Back in the autumn, reviewing a fantastic and almost exclusively vegetable lunch at the Riverford Farm Field Kitchen, I got all holier-than-thou (a tone with which I am always extremely comfortable) about how we should reduce the amount of meat we eat.
Lord Stern of Brentford had just had his 15 minutes of fame for declaring, “Meat is a wasteful use of water, creates a lot of greenhouse gases and puts enormous pressure on the world’s resources” (which beats climbing up Big Ben dressed as Batman or marrying Katie Price), and I was right behind him.
Too much meat is bad for you nutritionally as well, of course, making you more likely to have high cholesterol and blood pressure, become obese and get cancer. And it’s also just very expensive. In my backward-looking and boneheaded way, I’ve always thought how nice it would be if we went back to just a roasted joint on Sunday, leftovers through the week, the odd bit of bacon and sausage or a piece of fish here and there, and otherwise mostly vegetables. One could then afford to have only the best meat, farmed with the most thought for the sustainability of resources and the welfare (or survival) of animal stocks. And we’d be thinner and happier, too.
I’ve done that more or less in my home cooking for a while, but that is only going to have minimal gestural impact on things. So I’ve decided to make it central to my restaurant eating practice as well. It’s been a while since I had a crack at building these reviews around an important principle, and I think it’s time. From now on, I shall always order the vegetarian option, wherever I go, starter and main.
Christ. How terrifying. Even as I climb into the car and head out to review a restaurant, I am generally thinking about plump, sweet animal meat, seared and sliced and scattered with salt, slow-roasted, basted, baked, braised, even just a bit of beef boiled with carrots and a smear of hot mustard…
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But, hell, I’ve said it, so I’ll do it. Probably not for ever, but for a while. That’s the thing with my little ideological wars: they’re terribly exciting for a while, and everyone gets on board, and then I get tired of writing the same thing every week and it peters out. But by then the desired effect has usually been achieved. Amazing to think it was six years ago this week that I went all zero-tolerance on factory farming. I went fish-silly next, and the world soon followed suit. And since my tap water campaign the bottled water industry has crumbled to its very knees.
So, veggie options every time from now on. Although I’m not saying that’s all I will eat. Ye heavens, no. I’ll be doing my level best to make my guests order the non-meat stuff, and if they absolutely won’t, then I’ll do it. But whatever it takes, at least one of the meals eaten at my table will be meat-free. You may find I start taking out a lot of vegetarians.
Obviously, I’m not saying you have to do this. Restaurants are for most people a rare treat, and rare treats are not the time for preachy self-denial. You count the days to a slap-up feast at the Hotel de Posh, and aren’t going to sit there and eat sprouts just because some North London bleeding heart is weeping for the supra-oceanic future of the Maldives or the life of some pig in Norfolk you’ll never even meet.
But I’m going to do it, because it’s my job. And from now on I’m going to be scoring restaurants on the quality and variety of their non-meat cooking. Not just the veggie options, but the composition of the platefuls. Giant piles of meat with no veg will not impress me. I want balance. I want to see meat used for flavour and variation, or as a focus, but I want most of the plate to be other things.
And when it comes to the vegetarian options, I want to see the cheapness of ingredients reflected in the price. I am fed up with seeing a goat’s cheese and beetroot tart priced at £16 just to make sure people don’t dodge meat to save money. The vegetarian options should in general be cheaper, much cheaper. You are not to treat meat-swervers as second-class citizens who can be given one dish only and charged whatever the damn hell you like because they have no choice. It is time for a change in how we eat.
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And I guess Rebecca Mascarenhas, celebrated proprietress of Sonny’s in Barnes, thought it was time to change the way people ate at her 11 Abingdon Road restaurant, too, because with the arrival of Philip “The Square” Howard as a partner (I’ve called him that because that’s the name of his most famous restaurant to date, not because he wears thick spectacles and always leaves parties early) and a change of name to Kitchen W8, this always pretty good place has leapt, at one bound, into the premier league.
Esther and I took our soon-to-be in-laws, Xander and Hannah (they introduced us: he’s one of my best friends and a bon viveur to rank with the very bonnest, she is Esther’s sister and currently pregnant with their 18th child), and we had an amazing meal. Particularly amazing given what a restaurant wasteland this area is. Believe me, Esther lived across the road from here when we first met, in a flat on the High Street above Cecil Gee, and the relationship nearly foundered then and there simply because I could find nowhere locally I was prepared to eat.
Of the seven starters, three were fully vegetarian, one mostly veggie, and one fish – a fantastic and totally coincidental beginning to my “Back Off On Meat” (or “Boom!”) campaign. As it happens, we only had one of them: a dense, rich ravioli of wild mushrooms with melted onions and trompettes de la mort, which had all the complexity and wealth of flavour you could ask for in a meatless world.
Hannah had chosen that, so I got to have a dazzlingly beautiful plate of smoked eel, sliced polythene thin to dress the plate with a pale ruby sheen, on which were two sweet plugs of fresh grilled mackerel with sweet mustard and leek hearts. Utterly adorable in conception, visual effect and mouth action.
Xander and Esther had a foie gras mousse with raisin purée, fruit bread and parmesan. A little too rich and sexy if anything, for me, as a starter, but a wondrous thing in itself. I’d probably have it for pudding. If I was fattening myself up for slaughter.
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The vegetarian main was unbelievably good again – a roil of fricasseed chanterelles, cauliflower, salsify, leeks, spaetzle and parmesan. Salsify gives an especially good, earthy account of itself in the absence of meat and with the spaetzle for length and parmesan for depth, this was a dish to make me sure I could live for ever without meat. If I had to.
But it was Esther who had ordered it, so I had to have roast wood pigeon with “foie gras baked potato”, celeriac and chanterelles. Boyohboyohboy. Some dish. If I had a weeny criticism it would be that the onion marmalade (or whatever it was) that lay between the potato and the liver was a mistake. Sweet things are always good with foie gras, of course, but it is pressed livers with their very faint bitterness that need the help, not fresh, sautéed ones. Particularly when they are being so cavalierly slung on to a baked potato. It’s a genius idea, but it is a moment for flaky sea salt to cut the fat and introduce the potato, not jam to confuse the issue.
Xander had a smoked haunch of venison that was quite ethereal in its complexity and gentleness. Hannah had “roast Icelandic cod, caramelised trotter, Savoy cabbage and lentils”. Now, I knew that Iceland had one of the world’s few sustainable cod fisheries, but I had no idea their fish had trotters. Just like pig’s feet, they tasted.
As for side veg, the crushed butternut squash with chestnuts and beurre noisette was worth the trip alone – an orgy of Thanksgiving feast-style sweetness and chunk. The ratte potatoes were a very fine example of their kind as well. The desserts were gorgeous too – the rice pudding with prunes and pedro ximénez stood out.
This was my last review meal of 2009 and a stunning way to sign off on my first decade as a restaurant critic. Hannah and Xander live just up the road from Kitchen W8 and promised to come weekly. I live quite the other side of town and would do the same if I possibly could.
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Kitchen W8
11-13 Abingdon Road, London W8
(020-7937 0120)
Boom!: 10
Cooking: 9
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Service: 9
Score: 9.33
Price: about £50 a head all in à la carte.