Name: Caravan
Address: Granary Building, 1 Granary Square, London, King's Cross, N1C 4AA, UK
Telephone: +44 (0) 20 7101 7661
Rating: 5

Caravan in King’s Cross is the second outpost of the restaurant and coffee roastery of the same name in Exmouth Market. In-keeping with the area’s sensitivities (wasteland turns hip foodie mecca), they’ve gone for regulation industrial warehouse chic, lit by subtle candlelight at this time of night. The building is in the Granary Square complex, also home to a faction of Central Saint Martins and soon-to-open Grain Store from Bruno Loubet.

After we were seated a group of six people turned up, one of whom we knew, and asked if they could sit with us by moving tables together. This made us a total of nine, always a bit of a bugbear for restaurants, and we immediately sensed the panic around us, although they had their own booking and we asked to be treated like two separate parties. We were advised several times by different members of staff that the food would arrive as and when ready unless we chose from a set menu. We assured them this would be fine, as we were all ordering small plates.

Then hilarity ensued. An order for wagyu sirloin went like this:
“Would you like your steak medium rare?”
“Can I have it rare?”.
“No”.
“Do I have to have it medium rare?
“Medium rare? Yes, no problem!”.

Next the waitress mixed two different wines together. She placed a clean, empty glass on the table for one of the group to sample the new wine, only to remove it afterwards and pour it into her old glass, which still had some of a previous wine in it. Both were the same colour at least.

So was the food any good? It’s hard to say, as out of the three dishes I ordered only one turned up. I had a very rich, very cheesy dish of grits with girolles that were slick with oil, luckily there was some tasty caramelised onion and Parmesan pizza bread left over to mop it up with. Our ever helpful waitress (who, where credit is due, was very nice, if on an entirely different movie set) returned to say the kitchen had run out of breaded oysters without offering me a look at the menu, so I decided to wait for the chopped chicken livers with PX prunes before deciding on another dish. Alas, they never appeared, and there was no record of them being ordered. Everyone else had pretty much finished eating by then and I was too exasperated to ask for anything else.

Others had problems too. A huge, gloopy portion of burrata didn’t come with bread, and then they could only offer a doorstopper slice of slightly dry focaccia which didn’t really work with the gooey cheese. The medium rare wagyu was a perfectly pleasant cut of beef, a little pink in the middle, with mashed potato and a very mild wasabi salsa. There was a crispy duck egg with smoky babaganoush that was a good combo, but nothing to write home about, in fact the egg could have done with a teensy bit less cooking. This may sound like nit-picking but I really wanted to love Caravan, comedy and all, it’s just that each time a glimmer of hope appeared on the horizon I ended up hungry or disappointed.

And then they delivered the final blow. Despite priding themselves on having their own roastery on-site, it was here that I had the worst cup of espresso I have ever tasted. Just to give you the measure of how acrid this coffee was, it was akin to having my tastebuds singed off with burning plastic. My partner agreed, and just to make sure we weren’t moaning in tandem we passed the cup for others to try. No, it was definitely bad.

Admittedly it’s busy for a Tuesday night, but it’s also a big space with 80 covers. Does joining two tables together really result in mayhem and coffee-scorching? Answers on the back of a postcard please.

Monday	Open 08:00 - Closes 22:30
Tuesday	Open 08:00 - Closes 22:30
Wednesday	Open 08:00 - Closes 23:00
Thursday	Open 08:00 - Closes 23:00
Friday	Open 08:00 - Closes 00:00
Saturday	Open 10:00 - Closes 00:00
Sunday	Open 10:00 - Closes 16:00

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