“The Mole had been working very hard all the morning, spring-cleaning his little home. First with brooms, then with dusters; then on ladders and steps and chairs, with a brush and a pail of whitewash… Spring was moving in the air above and in the earth below and around him, penetrating even his dark and lowly little house with its spirit of divine discontent and longing…”
Nor is the dark and lowly little house of restaurant criticism any different. Which is why you catch me with my head in a scarf and an apron on my hips, dusting out all the nooks and crannies of this horribly wintered-up little column, and finding, as one inevitably does, all sorts of forgotten horrors and tiny joys beneath the dust.
Why, only moments ago, wedged down the back of the big flowery sofa (which I really must get around to re- upholstering), I found Café Vergnano, the only purveyor of food or drink in the world past whose premises I am truly unable to walk without entering. I’ve been meaning to write about it for months, years, but it just got forgotten under all the clutter.
It’s just a coffee shop on Charing Cross Road, on the east side as you walk down towards Trafalgar Square, but it happens to sell the best coffee I’ve ever drunk, anywhere. The espresso machine itself is an astonishing thing – an Elektra Belle Epoque – which looks like Flash Gordon must have crash-landed in it here, many aeons ago.
To watch the guy raising the cup to eye level to leak, ever so slowly, the frothed milk from jug into coffee so that it rises with a perfect rosetta to the rim, and then see him print “1882” on the rich surface with chocolate is to witness a rare devotion. But a simple espresso served on a pewter tray with a small bitter chocolate and a glass of cold water (to make each mouthful of coffee as rousing as the first) is perhaps a purer expression of the spirit of the bean. Go, for the Lord’s sake. Travel whatever hundreds of miles you must, just for a cup of coffee. It’s worth it. And double worth it.
Just like, oddly, the vulgarly monikered “World’s Most Expensive Sandwich”, launched three weeks ago at Selfridges Food Hall and eaten by me almost immediately, but then irritatingly lost over here among the unboxed VHSs and disc-less DVD husks. I only ate it as a stunt for a glossy mag. It’s £85, for crying out loud. I don’t normally hold with that sort of thing.
The main filling is a half-pound sirloin of wagyu beef, the famous beer-fed, regularly massaged Japanese £100 per kilo variety, whose angelic marbling with uncountable seams of pale fat give a sweetness and complexity that make it, if meat is your thing, a giveaway at the price.
The beef is grilled rare and basted with foie gras, then served between two slices of the chef’s own 24-hour fermented sourdough, with truffle mayonnaise, foie gras dressing, brie de Meaux, red pepper confit, English plum tomatoes and rocket. Arrogant? Unseemly? Dunderheaded? Yes, yes and three times yes. But, by Belenos and Toutatis, chef Scott McDonald is on to something here.
The truffle mayo was not over the top, the foie gras only underscored the richness of the meat, the gentle acidity of the toms cut that richness gently, and the bread was perfect: holding its shape throughout the trauma of its devouring and offering occasional crunchiness from its crust. There is no doubt in my mind that it was the best sandwich I have ever eaten. And the best of anything can name its price. It only makes me yearn for the days when, thanks either to an unforeseen career boost or creeping dementia, I finally end up with more money than sense.
Oho! What’s this behind the telly, all furred with dust? Looks like the Grill Room at Brown’s Hotel in Mayfair, revamped by Olga Polizzi for her brother Rocco Forte (at a cost, speaking of money and sense, of £19 million), and spruced up for the 21st century. Except that when I called to book last December they told me that gentlemen were required to wear jackets. So I withdrew my reservation and have never been. And will not go. A jacket, indeed. I’m a customer, not a bloody waiter.
So the Grill Room’s going straight in the box to take to Oxfam, along with two places I found while descaling the downstairs loo: Kilo (a new venture on the site of what used to be Noble Rot in a nooky spot behind Regent Street where I had a “kilo” of overdone prawns and shared a châteaubriand of no great nobility or ambition back in January), and Monkey Chews (a Chalk Farm eating pub I visited with a reader, where the seafood platter had to go back because all the prawns were pregnant and the crab was rotten to blueness – they’d have had a better chance of getting it past me if they’d served it with crackers and called it stilton).
But spring-cleaning is not all trips to the dump and the charity shops. Occasionally one comes upon some treasure which might have been lost for ever, had thoroughness not compelled you to wriggle your duster into the unlikeliest of holes – and so it was that I came upon Hot Stuff, an 18-seater Indian diner at the bottom of a giant housing estate in Vauxhall, which I’d been meaning to polish up for you all year but never got round to.
In a tiny boxroom under the estate, painted the bright colours of a student-run refectory, operating a bring-your-own booze policy, and pulsing with fun and games and a love of food, a breezy Anglo-Indian (in truth, Anglo-East-African-Asian) geezer brought menus which he admitted nobody had used in years. Then he described a dozen or so dishes we might like to choose and eventually brought them all. There was frazzling chilli paneer, soul-moistening prawns in garlic, huge naans, spicy chicken drumsticks, fishfinger tikka masala… all very good, very cheap, heavy but life-affirming food to send you home with a happy heart and a bulging doggy bag.
At the next table a sozzled teenager from the estate scoffed “the closest thing you’ve got to a balti” with her absolutely hammered father (they had been waiting in the pub for three hours for a table), and at another (well, the other) table, 12 gibbering students congratulated each other on getting out for a fiver a head (not counting the cans of Stella they’d brought).
Finally, Village East, the brand spanking-new bauble to place in the centre of the spring-cleaned review. It’s just opened on Bermondsey High Street along from the Delfina Arts Café which started the trendification of the area back in the middle Nineties on the back of the Brit Art boom, and is a little too Jamietastic for its own good: multi-levelled space, raw, pale wood, open kitchen, plain-talking menu with “ye olde typewriter” typeface and woodcuts, let down a little by very foreign waiting staff who don’t really understand much of what you ask them.
Deep-fried soft-shell crab looked scarily literal sitting there all pink and naked on the plate without the opacity that comes from the chilli and garlic batter treatment it gets in South-East Asian environments. It was not especially lively tasting, and a bit of a nightmare to get through. Stuffed courgette flowers were heavily battered, on the other hand, and what delicacy might have survived the deep-fryer was suffocated by a very strong goat’s-cheese filling. Roast suckling pig for two was not the most exciting piglet I have ever chewed, but there was lots of it, decent crackling, and the odd-sounding accompaniment of parmesan sauce – served on the side – made rather more of it than might otherwise have been.
It flatters to deceive, alas, this place. A menu inspired both visually and content-wise by the no-nonsense modern Britscoff approach of St John and Anchor and Hope and all that, needs to do far more on the plate to convince weary old dogs like me.
And with that the mole “suddenly flung down his brush on the floor, said ‘Bother!’ and ‘O blow!’ and also ‘Hang spring-cleaning!’ and bolted out of the house without even waiting to put on his coat”.
Café Vergnano
62 Charing Cross Road, WC2 (020-8922 6308)
Selfridges Food Hall
400 Oxford Street, W1(08708 377377)
The Grill, Brown’s Hotel
Dover Street, W1 (0871 0751072)
Kilo
3-5 Mill Street, W1 (020-7629 8877)
Click here to book a table at this resaurant
Monkey Chews
2 Queen’s Crescent, NW5 (0871 4262570)
Click here to book a table at this resaurant
Hot Stuff
19 Wilcox Road, SW8 (020-7720 1480)
Village East
171 Bermondsey Street, SE1 (020-7357 6082)
E-mail feedme@thetimes.co.uk and maybe we’ll go out for lunch
