were in holiday mode, we had nothing more to think about, while waiting for our food, than to admire to purple flowers growing at the top of the grassy wall in front of us and wonder how on earth you could go about mowing a vertical lawn? How would you stop the grass cuttings falling into the water feature below? How many people would you need to clip the thing with shears? How do you plant grass on a wall anyway?
The soup arrived in a clay bowl and was tomatoey with what seemed to be bits of egg in it. Not as spicy as we had hoped, but nice all the same. The main courses were served on enormous plates. The generously-proportioned salmon dish came with mashed potato and a creamy prawn sauce and was both tasty and filling. However, the lamb kebabs, served with saffron rice, had spent a little too long on the grill and were not the tender meat that you would get in an Iranian restaurant.
Having settled into my holiday lethargy, I then discovered that if I wanted any dessert – and I did - I would have to get up and select it myself as there was no dessert menu. I suspect this is a ploy to get customers into the main part of the restaurant where they can see what else is for sale on the floor-to-ceiling shelves: olive oils, chutneys, different types of pasta and some very luxurious-looking chocolate. You can also buy a whole range of kitchenware items such as painted ceramics, wooden bowls, Turkish coffee pots, Moroccan mint tea glasses, and tagine pots.
Dessert was a selection of cakes of the marble and banana variety as well as a couple of choclatey creations and some generously-sized meringues. We went for a huge slab of flapjack to share. This was just too healthy for its own good and contained, amongst other things, whole nuts, whole dried apricots and whole cherries all covered in syrup. A delight to the taste buds but, fearing a visit to the dentist might become necessary, I didn't go too far with it. Perhaps we should have gone for a light and fluffy sponge after all.
To finish off, we ordered a beautiful silver teapot-full of mint tea, which we drank out of delicate, small glasses.
Lunch for two, including wine, cost us £50.57. Not exactly a credit crunch lunch but mostly good, interesting food and the opportunity to eat alfresco on a sunny day. What a shock to emerge and find we were still in Shepherd's Bush. Having been surrounded by the smell of mint tea on one side and shisha smoke on the other, I could have sworn we were somewhere on the southern Mediterranean. Southern Terrace as it turned out.
Yasmine Estaphanos
16 March 2009
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