Le Must, Labone – restaurant review

Le Must is hard to miss. Built from those artfully irregular stones that all-inclusive resorts use when they’re trying to look rustic, it is harshly lit and surrounded by large, gaudy billboards that advertise the restaurant itself.

Inside, rote sophistication. A private dining room behind semi-frosted glass, a grand piano, chairs with those infuriating skirts around the legs so that you can’t tuck your ankles under them if the mood takes you. Some people like that stuff. The point, in view of what was to come, is what it costs to put it there and whether a serious restaurant might have spent the money elsewhere.

Though staff were friendly, quick and attentive, ordering was agony. Our server returned to tell me the lamb leg with prunes and beans was off because the kitchen had run out of prunes. Did I want potatoes instead? I did not, since the resemblance between potatoes and prunes ends at their being roughly the same shape.

Lamb fillet with honey and vinegar was also off. So was flash-seared tuna steak. Another waiter suggested a fillet steak, which I accepted on the grounds that it must therefore exist, and that an ostensibly French restaurant should be able to throw down a decent steak frites.

While we waited, another diner fought a running battle for a side of sauteed potatoes. I’ve no idea why it was delayed. Perhaps the chef accidentally sauteed some prunes. Nor am I sure whether the dish ever arrived, because in the interim someone handed me a plate bearing crinkle-cut freezer chips.

There was a fillet steak there too, and it was fine, as fillet steaks usually are. Their perfectly-fine-ness is exactly why I don’t usually order them. But next to the steak, where the frites were supposed to be, was a pile of crinkle-cut freezer chips. I stared at them for a while. “Dad used to give us those when we were children,” said Lucy.

The crinkle-cut freezer chips imply that Le Must either doesn’t care about food or thinks its customers don’t. Had the crinkle-cut freezer chips had the power of speech they might have told me which, and together we might have undertaken a moral comparison of the two positions. It would have been more interesting than eating them.

Lucy’s duck leg with apple was considerably better, though the meat was a little dry and the potatoes too heavy on both garlic and salt. Desserts were a fruit salad with ice cream – okay, but the watermelon, a cheap and widely available fruit in Ghana, was showing its age – and a tolerable tiramisu.

Finding it: On Orphan Crescent. Next to Churcheese, a ‘playplace’ and junkfood emporium that many taxi drivers seem to know. If approaching Labone from Cantonments Road, take the turn next to Morning Star School. Continue to the end of the road and turn right. You’ll see Le Must on your left.

If approaching from Josiah Tongogari Road, take the turn opposite-ish Labone Senior High School (it’s a bit further south than the school, nearer the junction with Ring Road) and follow the road when it curves round to the right. Le Must will be on your right just after the bend.

Regular tro-tros stop near both Morning Star and Labone High junctions.