Restaurant review: Beard to Tail, London.

77 Curtain Road, London EC2 (020 7729 2966)
Meal for two, including drinks and service £110

I like the name of this week's restaurant. Beard to Tail could be a dodgy website catering to niche tastes, and that's always going to make me snigger. I also liked reading the menu. It's as filthily written as Beard to Tail sounds: bourbon BBQ ribs, baked bone marrow with soft herbs, wild-boar faggots, braised pork cheeks, offal salad, meaty beans. Beard to Tail is the literal translation of the French phrase that gives us the word barbecue. You get its shtick. And now you'll know why I booked a table. The menu could have had a subhead that reads: "We wrote this for you, Rayner – get here!"Reading is probably the only thing you'll enjoy doing at this joint. After eating there I wanted to nick the menu and give it to someone with enough talent to realise its potential. It is one long masterclass in disappointment. It's a wretched indictment of a gruesome kind of Shoreditch hipsterism which turns perving over dirty burgers into a spectator sport. It's all "pimp this" and "drool over that". It's the ballad of saturated animal fats, which is a song I like to sing; sadly, this lot cannot carry the tune. They've made such a bloody effort to be on trend – the website booking, the 90-minute table allocations, the Greenwich Village bare-brick walls, the industrial fittings, the stygian gloom so dense you think you've developed macular degeneration between the door and the table – and have forgotten the one thing that matters: cooking properly.We arrive for our 9pm table to be told they can't do the crispy pigs' ears or crackling and that they've run out of trotters stuffed with bacon, sage and onion. All the extremities are off. So we order a half-rack of ribs, which come with a thin, bitter dipping sauce. In a town which has finally got a handle on real barbecue these are a dismal offering: a big whack of sweet and salt and not much else. If they went near a smoker rather than the oven, it's not obvious. The bone marrow dish is much worse. The marrow/herb mixture is so dry and powdery you don't know whether to eat it or snort it; the mix is stuffed inside lengths of sawn bones which are clearly reused time and again. Worse still is a feeble portion of overcooked and under-seasoned duck livers on toast from what looks like sliced bread.

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