Last week, you will remember, we discussed why Nick Carraway, the narrator of The Great Gatsby, did not pursue a career as a restaurant critic. This week, for module two of “Modern American Literature, Media and Restaurant Management”, we will be looking at the presence of some unlikely restaurateurs in the so-called “wild man” fiction of the cowboy era, to which end I would like you to open your copies of True Grit at page 137, where we find Rooster Cogburn describing… yes, what’s that, Wibblethorpe? Can’t it wait?
What do you mean you couldn’t find a copy of True Grit? No, it is most certainly not out of print. It was reprinted by Bloomsbury this very year under pressure from the novelist Donna Tartt, who provides the introduction which… eh? What? None of you was able to find a copy? By God, it’s small wonder you ended up at The University Of A Random Bit Of The South-East England at Kentish Town (Formerly Parliament Hill Polytechnic) doing one of these vocational/liberal arts compound degrees which seem to be all the rage, but in which there is absolutely no point whatever.
OK, I’ll talk, you take notes. You are all aware of Rooster Cogburn, the big, one-eyed, murderous drunkard of a US marshal played by John Wayne in the 1969 film,
True Grit? But have you ever wondered how he got that way? The film barely hints at it. But the little-read 1968 novel by Charles Portis, on which the film is based, offers more depth, in an area that I think will surprise you.
Sitting round the campfire with Mattie Ross, the 14-year-old girl who has hired him to track down her father’s killer (cowboy books have only one plot, but it’s a damn fine one), Cogburn recalls how, in his rustling days, he once robbed a Federal captain and decided to use the money to
go straight:
“I went to Cairo, Illinois,” he says, “and bought a eating place called The Green Frog… we served ladies and men both, but mostly men.”
At first, the restaurant business went well for Rooster Cogburn, but then his wife got restless and things started to go wrong: “Running a eating place was too low-down for her… my drinking picked up… she got a bellyful of it and decided she would go back to her first husband… I tried running it myself for a while but I couldn’t keep good help and I never did learn how to buy meat. I didn’t know what I was doing. I was like a man fighting bees. Finally I just give up and sold it for nine hundred dollars and went out to see the country…”
Yes, sirree, the meanest old dog in Westerns was a failed restaurateur, bitter as hell and shooting up the plains because he couldn’t get decent staff. Nor is it unlikely motivation. I dare say if it all went tits-up for Oliver Peyton, Marco Pierre White or Luke Johnson (who has fought a few bees in his time), you’d see them staggering about, wearing eye-patches, with a bottle of Jack in one hand and a six-shooter in the other, killing people for fun.
And you’ve got to love where Rooster Cogburn couldn’t get the hang of buying meat – a subject very close to my own heart these days, as you know. If only the film had incorporated a flashback scene with John Wayne at the butcher’s, his Colt 45 resting between the eyes of the slaughterman, and saying, as he cocks the revolver with a spine-chilling click: “I’m gonna ask you one more time, cowboy, is these here Middle White loin chops sourced from conscientiously farmed organic pigs, or ain’t they?”
And talking of restauration in the Old West, I am here to tell you that with the opening of The Ledbury last month in Notting Hill, the frontier has finally been tamed. The local Hoorays’ fondly held illusions that they live somewhere edgy and bohemian have finally been shattered by the arrival of a restaurant whose raison d’être is – as it has long been for restaurants in Chelsea, Mayfair and Knightsbridge – to provide a product for people who are desperate to spend a hundred quid a head on supper.
Traditionally, this area has been well served by the sort of upscale brasseries – Kensington Place, 192, Osteria Basilico, The Electric, E&O – that allow people to eat out in a way that makes them feel young and funky and cosmopolitan rather than fat and old and unimaginative, just sitting there in their blazers waiting for obsequious flunkies to shovel expensive morsels into their fat faces (who mentioned Michael Winner?).
There was never any really first-rank stuff around here (Assaggi, perhaps, but even that’s low-key and folksy despite the cold-sweat menu prices) because, I guess, the locals were too sophisticated or too cool or too media or too stoned to want it.
Well, for the sake of The Ledbury’s owners, Nigel Platts-Martin and Philip Howard (whose pedigree ticks such top-end favourites as The Square, The Glasshouse and La Trompette), I hope they want it now. Because this place has the hushed, moneyed feel of a Tom Aikens, a Gordon Ramsay or a Pied à Terre. And while it would have been laughed off the map in these parts even seven or eight years ago, it is possible that the Euro-American super-bankers and lawyers who have bought out the arty Brits who bought out the black people might just take it seriously. Their wives wanted to live in Chelsea anyway.
Rich, shiny parquet, inch-thick linen, chandeliers, individually upholstered black and white leather chairs, staff in black uniforms and an eight-course tasting menu are the very least you would expect. As is an amuse-bouche of cherry tomato jelly with… well, it doesn’t really matter what it’s with, does it? It’s the first amuse-bouche W11 has allowed in. It has no competition.
Four dazzlingly presented starters drew gasps, which is always nice. A slick and viscous poached egg was deep-fried in a sort of vermicelli and served on new-season asparagus with a morel foam. Expertly done, and a reminder that in the crap-hole that used to be on this site, a Texican brasserie called Dakota, they were unable to poach an egg at all.
A rabbit and morel lasagne was equally accomplished, and so was a pair of halved, roasted scallops with basil purée, aubergine and baby squid “friture” – the silvery-mauve glisten of the foetal cephalopod and the deep indigo of the aubergine brilliantly picked out with baby leaves of purple basil.
As for the mains, a gleaming parallelogram of bream, zig-zagged with courgette purée, nestled in a pale-pink lobster foam with some timely Jersey Royals, and I had sweet English veal with a roundel of macaroni cheese (très posh) and white asparagus. My mate Tony had pigeon in a weedy consommé that was the only bum note.
Whether or not The Ledbury will succeed depends on whether or not the faux-boho locals can get over themselves and admit it’s what they’ve always wanted. Some, I suppose, may be fooled by its incongruously modest name into thinking that it is a gastropub. They may even try and persuade you that it is really just a darling little bistro doing simple scofferoonies with a glass of plonk (although, as the Duke would say: the hell it is).
If not, I guess Philip and Nigel will just have to sell up for nine hundred dollars and go out to see the country…
Meat/Fish: 8
Cooking: 8
Other: 7
Score: 7.67
Price: Like I said, a rough hundy a head
Shanghai
41 Kingsland High Street, E8
(020-7254 2878)
Sarah Kerr writes: “For such a dump, Dalston has an incredible number of good places to eat. This place is in an old pie-and-mash shop and the waiting staff are quite interesting, as a few are obviously ladyboys.”
Chideock House Hotel
Chideock, Dorset
(01297 489242)
Rose Rouse writes: “I would like to advise you to eat here. Last time I went, the owner Anna Dunn cooked the best sea bass I have ever tasted.”
E-mail feedme@thetimes if you know somewhere good, and maybe we’ll go there together
