Threadneedles Hotel,
5 Threadneedle Street, EC2 (020-7657 8088) There is something more than faintly unnerving about three testicles on a skewer. Or is that obvious, even to you girls? Testicles for lunch I can just about deal with, though I have only ever had them for supper. Testicles on a skewer, well, yes, that I can also manage, although not without a little eye watering. Although last time I had them they were skewerless and tucked cutely into a vol-au-vent case with a beige, shroomy jus. And there were two of them. Two. That is the thing about testes. They come in pairs. Literally.
But three? Three gonads all in a row? It was as asymmetrically spooky as the triple-eyed mutant fish in The Simpsons. The four of us, all men, looked down at our testicles, our three testicles, in silence. And then Macbeth said: “That must have been a happy rooster.”
And then the Irishman said: “Do you think it’s like finding a four-leaf clover, y’know, you grab a three-bollock’d rooster and have good luck all day?”
And I thought of hens’ eggs and how, when I was a kid, you quite often got double yolkers and you never do any more. Was it some sort of grisly Seventies hormone additive to the food which has since been banned? And is it why I don’t have as much hair on my chest as I ought to have? And what happens when a three-testicled rooster meets a double-yolk-laying hen?
And none of this was a dream. It’s all true. And it is mostly the fault of Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord. That very Talleyrand who was not only Napoleon’s foreign minister but uniquely kept his head in high office during the Revolution, the age of Napoleon, the Bourbon Restoration and the accession of Louis-Philippe, mostly because he filled that head with the finest food of the age, cooked for him by his personal cook, Antonin
Carème, who can claim - along with Brillat-Savarin, of course - the title of the First Celebrity Chef, should he want to, which is doubtful.
And what this Carème fellow fed Talleyrand (not to mention Bonaparte himself, Josephine, Tsar Nicholas I, Princess Bagration, Baron de Rothschild and George IV) was mostly bollocks. Roosters’ bollocks. And he served them in vol-au-vents, the dimpled puff-pastry cases that he himself invented.
I know this because I read about it in Ian Kelly’s exciting and beautifully packaged biography of Carème, Cooking for Kings. And I have eaten the scrotal fruit of the chicken because Ian, as part of his publicity drive for the book, cooked a meal for me that began with cockerel’s cockles (you always suspected that the book-reviewing game was a bit back-scratchy but I’ll wager you didn’t know that feeding birds’ balls to the critics was a crucial stage in the procedure).
And then, out of the blue, Ian phoned me. “I’ve just discovered,” he said breathlessly, “that we have bigger bollocks than the French.”
Well, I knew that.
“No,” he said. “I mean that I fed you the testicles of a French rooster but I’ve discovered that British birds have bigger ones, and I’ve found someone who is cooking them: Tom Ilic at Bonds.”
This was all I needed to hear. First of all, I had enjoyed Ian’s testicles enormously. They were mealy and fat and similar to my favourite glands of all - the thymuses and pancreases of calves and lambs - but even more delicate and fragrant. And I have been desperate for more ever since. Secondly, Tom Ilic is a great chef. A great young, Serbian chef. He fed me majestically three times (although he didn’t know it because I wasn’t a critic then) at the New End restaurant, the only great restaurant Hampstead has ever had, which opened at the beginning of this century and closed almost immediately because Hampstead’s rarefied air is too thin for restaurants to breathe, and they are unable to survive there. I had not eaten his food since, and forgotten that he was now at Bonds, the sort of swanky and enormous City eatery in a converted bank that I tend to avoid. The trip was on.
Ian, who is an actor as well as a chef and a writer (a Dirk Bogarde or Sam Shepard of the kitchen), wanted to bring along a couple of pals: his literary agent (the aforementioned Irishman) and an actor whose Hamlet has been hailed as the finest of this generation. Hurrah, all this and a celebrity, too. And then Ian e-mailed to say that his actor pal would rather I didn’t mention his name. That’s why I called him Macbeth at the top of this piece; it’s my little joke about actors and their sensitivity about declaring names. But I mean no disrespect, not a jot. Macbeth was a genial and brilliantly amusing and jolly companion, and I am not suggesting for a moment that he has anything to fear from walking forests or Brooklyn Beckham (whose mother, famously, was too Posh to push).
And now, the meal. The menu had nothing but fantastic-sounding things. I ate a salad of eel smoked on the premises (so that fishy smell around Threadneedle Street is not just the whiff of corruption and greed, although mostly it is) with deep-fried onion rings and horseradish crème fraîche. Very crispy, very slick. Kelly, Macbeth and the Irishman loved their pigs’ cheeks with chorizo and their fat, nutty scallops with roast pork belly and a very floral honey vinaigrette.
And as for the bollocks. They were the b******s. The absolute b******s. As it turned out, Ilic had sourced not English but French ones, so they were by no means huge. But bigger than you’d imagine if you’ve never looked closely at a cockerel’s undercarriage. The skewer lay on a vol-au-vent filled with a lightly truffled fudge of sweetbread and kidney, a faint lemoniness danced on my tongue. The wit and erudition of it was breathtaking. The rooster’s doodles were so gentle and white and nebulous, like marrow, that they needed context. Set alongside sweetbreads and kidneys they had that. I didn’t have to rely on memory to contextualise the offaliness of each will-o’-the-wispish mouthful. It was, in so far as kitchenwork can allow for such hyperbole, pure, pure genius.
Assiette of pork was a narrative dish containing fillet, belly, brawn, etc, laid left to right on a long oval dish. Excellent of its kind. Two melting, milky veal cutlets, grilled with a sweetbread fricassée, were so good they had Macbeth seeing ghosts, and my attempt to relax the offaliness of my day by taking the sea bass with a frogs’ leg aïoli was scuppered by the two accompanying bone- marrow crubeens, which were flat little fritters of marrow that brought back a weightless and welcome memory of the
earlier cock and balls story.
The heart and soul of Ilic’s cooking lies somewhere between the rustic clarity of Fergus Henderson’s St John and the casual tenderness of Club Gascon. This converted bank full of rippling columns and rustling linen and the chink of easily-trousered bonuses is both more and less than the food demands. Oh, and the service is terribly lame. But that hardly matters when a chef has balls like Ilic.
Food: 9
Dining room: 7
Service: 6
Score: 7.33
Price: £100 for two sans grog.
Club Gascon
57 West Smithfield, EC1 (020-7796 0600)
Nicely crafted bits and pieces of the insides of animals, very popular with the City.
Sweetings
39 Queen Victoria Street, EC4 (020-7248 3062)
My favourite fish restaurant in London. Victorian, extraordinary, and beloved of a slightly older city crowd.
E-mail feedme@thetimes.co.uk and suggest somewhere we could go for lunch. If you’ve got the balls.
