THE GILGAMESH RESTAURANT LOUNGE is reviewed in the Sunday Times by A. A. Gill. He ate there with Jeremy Clarkson. British readers will immediately grasp the epic cultural significance of this event. It is hard to explain to others. Clarkson is known for his television shows about fast cars, his politically incorrect Sunday Times column (e.g., here), and for generally being politically incorrect in a loutish but boyishly endearing way. As Gill notes, he would make a fair Enkidu. Gill is an acerbic television and restaurant critic who has a gift for finding just the right nouns and verbs to describe bad food. He's too metrosexual to make a proper Gilgamesh, but when the two get together, the comparison almost works -- at least as a parody.

He gives the Gilgamesh three stars (of five), which is an okay rating for Gill. His description of the restaurant deserves to be quoted. After an account of how Camden Market has changed from the time when it used to consist of three hippies, he tell us:

It’s astonishing. You get in up an escalator. The main dining room is huge, and must seat up to 300 people. It has a retractable glass ceiling, three storeys high, and decoration that makes Cecil B DeMille look like St Francis of Assisi. The Babylonian theme has been extravagantly extemporised. Every surface is covered in bas-relief and woodcarvings taken from the great collection in the British Museum. These aren’t copies, they’re proper Bollywood pastiches, handmade in India.

Triumphal Babylonians peer down at you with a severe mien. Ancient Babylon didn’t have much of a sense of levity or tomfoolery. The cuneiform joke book was a very short tablet: “So, there was this Sumerian, this Assyrian and a Jew...” By way of light relief are the long pietra dura bar, made in the style of the Italian Renaissance, and some Chinese dragons nesting under the eves. To add to the theatrical effect, the lighting changes in a slow disco spectrum, bathing you in blue, green and red to match the music, which is part sword-and-sandals epic soundtrack and part sing-along pop classic.

The customers are a mixture of taxi drivers with their mistresses, Essex tanning-parlour magnates with both their mistresses, media workers with their boyfriends and a lot of girls who appear to be in search of a footballer. Some of the waiting staff wear curly radio earphones. Whether these are a simple style affectation or channel ancient voices, I don’t know. It doesn’t make them any more efficient.

The mise en scène is incongruously, but grandly, finished off with a coup de théâtre. The sports-dome ceiling opens onto the goods track to King’s Cross. Every five minutes, locos pulling containers of Korean gearboxes and German nail-polish remover emit ferrous screams 20ft from your table. The effect is stupefying.

And the food? I won't quote the whole section, but here are a couple of excerpts:

... Despite the cacophony of the room, the number of covers and the distraction of so many Wag wannabes, the food is actually very good: well made, with clear flavours, imaginative combinations and attractive presentation. If you feel you’ve eaten a lot of it before, that’s because it is becoming London’s regional cuisine.

[...]

So, to recap: there’s this Babylonian restaurant, decorated from India, serving Japanese-Chinese food, cooked by a Welshman, for Londoners from every corner of the world. It’s culturally incoherent. But before you sneer, it’s not socially so. This is what the melting pot looks like. And it’s certainly an improvement on three hippies.

Also, it's expensive (£200 for three people). But, again, this is fairly positive as Gill reviews go and means he liked it pretty well.