RANT - Benu

Let's just start with a combined gastronimic and economic warning - don't waste your time and hard-earned cash eating at Benu. 

The plaudits garnered from various culture magazines and repeated on Benu's web site must've been written after industrial-sized samplings from the great wine list, rather than experiencing the microscopic scraps of food on the fussy flop of a menu. 

We had the tasting menu - 19 items (yes, 19 items) each - which revealed several things: 

• Way too much time is spent arranging tiny amounts of food into pretty little shapes, and no time at all is spent making sure those ingredients taste good
• The huge feeling of disappointment as each dish is delivered, and each dish cover is removed, doesn't diminish over the 2.5 hours it takes to pick through the menu
• Most of the dishes on the 'tasting' menu have no real taste whatsoever; this is a culinary feat in itself .. using so many normally tasty ingredients and rendering them taste-less
• I'm already repeating myself: the food was taste-less and massively overpriced. 

Service was impeccable, but not good enough to make Benu worth another visit.