I went to 108 Garage on a tip-off. A proper nudge and a wink down a dark alley from an interested party I know who is not a PR, not a chef or a restaurateur, not a critic or a blogger, but just, you know, ducks and dives around the edges of the industry. Helps people out, if you know what I mean. Bit of this, bit of that. She got me a table once at the Ledbury – for my mum’s birthday – through a chef she had helped out back in the day, and she said if I knew what was good for me I’d get down Golborne Road and have a look at this Chris Denney kid.
Mad as a bag of soup ladles, she told me, but the boy’s got a heart of gold and a touch of genius, been around for years, working under some of the biggest names in the game but never had a place of his own. Come close a couple of times, but you know how it is. You’ve seen On the Waterfront. And then out of nowhere Denney hooks up with this Italian money guy, name of Luca Longobardi (“The Mafia’s Banker”, according to the title of his own memoir), on Gumtree of all places, and suddenly he’s got his own show.
“You need to sit up at the bar and get a squint at Chris in action,” my insider tells me. “And you’ll see what I’m talking about.” So I go, because I owe her. I book online and there’s no option to choose where I sit so I leave that for the night.
We arrive bang on time at 8. It’s down the arse end of Ladbroke Grove, a bleak spot with promise, as underlined by the presence of a Pizza East across the road. The place is dark, loud with dance music and scattered with low-slung tables and chairs like you’d get by the pool at a run-down West Palm Ramada Inn. Then two or three proper tables and the bar, which is neat and tidy with a small bearded man in his late thirties beavering away at the pots and pans, as intensely focused and oblivious to his surroundings as Toscanini conducting at the Met.
The nice front of house girl says we may not sit at the bar. She says all the spots, at this place that nobody has heard of, which is currently empty, are going to fill up with people who specially asked to be seated there, even though I was not able to.
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I say I don’t believe her. She is as unmoveable as a rock. Some of these people will be coming as late as 9, I learn – we could eat and be gone in that time – but it will be absolutely impossible, she insists, for my wife and me to sit there until they arrive.
I’m not going to hit her. She might know kung fu. So I ask where she wants us to sit and she indicates one of the sticky foot-high coffee tables slap in the middle of what is effectively a dancefloor. Even my wife, who is quite nice, says she is not sitting there. So we stand for a bit and when a couple get up from a similar arrangement of knackered garden furniture which is at least by a wall and not so exposed, we sit down at it, so low that I fear I will never stand up again.
There is a pervasive smell of cigarette smoke, so strong that I ask the waitress if this is, perhaps, a smoking restaurant. She says not. Nor is there anyone smoking out front or chefs tabbing away out back. Mysterious. It must be an old chimney flue pulling fag smoke from some other part of the building down into the wall cavity. Or the ghost of some long dead smoker, puffing spook fags that only my soul can smell.
A waitress comes and talks down to us, literally, because we are five feet below her. I feel like a toddler at a play table looking up at the teacher. Except my knees are around my ears on account of the deckchair I’m sitting in. I am Kafka’s Gregor Samsa, marooned on my back with my limbs flailing – baffled, angry and sad.
I’m so furious I order “all the starters” without looking at the menu, then sit back and watch the other customers playing with their phones because the seating arrangements mean they are too far from their dining partners to hear each other speak.
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The starters come in good time and I struggle forwards into a position where I can get at them. I achieve a sort of squat, and go at the first dish like a Calcutta beggar reaching into his begging bowl to see if the thing the fat guy just threw in was a coin or a pebble.
It is a stracciatella but not a soup as I’d expected, rather a wet, young buffalo cheese not unlike burrata, but richer, sourer and scattered with sliced fig and puffed spelt. It is deft, pretty and delicious. It would make someone a terrific breakfast. Slurping it from this bent-over, half-seated position, I fear terrible wind lies in my future.
The next dish is a tentacle of octopus, perfectly roasted over coals, sweet and tarry, crisp at the end, with tahini to broaden the flavour and pickled golden turnip (I took it at first for beetroot) for tang; then Isle of Skye scallops, fresh as eyes, sliced thin, with tiny diced Yorkshire rhubarb – sour, pink, forced winter jewels – and blobs of “oyster mayo”, which bring a rich, tight umami of the sea; then a whole lobe of veal sweetbread roasted but still gooey, and a wedge of january king cabbage just charred enough to give a nutty rather than petrolly flavour, with some shards of roasted hazelnut and a sticky yeast paste that backs up the gentler flavours like a savoury billiard ball hidden in a sock; and then two golden cubes of deep-fried braised pig’s head with a tart piccalilli sauce and two sweet little fillets of smoked eel.
Incredible cooking. Quite stunning. Not fanciful half-foraged hipster rubbish like … well … quite a lot of the places I pretend to like because I want to be in the cool kids’ gang. Just tightly controlled, well-ordered, imaginative dishes beautifully presented at the peak of their form. And all the more exciting for coming at me through the stinky half-dark of this flailing junkyard of a restaurant.
The charming lasses on the floor mostly hadn’t a clue. One came past and offered us dessert but we said we were waiting for our mains. Then our original waitress came by and said that they had run out of the hogget we had ordered, which was funny timing at this stage, so we ordered the vegetarian option instead.
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Then another waitress came by and asked how our meal was going – to which I could only answer, “I have honestly no idea.” And then a bit later the first waitress said they did have the hogget after all, just as another one was putting down our substitute veggie plate.
So now we had three mains. And they were all first class: Jacob’s ladder (beef short rib), blackened and pearly pink, juicy and high, collapsing under a deep green sort of pickled pesto; a rhombus of ruby red hogget glistening fresh from the sous-vide, sweeter than mutton, denser than lamb, with salt-baked swede, bronze fennel and a grating of salted ricotta; and the superfluous veggie dish: roast cauliflower with buttermilk and asiago – the best cauliflower cheese you’ll ever eat.
Astounding cooking. Eye-popping. Mouth-watering. Almost impossible to eat from my freeze-framed breakdancer position on the floor but worth it when you really tried.
The food was so good I even ordered pudding and was rewarded with delightfully grown-up salted pineapple with curls of fresh coconut and espelette pepper and a life-changing black sesame ice cream with sheep yoghurt yielding invigoratingly tart notes of liquorice and farmyard piss. Toffee popcorn and scattered flower petals added something sugary for the ladies.
As we left, I grabbed a menu for reference and the front of house girl who had denied us the bar told me I had to put it back because taking menus was forbidden. And so, to my eternal discredit, I put it in my inside pocket, said, “Then I’m afraid you’ll have to take it off me,” and scarpered into the night.
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Crazy evening. Mental place: worst furniture in history but the kind of chef who comes along only once or twice in a decade.
If the rest of 2017 is like this, it’s going to blow my head clean off.
108 Garage
108 Golborne Road, London W10 (020 8969 3769; 108garage.com)
Cooking: 9
Service: 5
Furniture: 1
Score: 8 (and don’t you DARE question my maths)
Price: I paid £109 but they’d knocked off the mains as a gesture