Albannach
66 Trafalgar Square, WC2 (020-7930 0066)Boisdale
15 Eccleston Street, SW1 (020-7730 6922
Two Scottish restaurants this week. Ho ho ho. Already, you’re laughing. You’re looking forward to some haggis gags, a Burns quote or two (wee sleekit cowering timorous this and great chieftain o’ that), something about how stingy the portions are, some stuff on alcoholism (incorporating the phrase “wee dram”), ginger hair, caber-tossing, the incomprehensibility of Kenny Dalglish, kilts, porridge, thistles, Culloden and deep-fried Mars bars.
Because that’s what you always get, isn’t it? Putting down the Scots is second nature to the English hack, and always with the same, weary stock of clichés. In reviews of Scottish restaurants, for example, it is de rigueur to observe that “the portions, as you would expect, were very small”. But would you expect that? Is a tightwad necessarily likely to serve you less food? No, he will serve you cheaper food, but give you lots of it to create a profitable illusion of generosity. Restaurants that are driven purely by greed will beef up the portions even as they search lower and lower down the food chain for their materials, which is why only the cheapest places offer “all you can eat” deals.
As a general rule, the less you pay in a restaurant, the more they will give you to eat. (Also - isn’t it odd that people think that it is OK to write about the
stinginess of the Scots? You couldn’t write “being a Jewish restaurant the portions were very mean”, could you? They’d tell you this was the sort of thing that led to ghettos and death-camps, and they’d have a point.)
Personally, I have no beef with Scotland. I am not posh enough to be self-hating half-Scots, nor ancestrally English enough to mock the Scots for being mere Celtic prototypes beaten into the nooks and crannies of the British Isles by the blond-haired master race born of interbreeding with successive waves of Norse invaders. Scotland, like Wales, Northern Ireland, Palestine and the Vatican, is a chunk of distant soil of uncertain national status with which I generally have very little to do.
I’m not even a rugby fan, which is where the rivalry between the countries seems to live on most meaningfully. I am a lover of cricket, a sport at which the Scots (like the Welsh and the Irish) are allowed to compete separately if they want but which, if they are any good, they are allowed to play for England.
So I went to Albannach with no preconceptions beyond a faint scepticism about restaurants in Trafalgar Square, which never seem to work out. There was a bouncer on the door. I hate bouncers. It is why I never go to nightclubs or illegal drinking dens, or try to assassinate presidents. I hate them even more outside restaurants. You hire a bouncer because you want to keep people out, whereas a restaurant is the sort of place where a chap wants to feel that they want him to come in.
He did not greet me or move aside. He stood there in his big black coat with his stupid earpiece and stood down only when I said I had come for lunch, as if it were some sort of password. But if I had been coming in to kill somebody I wouldn’t have said so, so I don’t know what he is supposed to be for. It briefly occurred to me that, as this was a Scottish-themed restaurant (complete with exhaustive whisky list and antler chandeliers), perhaps I was supposed to head-butt him. But then I remembered I wasn’t doing clichés.
Turns out he was there because Albannach is mostly a bar. A big, modern steel and glass, cocktails-after-work screaming and fighting whisky lounge. With antler chandeliers. The mezzanine restaurant looks like an afterthought, hovering above the bar like a royal box from which to look down on the reeling, drunken hordes.
The staff are not Scottish. My waiter was a dainty, hirsute little Brazilian in a short-sleeved T-shirt with a Pringle check on it and a walkie-talkie on one ear, like a delivery driver. All the staff had them, perhaps so they could go to the bouncer’s aid if there was head-butting to be done.
The menu on offer was a shortened, introductory one, but the prices were full (a stonking £25 for two courses) so I reckon the place is fair game. And, indeed, the game was no more than fair. They could not tell me whether the venison was farmed or wild (which is not too important as you can’t raise a deer in a battery shed, but does not bespeak great interest in the origins of the food) and they overcooked it. The portion was generous, seven or eight half-inch slices of braised loin, but only one or two were pink enough to yield the full flavour of the meat.
By then I’d had a decent deep-fried crab risotto ball with good olive oil and a pimento jus for a pre-starter and a cullen skink that was a rather mingey little bowl of soup, I have to say, when you reckon that it cost about a tenner. It was too mild, a bit low on haddock, not all that skinky. Maybe that’s why they put inverted commas round it on the menu. My guest had asparagus, which is a bit suspect in February (though no more so than the “fresh petit pois” in my soup). He also had spiced Skye monkfish tail in a mussel and saffron broth. I don’t know much about Skye monkfish, myself, but it was part of a philosophy of provenance which seemed to prioritise Scottishness above all things. The “broth” was more of a nage, really, but not without flavour. And you can’t go using words like nage in a Scottish restaurant, when there are words like “broth” to be fitted in somewhere.
Architecturally and spiritually, it was more like eating in an airport than in a restaurant. There wasn’t even any haggis. And all this thinking about Scotland had got me in the mood for haggis. So that evening I went to Boisdale in Pimlico, where they at least have the decency to cover everything with tartan and offer a two-course menu for £17.45 which allows you to have haggis for both starter and main course. Before they let me in, though, I had to pass another scary front-of-house man. This one was less
obviously a bouncer - he was seated, for a start - but I had the sense he could look after himself. Smaller, quieter, in a gangland situation you’d pick him for a blade man. I swear he cracked his knuckles as he looked for my name among the reservations.
On a Thursday night it was a late-middle-aged bridge-and-tunnel crowd (polo neck with sports jacket and tasselled shoes for the boys, big hair and rivers of perfume for the ladies) with a monstrously loud jazz trio who were, as ever, the only three people in the room enjoying the music. Unable to hear or see my companion (because of the syncopated din and the big candle between us on the table) I concentrated on the menu. It had the sense to acknowledge that Scottish cuisine is to be celebrated more for its resources than the execution (just as Scotland historically has been raped more for its raw materials than its arts and crafts). Of the ten starters, five were smoked salmon (the only wild option a gold medal winner - presumably in the swimming - from Dunkeld) and of 15 mains, nine were beef.
I had a rich and tasty haggis that was well-bought from Macsween of Edinburgh, but lazily warmed up. Haggis should steam like a whale when you stab the skin but this arrived no warmer than the arse of a healthy baby. Speaking of arses, a Macduff Aberdeen Angus rump, hung for 28 days, was cooked some way past the rare state in which I had asked for it but was a good enough piece of meat to have survived. The only true disaster was the “Scottish Tart” of dried fruit and walnuts which I had for pudding, whose pastry tasted gag-inducingly of onion. Still, the Boisdale website does claim that “vegetables are from organic suppliers where possible” - so at least the accidental onion was probably a good one, and no doubt of a very generous size.
Albannach
66 Trafalgar Square, WC2 (020-7930 0066)
Meat/fish: 6
Cooking: 6
Other: 6
Score: 6
Boisdale
15 Eccleston Street, SW1 (020-7730 6922
Meat/fish: 6
Cooking: 4
Other: 5
Score: 6
E-mail feedme@thetimes.co.uk if you know somewhere good, and maybe we’ll go there together, the noo
