I love white restaurants. The memories they leave you with are so much cleaner and crisper than the rest. Otherwise quite unmemorable meals live more excitingly in my imagination by virtue of having been eaten at the Hempel or at Spoon at the Sanderson or at the Blueprint Café, because they come leaping out of the dark recesses of my atrophying mind more energetically than all the fusty cream and heliotrope and fuchsia ones. And those three are only quite white restaurants.
Very white restaurants such as Nobu and St John have left even more indelible impressions. But then they also have better kitchens. The painted boards and whitewashed brickwork of Fergus Henderson’s Clerkenwell headquarters - down a white-walled corridor you walk, into the high, white bar and bakery space and on up into the white restaurant - provide the perfect background on which to paint pungent recollections of onion soup with bone-marrow toast, a dish of skate, chicory and anchovy, blood cake and fried eggs or boiled ham with broad beans and parsley sauce.
White is the colour scheme of dreams, and the colour of the Shandean white page parody of Locke, who described the tabula rasa that is a man’s mind before receiving the imprint of knowledge through experience. And it is how the great empiricist would have envisaged a restaurant, too, if he had been in the business of writing Essays Concerning Human Scoffing.
And white is the colour of the dreamiest restaurant experience I have ever had, at The Supper Club in Amsterdam, long ago, on a stag weekend. A vast white room, it was, with a wide, white triforium lined with white canvas mattresses. Up a white ladder the 15 of us climbed, stoned as monkeys (but chirpier) on sensi, and sprawled on the squishy white floor. A dwarf all in white with a platter of oysters on his head (there are always dwarves in dreams) climbed up to join us and down in the open kitchen two huge white women in chef’s whites swallowed fire. Throughout the evening we were fed little Pacific Rim-style nibbles with long intervals between, while we watched strange, diabolic cabaret and dancing. And what with the DJs going all late-Nineties ambient on us, and the sticky blue charras which we smoked after pudding, and the little Japanese woman who walked on our backs for a guilder a yard, we were all asleep by one o’clock, to be woken at three with the dwarf prodding us and asking us to leave. You just don’t get that in a restaurant with burgundy carpet and pelmetted paisley drapes by Nina Campbell.
No dwarves or fire-eaters at Ottolenghi, but then this is Upper Street, Islington, London N1, where the restaurant chain development consultants arrive with tape measures to carve off slices of the never-ending restaurant sausage into whatever space is left after the vacation of premises by interesting independents that just couldn’t hack it any more. We are very close to where a once great, white restaurant called Granita used to be.
Ottolenghi itself is not unique; there is one already in Ledbury Road. But two links do not make a chain, and there’s plenty of time to go snootily off the franchise later, when there are 20 of them. For the moment, I love it.
It is a long, entirely white room that feels a bit like a shoebox, a bit like a shoe shop. It may once, indeed, have been a shoe shop - most of the shops on Upper Street, after all, are. In the window, white candles, rather gothically arranged, winked enticingly in the after-dusk.
In the front there are wide, white shelves and counters that groan in the daytime with grab-your-own breads and delicacies but look rather sexier in the evenings, empty. There are also floor-to-ceiling shelves of fruit crates, also and again rather enticingly, empty. It is dream-like already.
And then there are the tables. White, of course. They are long, rectangular, and there are only two of them, tapering into the depths of the dining room with dizzying perspective and laid as for a dinner party, with hessian napkins, nice, slender, sparkling
cutlery, flower arrangements and glass candelabras. For the plan is elbow-to-elbow communalism à la wagamama (wow: “alawagamama” - have you ever seen so many “a”s?).
I arrived alone and early, and as the furthest table was full I was seated on one side of the nearer, completely empty one. Just me at a table set for 20. Again, dream-like.
A waitress - contrasting nicely in all-black with a white apron - brought me a single white sheet of A4 which explained that the three listed starters would be brought to me with olive oil and bread unless I asked them to be withheld. My first opt-out menu. I asked, politely, why. “I am a goat,” she said, turning suddenly into my dead great-aunt, “You may turn the question paper over… now!” Or at least I half expected her to. In truth, she said, “We’re looking to simplify the business of eating out.” She said it in an Australian accent. Australians are looking to simplify everything. Even dinner they find a bit tricky. It reminded me that in Australia every restaurant I ate in was entirely white - why confuse simple minds with such arcania as colours and patterns?
The bread was a deliciously tacky slice of malty, meaty brown from a loaf which must have been beautifully decorated with dried fruit (I got a sliver of dried apricot and a smidge of orange) and a boisterous, yeasty white. Cannellini bean purée with spring onion, lemon juice and olive oil was a high, citrussy ersatz hummus served in a generous fold on white porcelain. Salted fresh herring was robust and squeaky but seemed puzzlingly under-seasoned and came with a soothing mush of grilled aubergine that had the lovely smokiness of babaganoush. The third starter was warm, sweet goat’s cheese with organic beetroot - a little jiggling on my part paired the beetroot with the herring for satisfyingly mittel-European harmony.
My main course was also a joy. A heavy little cast-iron pan with one of the hessian napkins folded around the handle contained a fistful of gorgeous, buoyant prawns that had been cooked off in arrack to leave a heady aniseed whisper in the flesh. In there also were kalamata olives with their exotic sourness, tomatoes and a coconutty jus faintly reminiscent of Singapore laksa. The alternatives to that were cod on samphire, ribsteak of Hereford beef or porcini gnocchi. I also had a side of mangetout and fresh peas, a huge white bowl of effervescing greenness served with lashings of butter and salt and pepper. All that, and I walked for well under thirty quid.
The arrack, the olives, the aubergines, the hummusy stuff - there is a distinct whiff of the East about Ottolenghi. I half think someone told me the place was Israeli-owned but that they didn’t want it widely known. Less, I suspect, because of fears about security than because of the kneejerk boycottasticness of the lachrymose, Guardian-reading locals whose anti-Zionist frenzy is not adequately quenched by avoiding the smaller, nuttier varieties of avocado at Waitrose. Ignore them, chaps. As far as I’m concerned, you’re all white.
Food: 7
Service: 7
Whiteness: 9
Score: 7.67
Price: As above
Inn the Park
St James’s Park, W1 (020-7451 9999)
If we get any sort of Indian summer, don’t forget about this place. I dropped in the other day for lush crab and mayonnaise on toast and a whole, small roasted chicken with spring greens that was just about perfect. Great views, lovely service, surprisingly easy to get a weekend lunch table.
Rasoi Vineet Bhatia
10 Lincoln Street, SW3 (010-7225 1881)
Bhatia opened this place after leaving Zaika a few months ago. According to the lesser critics, he is once again offering some of the best upscale Indian food in London, but I’m probably not going to get around to going for some time, so feel free to go it alone.
E-mail feedme@thetimes.co.uk if you once dreamt you went to a white restaurant.
