We had not been in the pulsing gloom of Oma long when I caught sight of my neighbour’s napkin. Thoroughly swiped with the remnants of his wild red prawn giouvetsi, it looked like something grimly lowered into an evidence bag at a crime scene; a Rorschach test of scarlet blots and smears that had memorialised the messy, crustacea-squeezing work of a dish that is already internet famous. Later on in Agora, the conjoined sibling establishment that sits downstairs, members of the team carried a swaddled, whole pig carcass through thronging, dimly-lit crowds, like butchers stopping at a rave on the way to a delivery.
I’m not entirely sure why these are the most indelible images in my mind, following a couple of separate visits to restaurateur David Carter’s twin-pack of blockbusting Borough Market openings. But I think it might be because they exemplify the fact that these restaurants, and Oma in particular, draw their power from a kind of sophisticated primality. Though Oma presents as fancy, a sleek, griller’s Berghain of thudding house, seductive low-lighting and open kitchens with futuristic, check-on computer screens, it deals in rugged, head-down and elbows-out pleasures. At its best, it is both surprising and utterly scintillating.
