Who can review a restaurant at a time like this? Who, when families are being shelled as they flee for safety and Europe teeters on the edge of the end of everything, can sit down and complain about the slow service, the dull menu, the poor acoustics, the chewy pork chop, the incorrectly cellared claret…?
Hell, I don’t know what the words “a time like this” even mean to you. To me, on March 8, 2022, they mean a time when thousands are dead, Ukraine resists heroically, Nato is hamstrung for fear of a wider war and the world quakes, as it has not quaked in 60 years, at the prospect of global thermonuclear Armageddon. But for you, next week, where this piece will land, those same words may mean millions dead, Ukraine overrun, Moldova braced, Poland trembling, Nato… War… Global thermo… My brain cannot even contemplate the picture; my fingers barely type the words.
And to think that I worried about restaurant writing in the time of Covid. Worried that I might write a review on a Tuesday and that by the time it was published the following week, the restaurants would all be closed again and my words would read as flippant, entitled, anachronistic, irrelevant, dim, greedy, meaningless… I didn’t worry that they might not be read at all, because there would be no one to read them. A mere pandemic? We didn’t know we were born.
I am not saying things are so bad, yet, that I haven’t been able to eat. I’ve done plenty of eating. Even swallowed some of it. But I’ve not had the heart to put pen to paper in weeks. Not for a restaurant review. For a comment piece for the next day’s paper, fine. At this stage (March 8, as I said), we’re all still pretty certain we will be here tomorrow and that there will be people to read The Times. But a week or so from now, who knows?
Before all this, I was going to write about Chez Bruce. I went there for a quiet Tuesday lunch with Ian Brunskill, associate editor of this paper, and enjoyed a lovely lobster and scallop raviolo with brown shrimps and samphire that was perfectly served by their last bottle of the Keller von der Fels 2018.
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And then I had the pig’s trotter, because I had not had one in years and wanted to be transported to the 1990s pomp of Marco Pierre White and his “Pig’s Trotter Pierre Koffmann”, or further back to the heyday of La Tante Claire, where Koffmann served up the trotters himself (to Brunskill, indeed, on his wedding night). But they are shelling the schools and hospitals now, and that recent Wandsworth trotter (sleek, gelatinous, bronze, with its moussey centre full of bosky winter complexities and Gallic winks) feels as long ago itself now as the early 1990s and an unmarried Ian Brunskill.
Go there when this is over, if it is ever over, and eat and drink incomparably well, in peace and quiet, surround by chaps and chapesses of a certain age, and give thanks for small mercies.
But maybe don’t go to Jeru. It isn’t very good. It’s globetrotting Middle Eastern fusion on Berkeley Street in Mayfair that is very expensive and doesn’t work at all for reasons that it would be inappropriate to expand upon when besieged cities all over Ukraine are running out of food altogether and multiple urban populations are only days from starvation. (Can I just say that I am aware that there are always besieged and starving people somewhere in the world – it’s just that the media coverage is at saturation level for this one, so it is harder than usual to put from one’s mind.)
Funnily enough – funny peculiar, not funny ha-ha – Jeru is just a couple of doors down (on this street of grotesque oligarchal clipjoints) from the notorious Russian-owned Asian/Italian restaurant Novikov, whose owner, Arkady Novikov, describes himself as “a close personal friend of Vladimir Putin”. That boast has not aged well. I wonder whether Novikov can possibly survive all of this. But then, of course, I wonder that about all of us.
I, for one, am definitely losing my mind. I booked Trivet in Southwark for lunch with my old pal Sam Leith, literary editor of The Spectator, because it looked like the only newly Michelin-starred restaurant I hadn’t been to when the new list came out in mid-February. All the way there I was racking my brains to remember why I had not been there before and then when I got there, I realised that I had. So I had either forgotten or lost all sense of the linear nature of time – as it all draws, potentially, to a close.
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The cooking was, as previously, precise and imaginative (there was an epic, possibly too epic dish of “winter sweetbread” with smoked maitake mushrooms, pickled lingonberries and wild cumin) and the wine list (compiled by Michelin’s Sommelier Award 2022 winner, Isa Bal) was neo-biblical, if of little use to us that day, since neither was drinking. Sam because he doesn’t any more, and I because I can’t do World War Three on a hangover.
Funnily enough – peculiar, again, not ha-ha – Sam and I had lunch together the last time we thought the world was going to end – September 12, 2001 – at Ubon in Canary Wharf, and used up in one fell swoop the annual expense allowance of both my Times diary and his Telegraph diary, both of which had been cancelled for the duration because light humour and gossip were not welcome “at a time like this”.
I ate these meals at Chez Bruce, Jeru and Trivet and each time came home to even worse news on the radio than I’d heard that morning, and just never felt like writing them up. And then when I briefly did, they were too long ago and had faded from memory. So I went to the Red Lion & Sun in Highgate (north London’s highest-rated entry in the new Estrella Damm Top 50 Gastropubs list) for a chicken with morels and vin jaune dish I’d seen on their Instagram feed and wanted to try, and loved in the flesh, and then hurried quickly home to check my children were still alive.
I went to the Gatehouse, also in Highgate, because I had recently learnt that it is no longer a Wetherspoons but a locally well-regarded Spanish restaurant, and enjoyed some excellent tapas – shout out for the pimientos de Padrón, the aubergine fritters and the prawns with chilli and garlic and pan con tomate. And the day after that, I went to the Pineapple in Kentish Town, a proper pub of unsurpassable buzz and hustle, the sort of place you would want to be during blackout on your last night alive, for some of the Thai food they have always served, but which I’d never eaten. And it was fine, and very cheap, and not at all disrespectful to consume at a time like this.
But I can’t write up three pubs within falling-down distance of my front door, even if they are where I plan to spend the next few weeks. Or days, if days are all we have. So then I went to the Broadcaster, newly opened on Wood Lane, opposite the Tube station, and shared some pretty good burgers and loaded flatbreads (wild mushroom and winter truffle, Cotswold cured pork belly, that sort of caper) with my son and a couple of mates, ahead of the QPR game down the road. And then we went to the match, desperate for a win against lowly Cardiff City after a terrible run through February and March. But they smashedus. And that’s probably promotion out the window for another year. But do you know what another season in the Championship wouldn’t be?
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The end of the world.
Chez Bruce
2 Bellevue Road, London SW17 (020 8672 0114; chezbruce.co.uk)
Jeru
11 Berkeley Street, London W1 (020 3988 0054; jeru.co.uk)
Trivet
36 Snowsfields, London SE1 (020 3141 8670; trivetrestaurant.co.uk)
The Red Lion & Sun
25 North Road, London N6 (020 8340 1780; theredlionandsun.com)
The Gatehouse
1 North Road, London N6 (020 8340 8054; thegatehousen6.com)
The Pineapple
51 Leverton Street, London NW5 (020 7284 4631; thepineapplepubnw5.com)
The Broadcaster
89 Wood Lane, London W12 (020 4549 7420; thebroadcaster.co.uk)
