18 Farm Lane, SW6 (020-7381 3331)

In the days before gastropubs, when I was still barely old enough to drink legally, I took my new girlfriend to a pub called The Belmont in Camden Town, which I don’t think is there any more and is probably not much missed. She was from Chelsea, the girl, and she spoke differently from me. She asked the barman for a cake.

“Sorry love,” he said. “We don’t do food. What’ll you have to drink?”

“A Cake, please.”

“I told you love,” he said, nice as pie (and dazzled, as I was, by her ski-jump nose, Alice-banded blonde hair and turned-up shirt collar), “it’s drinks only. This is a pub. If you want food, there’s crisps.”

“No, I keep saying,” she went on, “I just want a Cake, or ideally a Diet Cake.”

She left me, in the end, for a chap whom she felt was more likely to put a stain on her finger. Honestly, it’s what she said. It was three repetitions before I grasped that it wasn’t an ink splash she was anticipating, but an engagement ring.

She is, indeed, married to the fellow now, and I dare say they are living happily in her native borough, having their cake and drinking it as often as they like in the local pub.

It may well be somewhere like The Farm, on Farm Lane in Fulham, yet another chi-chi gastropub from Tom Etridge. I say “yet another” as if I were weary of them. I’m not. His turnaround of The Wells in Hampstead was inspired, and it still is good, now that he’s gone. The Ebury is great and I liked The Waterway in Maida Vale very much, although I haven’t been there for a while. And I like The Farm, too.

Tom captured the needs both of his potential clientele and of the critics when he instigated an opening-month policy of offering a 50 per cent discount to people prepared to “do a farmyard animal impression when you book over the phone”.
The critics loved it because it gave them something amusing with which to liven up their reviews (I do wish they’d stick to writing about the food, don’t you?), and the locals loved it because they talk like farm animals anyway.

I can just imagine my ex phoning to book a table, completely unaware of the offer, and the receptionist replying, “That’s a terrific donkey, madam: you qualify for the half-price food offer.” Assuming it was some sort of joke, my ex would probably laugh. And I dare say the receptionist would respond: “Sorry, Madam. That’s an excellent pig, too, but there’s no extra discount for doing more animals.”

On the night I was in, there was a chap in jeans and a blazer at a corner table doing a terrific sea lion, even though sea lions are not farm animals and you are only supposed to make the noises on the phone. And the people at the table next to me actually asked to be moved to another room because “that bloody woman over there sounds like an effing seagull”.

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