My friend Madge was doing pantomime. It was Stephen Fry’s Cinderella at the Old Vic, and I had forgotten to go before Christmas.
“We should catch it this weekend,” I said to my wife.
“Oh no we shouldn’t!” she said.
“Why not?” I asked, because I can be utterly cretinous about that sort of thing, more often than you would believe.
Being just across the road from the Old Vic, the Waterloo Brasserie is deeply convenient for the theatre-goer. It is, however, deeply inconvenient for the writer. This is because it is a brasserie. Nobody likes having to use the word “brasserie”.
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I think you know why. Probably it says vital things about the French that the word they have given us for “slightly relaxed restaurant” is virtually identical to their offering for “lady’s breast-covering under-garment”. I don’t know about that. I just know that, if this article is going to include sentences like “Last week, before going to the pantomime, I decided to try out a brasserie”, I’m going to have to be really careful. If there is a slip, the sub-editors aren’t necessarily going to spot it. Ah yes. My first genuinely inadvertent pun, right there. Minefield.
Waterloo Brasserie is a newish all-day place, apparently opened by the owners of a similar sort of affair in Cheyne Walk, Chelsea. It seemed perfectly acceptable pre-pantomime fare. I suppose I could have asked Madge about it, but I wasn’t sure she was the brassiere type. Well, you know, actresses often aren’t. (Did you get that one? Stay alert.)
Booking, frankly, was a bit of a pantomime in itself. I booked us in for dinner on the Friday night, discovered the show was actually a matinee on Saturday, cancelled, booked us in for Saturday lunch, and then found out that my wife quite fancied going for dinner on Friday after all. Actually, it was a lot more complicated than that. There were many, many phone calls, to the extent that I just cancelled everything and made my wife sort it out.
Look, I’m new to all this. I kept giggling to myself and saying, “Oh no we aren’t!”, which the poor bloke on the other end of the line had no reason to understand, and didn’t. I also kept having to say “brasserie”. I was really flustered. I only mention this so that the manager doesn’t read my claims to have been to his restaurant and then remember that I cancelled about nine bookings, think, “Oh no he didn’t!” to himself and wonder if I’m making some wild meta-joke. I’m really not. I’m just a useless arse.
I know you are used to Giles, wafting loftily around like a Regency dilettante between restaurants, television studios and whatever the hell a “fives court” is, but some of us don’t live like that. Some of us have no dignity whatsoever, and are forever scurrying about, late, lost and thinking about something else. Some of us have trouble finding a restaurant, even if we know it is opposite the Old Vic, and end up having to call our wives for directions, only to hear them guffaw, “It’s behind you!” and believe them, and spend a minute or two spinning on our heels, perplexed, because we are hopeless idiots.
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So, yes. We went to Waterloo twice, once for the meal and once for the pantomime. Odd sort of place, ever since it became St Pancras’s ugly sister. Forlorn. A little out of time, not unlike a pantomime in January. The Eurostar used to give it a certain je ne sais quoi, because you knew that within a couple of hours you could be ogling French girls in brasseries, or possibly brassieres, or possibly both. Now, a chap with a suitcase at Waterloo is probably just going to Surrey. It’s just not the same.
The restaurant itself? Yeah, it’s probably time to mention that. It is big and dark and a little bit spacey, especially up the back where they stuck us. Think of a cross between the set of Red Dwarf and – I do mean this in a nice sort of way – hell. The whole place felt like a series of inter-connecting corridors. It was all metal and grey and industrial, and there were these big red murals on the walls of what were either explosions or, possibly, burning skulls. If you can imagine that, without imagining some sort of horrifying Goth dungeon or a Michael Jackson video, then you are on the right track. I rather liked it.
Hell of a lot of staff. They all wore dark shirts of a slightly different infernal red, which seemed an odd choice, and they all rushed about all over the place, all the time. Lord knows what they were doing. They were apparently pretty rubbish at steering my wife from the door to the bar while I was running about Waterloo, and they certainly weren’t much good at steering us from the bar to our table once I arrived. There was an air of chaos, basically, and not nearly enough punters in the place to justify it.
The food, though, was pretty good. The menu was French, but not oppressively so, in that they leave some bits of it in English so that you know basically what is going on. Jerusalem Artichoke Velout?, Crispy Brie Tatin, that sort of thing. My wife started with the house terrine, which was acceptably smooth and meaty in all the right places, and I had the scallops. They were lovely, all four of them. I can’t pretend to understand what the hell is going on with scallops – Which bit is what? What is the foot for? Where do they keep their keys? – but I did feel that four scallops was a few scallops too few.
They were a bit stingy, also, with the vegetables. We had a pot of gratin dauphinois, which was as tasty as it was tiny, and hardly any green beans. Although, to be fair, the mains were so good that I’m not sure I’d even remember this if I hadn’t made a note. I had the beef cheeks, which was a first for me. It tasted a lot like very good oxtail, which was unsettling, but only in a zoological sense. My wife had the lamb, and liked it. Pudding was chocolat fondant and chocolat mousse. I had the latter, which was à volont?. According to our thoroughly pleasant waiter, this meant he would keep bringing me more until I was full. A diligent reviewer may have tested this, by means of pockets and the floor. Me, I was full very quickly. The bill, without wine but including Evian (sorry, Giles), came to a fairly respectable £80-ish.
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So, no complaints on the eating front. Still, though, the whole thing was a bit? I don’t know. Middling. Weird. A bit Waterloo. I have seen my wife in many, many brasseries (special care here, please, sub-editors) and she normally seems to be enjoying herself a bit more. It was all just a bit clunky and strange and not actually that much fun. Little things. The air-conditioner blasted out a freezing jet of air directly over our heads midway through the main course and we had to sit shivering and goose-bumping until they turned it off. There was a big angry man in the subterranean toilets who harrumphed and glowered and barged slightly to get at the hand towels, and it was rather startling to see him loafing by a desk at the front when we left, wishing us a good evening. It was just a very unsettling place to spend an evening, and I don’t think that was because it looked like a Satanic factory. There was just a vibe. Why was it so hectic despite being quite empty? Why did we have to sit at the back? Why did it all look like a series of interconnecting corridors?
Why do people still visit Waterloo anyway, if not to go to the theatre or Surrey? It’s near to the South Bank, I suppose. Maybe in the summer or at lunchtime it makes more sense.
“Weird place,” said my wife, as we left the brasserie.
“Mmm,” I agreed. “And remember, tomorrow we are coming back, for the pantomime.”
“Oh no we aren’t!” said my wife.
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“But I’ve bought tickets,” I said. And then: “Oh.”
Waterloo Brasserie
119 Waterloo Road, London SE1
020-7960 0202
Giles Coren is away