Courtesan - restaurant review

Walk down Atlantic Road on a hot Thursday night without peeking into the epicurious bits of Brixton Market and it’s like gentrification never happened. Here’s a bin full of chicken gizzards, a bloke asking anyone and everyone if they want to buy “his” bike, a doorway stall cranking out crunk, or somesuch. Here is the Dogstar, looking like it did in 1985. Just beyond, though, is a smattering of new neighbourhood restaurants, bars and galleries, and among them is the Courtesan.

This forbiddingly red-painted former shop is where owner and industrial designer Hammant Patel Villa hopes to marry his “passion for Oriental food” to a hipster-luring list of cocktails, prosecco and exotic teas. The Chinese chefs have apparently “worked in top W1 restaurants”. Despite an interior dominated by dark wood and antique birdcages, it’s busy. Dunno why, because this is the dimmest dim sum experience I’ve ever had, and not cheap.

The staff are nice and friendly, on the rare occasions when they swing by our table, to knock things over or put their fingers in our food. Cocktails take an age to arrive and when they do my wife Ann’s Courtesan (cherry liqueur, Wyborowa, prosecco) is unmixed and my Elderflower and Cucumber Collins seriously underpowered. We order a mixture of dishes which all arrive pretty much at once.

From the list of specials, jerk chicken parcel in rice, a fusion-y nod to the area, is actively nasty: gobbets of leg meat with no appreciable seasoning in a slurry of lukewarm grains. Wagyu and rib-eye sliders are a rare and succulent high point but served with a chilly disc of lettuce and indifferent sauces. Pricing is erratic: £5.90 for some woodily undercooked Chinese broccoli. The wine list is short and supposedly sourced from Bibendum but a large glass of Conde Villar Vinho Verde (£7.50) is all chemical fizz.

At 8.30pm they’d run out of two of the eight puddings: the chocolate cake was fine because it was shop-bought. By 8.45 we are out of there, reflecting that for the same price we could have had excellent dim sum at the Royal China in Queensway. Or eaten well from almost any other cuisine in the countless superior restaurants that gentrification has brought to Brixton.

69-73 Atlantic Road, SW9 (020 8127 8677, thecourtesan.co.uk). Open noon-12pm Mon-Thur and Sun, noon-2am Fri and Sat. A meal for two, about £100.