StreetXO restaurant review: a riot of excess

Dabiz Muñoz’s

Dabiz Muñoz’s London restaurant shows how
too much of a good thing can sometimes be a very good thing

Review Arion McNicoll

Circus Maximus

Fancy your cocktail in a glass the size of your head? Or maybe
served in a prosthetic heart, a Chinese takeaway box or a
hollowed-out coconut? If so, you have come to the right place. And
even if you might have opted for more conventional cocktail
receptacles before visiting StreetXO’s brilliantly over-the-top
CircusXO bar, you’ll be won over by head bartender Nikolai Clerc’s
penchant for the showily unconventional. 

Excessive as it all is, the enthusiasm of the team is infectious
and it would take a hard heart not to enjoy drinking from a glass
the size of a fishbowl by the end of your first glass the size of a
fishbowl. It is all too much… gloriously too much.

My favourite drink of the evening is unquestionably the
Tokyo-Jerez, which comes served with a prawn’s head, which the
bartender encourages me to slurp on before taking a sip of my
cocktail. The crustacean adds a shot of pure umami to the
herb-infused sherry and smoky soda drink that follows.

The Tokyo part of the cocktail’s title comes from the addition
of yuzu juice, a citrus fruit popular in Japan. Sucking the brains
out of a prawn’s head may sound unappetising, but it works
unexpectedly well with this refreshing cocktail.

Street life, it’s the only life I know

After finishing at the bar, we make our way through to the
restaurant. If you want to be right in the centre of the action,
head for one of the seats directly overlooking the kitchen. For a
quieter experience, slide into one of the leather booths that line
the edges of the room.

There is an à la carte menu if you have specific preferences,
but to get a wider taste of the wonders worked by head chef Dabiz
Muñoz, go for one of the tasting menus. This is not an exhortation
to spend a load of money: StreetXO has an express lunch tasting
menu for only £25 that takes you on a whistle-stop tour through
Muñoz’s greatest hits.

At the other end of the spectrum, the chef’s tasting menu
beckons for £100 per person, offering nine full courses. We aim for
the more moderate degustation menu (which admittedly still comes to
eight courses), order a couple of beers, and settle in.

The first two courses arrive at the same time and take the form
of light seaside bites. We kick off with “Irish Oysters on
Holiday to Acapulco!”, which is a thing of beauty. Served in a bowl
propped on what looks like the charred remains of a campfire, the
four oysters are swimming in a lime green gazpacho of jalapeño
& tomatillo verde, with drops of chlorophyll-rich olive
oil.

Beside them is Muñoz’s interpretation of fish and chips – eight
delicate slices of raw Japanese yellowtail, with a dollop of hot
sauce suspending a dried piece of yuzu and some small Rice
Krispies-like pieces of batter. The lot are scooped up by hand and
popped into the mouth, in a delicious sticky mess.

The mess continues into the next course, where Muñoz goes
totally Jackson Pollock with his Pekinese dumplings, a wonderfully
chaotic plate starring crunchy pig’s ear dumplings on a painterly
mix of strawberry hoisin, alioli and pickles.

The ramen of foie gras with barbecued Guinea fowl that follow is
a touch less exciting than I expected, but hot on its heels is
another showstopper: the “Galician Octopus who spoke Indian”. Thick
tentacles topped with squid ink crackers wrap their way around a
liquid centrepiece of roasted tomatoes and butter masala. It’s a
dish I would happily eat daily.

The savoury bombardment comes to a climactic finale with a dish
named “The Lamb who travelled: Paris-Lima-Canton”. Muñoz’s
slow-cooked milk-fed baby lamb shank is drizzled with a zigzag of
hot sauce and served on a bed of pomme purée à la Robuchon edged by
wisps of paper-thin pink cabbage.

To finish things off, Muñoz delivers a dessert of the day,
presumably according to his whim. For us, he prepares a
deconstructed cheesecake, served in an old-school ice-cream
container and broken down into its constituent parts; a dollop of
puree here, a wafer there, all on a bed of thick cream.
Delicious. 

A special mention must be made for the fabulous waiters, who
dazzle and charm from the moment we arrive. In a place as showy as
StreetXO, it takes a special kind of character to match the
extravagance of the décor and the ambition of the kitchen, but this
team manage it.  

From food to service, Muñoz’s restaurant is a riot of excess.
And while sometimes less may be more, in the case of StreetXO, more
is most definitely more.

Coming soon

For a taste of StreetXO and a dose of art, the restaurant is
partnering with the Mayfair Art Weekend to present The Mayfair
Modern Art and Lunch Experience on Saturday 30th June.

The event will comprise of a tour of some of London’s best-known
contemporary art galleries followed by lunch at StreetXO. For £90
per person, guests will get a seven-course meal including
StreetXO’s Pekinese dumplings and Steamed XO Club Sandwich as well
as the Cheesecake ice cream mentioned above. For more information
visit streetxo.com or www.mayfairartweekend.com

StreetXO, 15 Old Burlington St, London W1S 2JR; streetxo.com