And into this blackness appears the restaurant manager, who is absolutely lovely and very enthusiastic, while also resembling a Tim Burton character who would be deeply into A Flock of Seagulls. Like when Adrian Mole painted over his Noddy wallpaper. I mean, literally: Fiend’s walls are black. However, at Fiend one can take bohemian to mean that diners should prepare to be relaxed, groovy and open to anything, or, if you’re over 35, able to fake “groovy” in short, ebullient bursts, while rearranging your bifocals to read the menu in a room that is darker than Margate Shell Grotto.

The word bohemian used in conjunction with restaurants always raises alarms, as I envisage a Helena Bonham Carter type smoking in a room that smells of stale orchids and cat piss. This, I read, will be a “provocative, rebellious and inspired” evening of eating “kurobuta belly with eel glaze and rock samphire” or “diver scallop with yellow sauce and kent mango” or other sentences ringing with Ks and Zs that sit on the menu like barbed wire, not even attempting to sound delicious but, rather, intriguing.īaked celeriac at Fiend, London W10: ‘Possibly the most delicious thing I’ve eaten this year.’ Photograph: Karen Robinson/The Guardianįiend is “vibrant, bohemian” and in the “epicentre” of Portobello. Fiend’s website merely underlines the idea that one is about to be ambushed. “He speaks as he finds,” as my old gran would say. A shufti through the interviews the chef gave about his previous venture, the cult hit 108 Garage, brings up some refreshingly unfiltered quotes. You’d need to be a specific kind of chef to set up a rather dark, strange restaurant on Portobello Road and call yourself Fiend.Ĭhris Denney is that person. Fiend, to my mind, is a demonic, possibly green, gnome-like being, waiting in a dark alley on behalf of Satan himself.

It began with the name, which does not whisper equanimity, dreaminess or deliciousness. S ome restaurants lurk in my diary for weeks, instilling mild anxiety rather than joyful anticipation.

Hex fiend review