Keith Miller reviews Victors, Oxford: 'It's designed to look good - so long as you don't look too closely'

"Ah, Baudelaire!” sighs Uncle Monty in Withnail & I, “Brings back such memories of Oxford.” Monty, a noted aesthete (“I happen to think the cauliflower more beautiful than the rose”), is presumably recalling the city of dreaming spires in its prelapsarian state, before the chokehold of the one-way system and the dismal reign of the Park and Ride, when the loudest thing you’d hear as you pottered along the High was a reedy tenor bleating about the First World War over the chirrup of a thousand bicycle bells.

He’d have been horrified by the Seventies shopping centre known as Westgate, and he’d have seen through later attempts to pretty it up with a few postmodernist joists. But its most recent incarnation might have rather pleased him: the smooth masonry walls, the long noiseless escalators, the great round window glaring banefully out at the war memorial like the Eye of Sauron, the fantastic views from the roof. You can never tell, with aesthetes.

Before dinner at Victors, a new “Hamptons-inspired” dining destination atop Westgate (there’s another one in Cheshire) we hauled ourselves up to the bar for cocktails. The auguries weren’t good: they didn’t have dry vermouth or olives, so we couldn’t go old school (the slack-jawed horror on the face of our bartender when we asked for two dry martinis suggested that the results might have been unimpressive if we had).

But the drinks we chose from the list had a sort of Alice in Wonderland sense of whimsy and inventiveness, with vivid colours, little flasks of dry ice on the side and neat herbal folderols tucked in the top. Plus (crucially) they’d gone easy on the sugar syrup.

The bar is separated from the dining area by a glass partition. Assuming that by “Hamptons” they intend the suite of tony mini-resorts in the western part of Long Island, they’re aiming wide of the mark: the East Coast beachy vibe of clapboard, stripes, lobster pots, unexpected shark attacks etc is nowhere in evidence.

Instead they’ve turned the space into a sort of indoor-outdoor courtyard affair, with swooshy cascades of fake wisteria, washed brick walls, arched windows and soft swathes of faux candlelight. It made me think of California, not that I’ve ever been there – the French Laundry in Napa Valley is festooned in shrubbery, though I imagine theirs is real.

Victors’ commitment to the ersatz doesn’t end there: outside, on the optimistically named Kitchen Quad, lies a square of AstroTurf for summertime al fresco dining – either that, or it’s somewhere staff can practise their golf swings in quiet periods – who knows?

We peered through the gloaming at the menu. Here, too, what was on offer seemed to us a distinctly West Coast-tinged fusion of Asian and Mediterranean influences, with some perplexing overlaps and double-takes – they have a raw bar and a sashimi selection; you can get your smoked tofu in a bao bun or on one of “Victors’ Rolls”. Though maybe such a plurality ought to be welcomed in the interests of unfettered choice – let a hundred bao buns bloom!

We ordered in a fairly scattershot way, which I guess is kind of the point. After the martini fiasco we didn’t quite trust them to get their black cod £32 worth of right, so we opted for a more keenly priced three-bun deal: one black cod, one popcorn chicken, one softshell crab. All three were, let’s say, blameless – though the buns were stickier than they might have been, and the chicken might have had a bit more crunch.

“Li’l lobster rolls” – probably the most Long Islandish thing on the menu – were great, if not hugely endowed with lobster (the clue’s in the name, maybe) and overdependent, like a lot of Victors’ dishes, on a punchy sauce.

My friend leant over. “Of course,” she said, “if they really wanted us to share, everything would have to come in lots of 12. That’s the lowest common multiple of two, three and four…” I said I knew it was “…so any table of up to four could share fairly. Five and upwards, you’d just have to duke it out.”

I happen to know that she finds sharing small plates with me stressful, as I eat faster than she does, and I guessed that was actually what this was about, so I just nodded.

We moved on to a couple of heftier dishes: a vaguely Polpo-ish pizzetta with pulled short rib and sour-sweet onions, and a chicken paillard which was dressed in a summery marinade, but the meat was flavourless. “Everything’s great on the outside but sort of generic underneath – except the bao buns, which were great in the middle and got worse as you worked your way outwards,” said my friend. I said I thought she was on to something.

Victors is a perfect specimen of the restaurant as Potemkin village: like the room, the food is designed to look good if you don’t look at it too closely. It’s ideal for a night out, if you don’t mind fake wisteria and flavourless chicken – there was a real buzz in the room, with lots of tables of two, three, four and even five, necking prosecco, sharing small plates, trading stories.

But the menu has something feckless about it, a kind of pointless eclecticism; a reluctance to pick a lane, to decide on a thing to be good at and then try to be good at it. Despite some plus points (the lobster rolls, the pizza, the raw bar) I’d counsel hungry Oxonians – even American ones – to come to Victors for a cocktail, soak up the views and then hail a passing Park and Ride in the direction of elsewhere.