I went to the Ledbury last night, just to remind myself about serious dining. It used to be a thing I loved. The sense of occasion, the dressing up, the swaggering heft of the wine list, the mild masochistic discomfort of jacket and tie, the taste of truffle and liver and lobster and the juices of birds and beasts reduced and reduced and reduced to the sugars and phosphates of their very DNA, the tingling brain sensation those flavours gave you, then the screech of the bill, the daze of numbers and the escape into the cool night air, the loosening of the tie, the first pull on a post-prandial cigarette, the dizziness and the twinkling stars above.
I used to chase that feeling. Around Paris in my twenties, and then deeper into France and all over London, other parts of England (though not many), areas of Spain and Italy, California …
And then, quite suddenly, I lost interest. Became almost irritated by it all. With eating out now part of my job, I couldn’t help but resent restaurants sometimes if they didn’t move along at a reasonable clip, when they faffed and fiddled without getting to the point, when out came a second bloody fish course when all I wanted was to get home, write the bastard up and get on with something else.
And that only got worse with the advent of family. Anywhere that took longer than an hour to feed me my dinner was keeping me away from my children, which made me genuinely hate the place. Worse still, I would go home stuffed and bilious and a little bit pissed and be a less good father to those children the following morning, and work less efficiently in the office and therefore provide less well for them. I lost all patience for the flimflam and the silliness and the tortured platefuls it gave rise to.
Luckily, I wasn’t alone. For just as I grew tired of long meals, French meals, Michelin meals, expensive, pretentious, silly meals, so did everyone else, and they fell from grace in the eyes of fashion to be replaced by tapas and street food, single dish canteens, oriental snack bars, burgers and ribs and barbecues and craft beers, hipster squat and gobbles I could be in and out of and home again in the blink of an eye and call it a job well done, bang on trend and letting nobody down.
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But lately I’ve been craving posh. I went looking for it, as you know, at Chutney Mary and was sorely disappointed. And then it was my mother’s birthday and she wanted to go to the Ledbury, so I called around, knelt and wept, pleaded professional seniority and family festivities, then sat on a waiting list for a couple of weeks, and got a table.
I had reviewed the Ledbury and liked it when it opened in 2005 but hadn’t been back since it went supernova around the turn of the decade, won two Michelin stars and briefly cracked the top ten of the (daft but inescapable) San Pellegrino World’s 50 Best Restaurants, becoming, in some people’s eyes, the best restaurant in Britain. Those eyes are not altogether wrong.
The joy of serious posh came flooding back as I rested my wrists on the fat linen of the tablecloth, lifted the almost weightless glassware to my mouth (so light I felt more like I was holding it down, keeping it from floating away) and engaged with the sort of calm, kind, gently facilitating waiters I had forgotten all about. The other guests were beautiful. At least, the women were, or seemed so, and dressed for cocktails, rather than to minimise the downside of ketchup spills. And they didn’t have tattoos. There was space between the tables to move and breathe, easy light, quietness without a deathly hush.
You couldn’t call the food “simple” without sounding like a pompous arse, but it was clean and brilliant and easy to eat: a cool spume of chopped oyster and sea bream tartare with powdered frozen English wasabi, like fiery snow; foie gras frozen and grated over green beans, almonds and peaches; leaves of white beetroot (white!) baked in clay and tasting of it, over smoked eel and dolloped with English caviar; black truffle and dried ham over a warm egg; small, strong fillet of Belted Galloway, blackened but rare, a tug of braised short rib, buttery potato and girolles; strawberries with a tartlet of English flowers …
It took a shade over three hours to happen, a shade under £600 to pay for the four of us, and I have honestly no idea how long one would have to wait for a table if one were not my mother. So if you can’t wait, and can’t quite run to £150 a head, and don’t fancy Notting Hill, but are feeling, like me, that a bit of finesse ought to be creeping back into our dining, then instead have a crack at Pidgin, a small British restaurant newly opened in Dalston by a pair of supper club hosts called James Ramsden and Sam Herlihy, which I went along to because I sort of know Mr Ramsden, although I can’t remember how or why. I’d certainly never been to his supper club, or anyone else’s.
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It’s a cosy little room, well lit, with wild flowers in jars and branches on the walls (very pretty and cheaper than actual art), and a fixed-price, four-course menu like the Ledbury. Except that, unlike the Ledbury, there is no choice. You eat what is on the menu that day. Which, along with being in Dalston and having only a couple of waitresses, allows them to bring it in for £35 rather than £95.
“Pork fat and peas” was a neat little whipped lardo crouton (every menu must have something whipped on it this year – it’s a Fifty Shades thing) with attendant greenery; then came a section of grilled leg of octopus with shards of granny smith, nasturtium leaves, roast lemon and almond milk that was very delicately balanced and fine; then “beef and embers”, which was thinly sliced picanha (a trendy Brazilian cut from the rump), very rare and nicely charred, with coal-roast (as opposed to clay-baked) beetroot (red not white), koji-pickled carrots and a salad leaf called “bull’s blood”.
“Very good, but not enough of it!” said my friend, Henry, picking up his plate and licking it. And I tended to agree.
“There’s plenty,” said Esther. “You’re always complaining about being overfed in posh restaurants. This is a posh restaurant that isn’t overfeeding you. So shut up. By the time you’ve had pudding, you’ll be full.”
“But I don’t like pudding,” I said.
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“That’s because you’re always so stuffed by the time you get to it.”
And since this time I wasn’t, for once, and it being a sweet take on panzanella (a Tuscan bread salad) with fennel brioche, strawberries and an excellent olive oil ice cream, I did, quite.
There were nice touches: iced glasses for the sharp Cornish beer, home-made truffles rolled in crushed Crunchie bars (or possibly honeycomb), and the sense of being at a very well-catered dinner party rather than a nervous new restaurant in the eastern badlands.
Some people might say that Ramsden and Herlihy (and their fine chef, Elizabeth Allen) have not moved on very far from the supper club concept in the direction of “restaurant”, but I think that is to forget what a restaurant used to be, years ago, which was something quite a lot like a supper club.
This part of town has made great leaps forward with its casual, party-focused hipsterish bars and restaurants and Henry, who lives round here, wondered aloud if this part of Dalston is ready yet for something so quiet, refined and subtle as Pidgin. And I wondered with him. But then I looked back at my review of the Ledbury from 2005, and there I was, worrying that Notting Hill wasn’t quite ready yet for something so quiet, refined and subtle as the Ledbury. But it bloody was, wasn’t it?
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Pidgin
52 Wilton Way, London E8 (020 7254 8311; pidginlondon.com)
Cooking: 7
Service: 7
Fine-ness: 8
Score: 7.33