Canteen

I was planning to write about nostalgia right from the start, even before I was accosted by a ghost from the past. I really was. Everything else was just coincidence.

It was like this: I was driving into Spitalfields on a Sunday morning, on my own, for lunch at a place called Canteen, and all I had for music in the car was the single remaining CD from a set of 20 discs of Hits of the Eighties, because a local hoodlum has a copy of my car-door key, though not my ignition key, and steals anything I leave in there overnight, such as compact discs, half-drunk cappuccinos, small pets, mud.

Now, I don’t know if you have ever driven from North London into the near East End on a bright winter’s morning for lunch, on your own, with nothing for company but the Flying Pickets’ a capella cover of Only You, Feargal Sharkey’s A Good Heart, and Star Trekkin’ by the Firm, but it can do strange things to you.

Partly, it’s the alone thing. A chap should lunch alone on a Sunday once in a while, for the good of his soul, but not too often. You can feel, swooshing down Holloway Road as Leo Sayer clears his throat to belt out More Than I Can Say, like the last man on earth.

And you are thus cleared, when Billy Idol starts squawking Hot in The City, to agree with him, and to wind down a window and punch the air and yell: “Hot in the sidday, hot in the sidday, hot in the sidday tooonaaaaat?”, or to wail: “starrrrr-trekking across the universe, [change to nasal, high-pitched voice] on the Starship Enterprise under Captain Kirrrrrk?.”

But you are likely also, when the first watery chords of China in Your Hand begin to drizzle, to feel time peel away and a lump grow in your throat like you just swallowed an emu’s egg. Particularly if, as the song climbed the charts in the run-up to Christmas, 1987, you were working as an elf in Santa’s Grotto in Harrods and happened to snog an elfette about whom you remember nothing except that she claimed to have been at school with Carol Dekker out of T’Pau.

It’s not about the music being any good (“come from greed, never born of seed, take life from the barren land, ooooh, eyes wide, like a child in the form of man?”), it’s about pushing buttons you thought had rusted over. Blondie, the Jam, Talking Heads, they cannot do this, because they were half-decent and you have listened to them occasionally since. But Living in a Box, Kim Carnes, Jona Lewie, they fly invisible across the gulf and blast 25 years away like fish in a barrel, or kids in a Texan schoolyard.

And so I was driving in, and shifting time subtly across my teenage decade as tune followed tune (Eye of the Tiger meant kissing in the back row at Rocky III in 1982; The Power of Love meant, far more pleasantly, kissing in Back to the Future in 1985, at last with a girl) and thinking how the power of past experience to move you has nothing to do with whether that experience was good or bad – it is the mere fact that it is gone that causes the pain. Just like with the music.

And so it was very, very surprising that as I took my place at a corner table at Canteen a man should come over and ask not, as they usually do, “What’s Gordon Ramsay really like?” but, “Didn’t you used to work at the Dome?”

The Dome. Ye gods. Long gone grismal chain caf? in Hampstead. I worked there as a barman through the bright dry summer of 1990 (flip your limbs to Can’t Touch This by MC Hammer; sniffle to Heart’s All I Want to Do Is Make Love to You) and also the summer of 1991, which was cold and wet (although nobody told DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince).

He was Dominic Lake. Wow. He hadn’t changed. Nor had I. Was I still seeing anyone from back then? Yes, my best mate, Matt Born, occasionally. Also Rowan. Um, otherwise, no. He was still seeing Steve Chambi, who nearly punched me for being a snob (yes, even then). Did I remember Larian? Crazy Larry? Sure, but did he remember when Emma Salmon dressed as Catwoman for that fancy-dress party? He most certainly did. Aaahhhhh?

And we remembered Sybilla and Barney, and Adie, who looked like Robert Mitchum, and Bev, who looked like Farrah Fawcett. And little Abigail? ahhhhh. And setting up the bar at 7.30 in the morning and cursing the guy who hadn’t cleaned down properly the night before. And working the late shift, drinking beers while the floor staff put chairs on tables, and not bothering to clean down properly. Ahhhhh.

Anyway, nice to bump into you mate, see you in another 15 years.

Or perhaps sooner. Because Dominic, it turns out, has a piece of Canteen, and it’s brilliant. The big square space with strip lights and long wooden tables and open steel kitchen do not prepare you for a menu that tappety-skips down memory lane like Dorothy on the Yellow Brick Road – although there is a clue in the cork-tiled floor (an idea stolen from the Coren family kitchen, 1972-93). For here be toasted crumpets and butter, devilled kidneys or mushrooms on toast, potted duck with piccalilli (all condiments home-made, bar the ketchup), welsh rarebit, hot buttered Arbroath smokies, macaroni cheese?

Arriving at 11, I had to wait till noon for the lunch dishes to come on, so I had two perfect espressos and then one Egg Benedict and one Egg Florentine from the all-day breakfast menu, both exemplary, though I’d go a notch tangier on the hollandaise, but that’s just me. With them I had a side of bubble and squeak, which was beautifully done with bright (squeaky) green leaves of cabbage and a crisp potato shell.

By the time I’d eaten that and read the sports pages I was ready for lunch. For lunch I wanted a roast. If you want the rib of beef, the loin of pork, the chicken with garlic and bread sauce or the leg of lamb with mint sauce then you have to order 48 hours before, and there have to be 4-6 of you. If you’re a Nobby No-Mates like me then you better hope it’s Sunday, because then there’s a roast on for losers, too.

It was roast beef, a rib-eye of Charolais-Limousin from Sussex, sliced very thick and served pink. It had deep, deep flavour. Obviously hung for a long time, but there was something more. The pale gravy, the barnyardiness, the sweetness and richness of the fat; it had the scent of long, long ago, of Hogarth’s The Roast Beef of Old England. And the Yorkshire pudding was exemplary, for it had texture between the crusts, not just air. The potatoes, my friend, were roasted in duck fat.

How I longed to try the gammon and potatoes with parsley sauce, the slow roast pork belly with apples (whose £9 price is a fair reflection of the cut’s low cost – watch out for belly going above a tenner just because it’s trendy), the home-made pies, the treacle tart, the lemon syllabub, the gingerbread with quinces?

Put that together with really friendly, well-informed service (although maybe they were just being nice to me because I was that guy who used to work at the Dome) and you get a totally modern, packed, buzzing (noisy) 21st-century restaurant with all the good things about the food of England’s past and none of the bad. They sell Horlicks, for crying out loud.

Canteen represents a past and a future to which I will be going back again and again and again. Altogether now: “Starrrrrr-trekkin’ across the universe?”

Canteen
Crispin Place, Spitalfields, E1 (0845 6861122)
Meat/fish: 9
Cooking: 8
Concept: 9
Score: 8.67
Price: I had a huge breakfast and a huge lunch with lots of bottled water and coffee but no booze for £30.09, including service.

St John Bread and Wine
94-96 Commercial Street, E1 (020-7247 8724)
Just across the road from Canteen, it was here first and, for all-day British eating, it is still, for me, a squeak ahead – but it is a bit pricier and a tad scarier. A dead heat, overall.

Rules
35 Maiden Lane, WC2 (020-7836 5314)
I had a roasted rump of Belted Galloway from Paul Coppen’s farm here the other day, as I do whenever they tell me it’s in. If they’ve run out by the time you go, unlucky. Have something else. The pies are good.