All food critics get asked the same questions: “What’s the best restaurant in town?” The answer is the one where they know you without having to surreptitiously check the screen; they bring you a drink without having to be told; it’s where the manager/owner asks after your children by name; it’s where there is one thing on the menu you really like, the way you really like it, and you wouldn’t mind eating it once a week for the rest of your life.
Then there’s: “What’s the worst thing you’ve ever eaten?” Everyone wants that to be monkey’s brain (apocryphal). In truth, it’s always the dull, ubiquitous, cheap, chain-made, convenient food. My particular low point was the drive-thru McDonald’s in Minnesota, and I can’t quite forget the in-flight catering on Uzbekistan Airways. The Nordic countries own the only cuisine I know that makes food that is knowingly repellent and a dare, just to see if you’re Viking enough. They offer buried shark, where the cartilage turns to ammonia; seal hand-preserved in whey; sheep’s head smoked over its own droppings. They sell the latter vacuum-packed in Reykjavik petrol stations, and it’s actually very good if you need to feed your inner berserker.
I spent years forcing myself to like durian, the king of oriental fruit and a relative of the jackfruit, that imitates the smell of rotting meat for reasons best known to its gagging reproductive cycle. It tastes a bit like garlic, wine gums, bat urine and butcher’s pocket, with the texture of a canal-dredged corpse. I’ve overcome these superficial, cultural shortcomings, and now miss it.
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Contrarily, I’m rarely asked what was the best thing I’ve ever eaten. Maybe it’s just too personal and subjective a thing, determined by the circumstance of consumption. Maybe yours would be your wedding cake, or the fried breakfast after having been released from prison. I remember a grey partridge my vanished brother made: I remember almost everything he cooked for me — the taste and the intensity of it linger. I remember a white peach in the south of France. It was the complete evocation of sybaritic heat and lascivious afternoons: perfectly, unimpeachably peachy. I remember the triumphant, rooted, Nordic surprise of the first time I ate in Noma; and how speechless and emotional the last dinner at El Bulli was. The fabulous mad saga of Faviken in the snow. The cleverness and the elegiac English humour of The Fat Duck.
But for me, the best? That would be Marco Pierre White at the Oak Room, 20 years ago. It was his moment. He was a chef on fire. Steaming, smoking, grilling, baking, flambéing, constructing astonishingly intense but rigorously elegant plates that were based on haute French techniques, but with an obsessive, gothic emotion, an angry northern nostalgia that was all his own. It was also the food of the start of my life with the Blonde, and the taste of falling in love. At 37, Marco took off his butcher’s apron and, like a young Alexander, said there are no more culinary worlds to conquer, and who wants to be poking a pot when they’re 40? He never cooked again. I miss him in the kitchen and his food with a fond longing, but context is everything. I was reminded of it because White Heat — the cookbook that changed cookbooks, with photographs by the late Bob Carlos Clarke that channelled Robert Capa and made the kitchen look like a war zone, and turned Marco into the Byron of the hob — has just been reprinted.
Giles Coren, my esteemed Saturday shadow with a mouth as sensitive as a sturgeon’s cloaca, said the steak at Kitty Fisher’s was the best he’d ever eaten. And where he extols with beluga prose, we should heed.
Kitty Fisher’s is a small restaurant in Shepherd Market, which used to be all brothels and drinking clubs. Now it’s restaurants and more restaurants This one is tiny, a little upstairs, a little downstairs, all decorated as if by a tasteful student who’d rummaged in granny’s attic and Oxfam shops. It’s not even shabby chic, it’s slacker salubrious. The Blonde and I took Jools Holland, the hereditary keeper of New Year’s Eve and Rolls-Royce enthusiast, and Hannah Rothschild, author and the new éminence grise of the National Gallery (or Fifty Shades of Grise, as the curators know her).
The beef was delicious, tasting like a repressed memory of the way food ought to be in fairy tales — a taste morbid and musty, the flavour of an oboe played in a hay barn
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The menu is short but perfectly formed, and the ideal Mayfair dinner party: whipped cod’s roe with fennel butter; salt cod croquettes with aïoli; burrata, beetroot and clementine; lamb cutlets, anchovy, mint and parsley. Nothing in the starters startles; nothing would exercise a Sloane chalet girl to prepare. (The chef, Tomos Parry, was named the PR-driven YBF — not young, black and fabulous, but Young British Foodies — chef of the year, a title he’d probably prefer you didn’t mention.) But there are all the things you fancy eating, familiar without being contemptible or dull. For the mains, ox cheek, champ and spinach — I must say, I have had my fill of ox cheek for a bit. Lemon sole with blood orange, black cabbage and monk’s beard — not as nice as it sounds: the fish was rather mean and undercooked and clung to the bone like a skinny bride. Duck with turnips and rhubarb was better.
Then there was the beef, the special for two, taken from an aged Spanish cow. It was utterly delicious, tasting like a repressed memory of the way food ought to be in fairy tales, a taste that is morbid and musty, the flavour of an oboe played in a hay barn. It’s not like your sickly, diabetic, corn-fed muscle or the wobbling wagyu. You need your teeth for this, but it repays every chew with the effluvia of baroque, bovine death. If our homegrown beef industry wasn’t such a cut-price, bureaucratic cynical filler of bleeding, vacuum-packed travesty, you could probably find it in England. Pudding was more blood oranges, and that old Sloane favourite, brown-bread ice cream.
Jools, Hannah and the Blonde were ecstatic about this place, loved it to the rafters. I’m more guarded. The service is exceptional, perfectly judged for the room: chummy, convivial, interested, amusing. The food is more construction than cooking, trusting in good ingredients in the contemporary way. It boasts a sort of woolly amateurishness, a handmade, homely, beaming enthusiasm. And that’s fine — it’s what they’ve aimed for and what they’ve achieved. Full marks. It’s just that nobody is being terribly stretched here, nobody’s reach is exceeding their grasp. It’s just perfectly lovely, and has all the ingredients for being someone’s best restaurant in town. But just by a whisper of cantankerous old-man snobbery, not quite mine.
Kitty Fisher’s, 10 Shepherd Market, London W1J 7QF; 020 3302 1661; kittyfishers.com; Tue-Fri: noon-2.30pm; 6.30pm-9.30pm. Sat: 6.30pm-9.30pm
Three of the best Young British Foodie winners
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The Ethicurean, Bristol
A kitchen-garden restaurant with YBF’s alcohol winner, Jack Bevan, as the mixologist.
Barley Wood, Walled Garden, Long Lane, Wrington, Bristol BS40 5SA; 01934 863713, theethicurean.com
Noisette Bakehouse, West Yorkshire
Baking winner Sarah Lemanski founded this micro-bakery, creating classics with a twist, such as popcorn cookie pops.
157 Roberttown Lane, Liversedge WF15 7LE; 07939 217443, noisettebakehouse.com
Dorshi
The street-food winners Jollyon Carter and Radhika Mohendas serve east-Asian cuisine from their mobile kitchen with an emphasis on local ingredients, including nettles.
dorshi.co.uk