Baroque

The List's Eating & Drinking Guide 2009 is now in the shops. This review is taken from the 2007 edition.

You'd have called it a style bar back in the heady days of the late-90s, but Broughton Street's Baroque is no longer the epicentre of cool. Posing pre-club queens now move on to hipper joints and Baroque's former core clientele has either mutated into - or been supplanted by - latte-d up 20 and thirtysomethings pouring over their laptops, taking advantage of the free wireless internet. But this really is still a bar, complete with fruit machines and big screen tellies. The sprawling menu stumbles into several corners of the culinary globe. Continental, Chinese, Med and especially Tex-Mex are represented by some - at times - unexpected dishes, such as chorizo, coriander and ginger fritters, and chicken, sweet potato and coconut chowder with corn pancakes. There are plenty of conventional salads, wraps and pasta dishes too. But this amount of choice confirms a feeling that this place is spreading itself too thin. There is nothing appetising about the slimy onions and past-it peppers in the red Thai curry, and it's a bit of a low blow to see 'home-made spring rolls' on the menu and only to receive one. A recent change in ownership should signal improvements that, on the food front, are most necessary indeed.

• High point: Get wireless internet access with your pint
• Low point: Those veggies in that red curry