Please note that since writing this blog post, Coffee & Jazz has closed down
‘The clue is in the title’, ‘does what it says on the tin’: idioms with which I seem to pepper my language. I’m not quite sure what the opposite of these expressions is, but Coffee & Jazz exemplifies it. Or rather, the jazz bit is right but the restaurant’s USP is not the coffee. Or, in fact, to be really pedantic, I wouldn’t know because I didn’t have any.
Coffee & Jazz is in fact an Indonesian restaurant. It’s not often that I get recommendations for Indonesian food, so I’d been curious about this one for a while. The occasion was the visit of my good friend, genre-defying academic and supporter of my literary endeavours, Simon. We hadn’t seen each other in over a year, so we decided to sack the concept of a menu (it appeared to be largely in Indonesian, and therefore unintelligible to us anyway) in favour of placing our dinner in the hands of the eccentric restaurant owner, whose seventies haircut, drug-abused skin and penchant for extracting-the-Michael inspired us with immediate confidence. Yes.
In fact, his approach rather lent itself to the kind of laissez-faire mood we were in. If you want a choice of more than one house wine, look elsewhere. But if you’re prepared to accept that a Keith Richards look-a-like knows more than you about which type of wine to drink with Indonesian food, then C&J is the way forward. With our rather excellent saté skewers, we had a South African Chardonnay-Sauvignon Blanc blend that was aptly named ‘Goed Gevonden’. Yes, the clue was in that title.