78 Westbourne Grove, London, W2 (020-7985 0900)
Back in the bad old days before Rudy Giuliani ran every gunslinger, crack-dealer, graffiti artist and schoolboy lifter of penny chews out of town, visitors to New York were told to be careful to pay attention when walking northwards across the city because, if you walked too far, failing to notice that the street numbers had tipped into the hundreds, you’d end up in Harlem. These days it matters less. Harlem is a
relatively harmless, rather dull patch of a great city still garnering a tiny cachet among the local yuppies because it used to have quite a spunky black community. Just like Notting Hill.
And these days if you wander too far east-north-east up Westbourne Grove from Notting Hill, you will get to Harlem. (Just as if you saunter long enough southwards through one of my restaurant reviews, through the dangerously irrelevant backstreets and pointless culs-de-sac, you will, eventually, get to a paragraph about food.) And Harlem, when you get there, you will find to be a restaurant. An American restaurant, not surprisingly, on the site of what used to be an iffy Greek joint where you could eat and drink late. Back when people in Notting Hill still drank. And stayed up late.
But Notting Hill, like Harlem, has changed. Twice. These days it is not even much like it was after it first went soft in the Nineties, when the country-born public schoolboys just down from Oxford pulled off the M40 and, like Columbus, who thought he had arrived in India, thought they had made it to London. That’s when they bought all the nice three-bedroom flats and drove up the property prices, forcing all the indigenous non-white people out (the Columbus analogy remains apposite) except for a handful, whom they allowed to stay on as their drug dealers.
The area became, you will remember, relatively trendy. Four cool people moved in. And then they made a film about it and it all went pear-shaped. Looking around the inside of Harlem at brunchtime on a Sunday I was shocked by what I saw: paunchy bald men of 35 in bad clothes with scrawny panda-eyed formerly-blonde girls smoking Marlboro Lights.
“What happened to the cool people, the young people, those contemporaries of ours who sold their souls to the devil for a good time and a small flat in Ladbroke Grove?” I asked Alan, a fellow North Londoner, whom I had dragged West to hear me sneer. “Why aren’t they here?”
“They are,” he said. “This is them. They just got old.”
So they did. Ho ho ho. Not just old but poor. When daddy took back the loot he gave them in 1992 to buy the flat, because he could not afford his fourth divorce, they were forced to get jobs. But they couldn’t do anything so they set up internet companies, which didn’t work. But they had already had children, two per couple. They couldn’t move out to a place with room for all the family because they couldn’t afford a house in Notting Hill, and wouldn’t move out of “the hood” because they had no idea what lay beyond (like pre-Columbians, they feared that if they got to the edge they’d fall off). And so they sit here and swell and moult and fester. The prices go up and up and up (as a few sell out to Italians and Americans to pay off debts) and so young people can no longer move in at all. In a recent survey (by me) the average age of a Notting Hill flat owner was found to have risen from 24 to 42 in just eight years.
And here they were in Harlem (which is about as much like Harlem as Notting Hill is like Notting Hill), surrounded by the Frogs and Eyeties in their beige Timberlands, blue jeans and Puffa jackets.
Harlem is not bad, as diners go. It looks a little odd, with its high walls, dark wood, panelled ceiling, window-seats and bar - like the gastropub-cum-iffy-Greek-joint-cum-Eighties-wine-bar that it is. But we ate well.
Critics tend to knock American restaurants in Britain because they fail to live up to what one has experienced in America. But what one experiences in America has little to do with the quality of the food. The food over there (“waffles, aygs, Oscar Meyer and grits”) is rarely done well either, but one is wooed so easily by the mood, the cheapness, the old dear who keeps giving you more coffee, or, at least, keeps filling your coffee cup with somebody’s inky urine sample (the idea of “as much coffee as you can drink” is so charming, unless the amount you can drink is “none”).
In fact, my brunch at Harlem was better than any brunch I’ve ever had in America, simply because it started with a cup of coffee I was able to drink. A perfectly decent espresso. The BBQ wings were from a not too terrible (though not stellar) bird, and the sauce had some flavour, though it was terribly, terribly sweet, just like over there.
The buttermilk-fried chicken was enormous, a vast leg and breast. It was Jordan on a plate and tasted of implant. The batter was dull (as if it were made with 11 secret herbs ’n’ spices, all of which were flour) and did not coat the underside of the bird. But you cover it in ketchup and get it down, just like over there. The slaw was freshly made and chunky, if a bit heavy on the raw onion for a sociable afternoon, and the candied yams were certainly candied. The onion rings had a charming light batter on them, but the frozen French fries were poor. The Oscar Meyer bacon tasted, as always, like wet Frazzles - which I happen to like. A Caesar salad was made from baby Gems, had too many croûtons and not enough dressing, but was, unusually, correctly spelt. Chicken Caesar salad has become a cop-out main course for dieting Sloanes who leave the croutons, but it shouldn’t be. Done properly, it is a glorious thing in its own right. Without the chicken, of course.
Our waitress was probably the best thing of all: 5ft 10in, khaki combats, Pumas, very perky in her Mickey Mouse T-shirt, wet lips, big eyes, killer smile, long hair tied up with a pencil. Yowzer, yowzer, yowzer. (Should I, perhaps, apply more editorial
distance when transcribing my notes to your page?)
After brunch we sauntered west towards the Ledbury Road and Portobello junctions for some post-prandial superciliousness. On the street, everyone was Italian or French or Spanish. We became aware of being the only people speaking English. Hearing us, other saunterers turned and stared as if we were in Rome or Paris or Hell. The shops were all either estate agents, crap handbag shops bought for girls by rich foreign daddies, or boutique vegetable stores where the mushrooms had double-barrelled names and cost nine pounds each. The church on the corner of Ledbury Road was in the process of being eviscerated and filled with million-pound Portakabins. Even God cannot afford to live here any more.
Food: 5
Waitress: 10
Location: 1
Score: 5.33
Price: Boozeless, we brunched deeply for about £40.
Tom’s Deli
226 Westbourne Grove, London, W11
(020-7221 8818)
Traditional Notting Hill brunch hangout. Good food, clientele almost exclusively Japanese.
Lucky Seven Diner
127 Westbourne Park Road, London, W2
(020 7727-6771)
Good burgers that are both organic and minuscule. Weekend brunches provide a veritable Babel of languages. Apart from English.
Have a problem with Notting Hill? E-mail feedme@thetimes.co.uk and we’ll go somewhere and talk it through.
