489 Liverpool Road, N7 (020-7609 3560)I’m just back from Atlanta, Georgia, and, sheesh and dang nabbit, those guys sure know how to eat. Shame they don’t know how to cook. Like most of the paradoxes enshrined in its comically unworkable constitution, America’s food, for the most part, offers the illusion of choice and democracy while providing, in reality, a single, unending, fascistically regimented product that runs counter to everything we climbed out of the sea and grew heads for.
I ate hotdogs in America. I ate cheese-dogs, slaw-dogs, chilli-dogs, chicken-dogs, fish-dogs, veggie-dogs, double-dogs and choc-dogs. I ate them at baseball games (where the match-day programme listed 48 different kinds of food available at 120
outlets in the stadium) and at the roadside and at a famous restaurant called Varsity that was celebrating its 75th anniversary. And I ate pulled pork with vinegar sauce. I ate it “tailgating” in the car park at a college football game, at a fund-raising barbecue for a Republican senator, and in tacquerias and upscale old-school eateries. I ate fried chicken and Cuban sandwiches, burgers, beans, black-eye peas and field-peas with fake eyes, turnip greens and tacos and 80 types of fried potato. Fried chicken, fried fish, fried ribs… and everything, every goddam mouthful (with the exception of a home-cooked pot-roast, a picnic and one great restaurant called Bacchanalia) tasted the same.
The food in the Land of the Free is no different from the food in rural Ukraine in the darkest hours of Stalinism. It’s just brighter coloured and there’s more of it.
Ask for eggs and they ask how you want them. Say “fried” and they say “fried how?”, say “over easy” and they say “regular, large, extra large, brown, white, duck, chicken or ptarmigan, free-range, organic or farm fresh, whites only or yolks too, salt or no salt?” And then they bring you the plate and you wonder why they bothered to ask if they were going to put the eggs on a waffle and cover them with maple syrup and grits. Grits are the sick of an infant child who has been fed sweetcorn too early in
the weaning process. But they are the very mortar of soulfood. In fact, they may be the very mortar of mortar. (The real answer to how an American wants his eggs, of course, is “hatched, raised to maturity on a diet of GM corn and steroids, killed, dunked in flour and salt, fried until it resembles no more a chicken than a wind-eroded sandstone gargoyle, and served with fries.)
Eleven days of salt, fat and sugar left me fat as an off-season oyster, happy/ irritable (depending on that moment’s blood-sugar status), bloated and hungry, slightly greasy, full of wind, unwilling to travel anywhere except by car, disinclined to read, preferring to lie farting in front of the television, bored by sporting events with pauses of more than eight seconds between goals, uncomfortable in anything but jogging pants and trainers, slack-
jawed from a lack of chewing (the food being soft enough to ingest straight from fork) so tending to drawl my words and avoid long or difficult ones, and too dependent on consumption and too obsessed with volume and cheapness to have any time for the contemplation of liberal thought.
I was an American. I lay smudged across the seat of my SUV with a three-litre plastic cup of Coke, and cried: “Nuke Iraq, lock up the wetbacks, lynch the faggots, shoot the gynaecologists, send money to Jesus and bring me a jumbo chilli-dog and a root-beer float. And get me a voting form and point my writing hand to where it says ‘Schwarzenegger’.”
The day I flew back I had to do a review. Which was tricky as I had been planning never to eat again.
So imagine my delight when I learnt that Morgan Meunier had opened his first restaurant round the corner from me, up by Highbury Corner - just a three-minute drive away. Or a six-hour walk.
Meunier was head chef for quite a while at Oliver Peyton’s admirable Admiralty restaurant at Somerset House, and I remembered with fondness, and some gastric relief, his cool, gentle, refined cooking, his way with fish and vegetables, and especially his seasonally hyper-sensitive garden menu, a tasting extravaganza that demands no flesh-eating at all.
Morgan M represents M Meunier’s assault on major independent status. He is free of the shackles of empire and has created a small, gentle, sunny little restaurant of the highest quality, the kind that has long been dotted around the southern and western suburbs of London, but never the northern. The only splash of garishness in the pale wood, etched glass, smokelessness and eau de nil (you can almost hear angels singing) is a double shelf of dark-red Michelin guides that signal, I suppose, the nature of his ambition.
Despite this, Morgan does not go the modern way of hyperintense flavouring (which can end up with everything tasting of burnt veal bones and truffle), culture-fusing fandangos or “narrative” deconstructions of old favourites that lay the
composite parts out in rows on long plates, like autopsies.
The amuse-bouche was a little tarbe bean soup with a twizzle of lemon confit, gentle, pale, easy. Snails were poached in Chablis, the little rascals, and sealed in a raviolo under a red wine jus that was by no means acerbic, and the attendant poached garlic held no horrors for even the feyest vampire. The scallops were beautiful animals (though not what a Georgian would call an animal) and were neither challengingly wet inside nor scarily seared outside, with their tiny onion soubise, and a crunch of very clever (but not too clever) chicory tarte tatin. I was beginning to feel like eating again. Which was just as well because a smooth tower of pink foie gras came to the plate with a friend: a little spatchcocked
half of grilled quail that was almost rugged in the context.
Pot-roasted Iken Valley venison was beefy, dark and ungamey, bolstered by a rich hare raviolo (my guess is that Morgan’s mum bought him a ravioli kit one Christmas and he just can’t stop using it - there’s even a lobster and tarragon one with the sea bass) and a lithe little chestnut and celeriac
purée. A friend of mine across the room (a restaurateur himself) was goggle-eyed with
admiration for the mallard duck served as both a roast and a confit with a poelée of salsify and trompettes, and his pal loved the
roasted red leg partridge with red cabbage and a liver crouton.
If you take the autumn menu you’ll get a soup, the scallops or the foie gras, grilled halibut with pancetta and lentils, the venison or the partridge, and then pudding and petits fours for 30 quid. Absurdly
good value. The meat-free garden menu (soup - legumes à la grecque - gnocchi and cherry tom ragout - ricotta cannelloni - pudding and petits fours) is a fiver less. Stupid value. You’ll believe a body builder can be governor of California. North London may not be the land of the free, but it’s the land of the bloody reasonable and a fair chance of fitting in your car seat for the ride home.
Food: 8
Location: 8
Gentleness: 9
Score: 8.33
Restaurant guide
Roussillon
16 St Barnabas Street, SW1 (020-7730 5550)
Small, gentle, quiet, suburban (well, a Pimlico backstreet), this place has a touch as light as a feather with everything from the roast veal with its marrow to the spicy duck-egg soufflé. And chef
Alexis Gaultier does a gorgeous garden menu of his own.
Vanilla Pod
31 West Street, Marlow, Buckinghamshire (01628 898101)
Michael McDonald makes light of great Anglo-French food, literally. Scallops with vanilla haricots blancs and vanilla velouté, raviolo of brioche and wild mushrooms with a fluff of garlic foam, and sea bass with saffron and vanilla are all worth the trip out to T. S. Eliot’s old digs in Marlowe.
E-mail feedme@thetimes.co.uk if you know somewhere better and we might go there together
