For those of you who insist on continuing, even after all these years, to tell
me to get out of town: enough already. I’ve been and gone. I’ve been and
gone about as far out of town as is possible. To Loch Maree, Wester Ross,
just opposite the northern tip of Skye. That out enough for you?
And before you look for the review, there isn’t one. What did you expect? That
I’d go and kick the croutons out of a packet minestrone in some hikers’
hotel, patronise the finest fried haddock available in Gairloch? What would
be the point? How many of you would say, “Oh, next time we find ourselves
peckish on the road to Ullapool, we must remember to avoid the Dunyompin B&B,
because the cock-a-leekie’s crap.”
I know you don’t like me saying this, but there is rarely, barely anywhere to
eat pleasurably outside London, except for country- house hotels that serve
rutting Londoners, or the occasional bit of commuter ruraltania, like
Oxfordshire or Cheshire — and that goes with double Cheesy Wotsits on for
rural Scotland.
Now, I’ve always pointed out that the reason we don’t have a pocking of decent
country restaurants is that country people are too bleeding long-pocketed
and short-armed to pay for well-made good food. “Ooh, look, £5 for that. I
can get a whole one for £2.50 at the freezer centre and still have enough
left over for a cheesy bake.” In Scotland, the reasons are slightly
different. It’s not that they’re mean: they’re just poor. Rural incomes
north of the border are comparable to Carpathian Romania and out-of-season
Moravia.
This isn’t a moan on behalf of crofters, clans and wilderness managers, it’s
just that this is a society where cash is scarce, but you get a lot of other
stuff instead — a lot of whisky and fresh-from-the-quayside class-A drugs; a
great view; and all the moaning you can swallow. You can also eat better
here than almost anywhere else in Britain — you just can’t do it in public.
Somebody asked me what I was going to do in Scotland. Stalking, I said. “Oh,
how exciting. Who?” Who? No, I’m shooting. “Ooh, with a long lens? I suppose
it’s Balmoral. You journalists are real scum.” No, no, I’m stalking deer and
shooting them with bullets. “Oh God, not Bambi’s mother?” No, no, of course
not — Bambi’s absentee father. And then I’m going to stop off at Royal
Deeside and take pictures of the Queen and the Seaforth Highlanders getting
naked in the heather.
A large incentive of my week in Scotland is the food. I have Isabel, the
amazing cook. Now I know that a review of Isabel is of even less use to you
than the chippies of Gairloch, but the reason she’s good is, I think,
instructive. Her greatest skill is in sourcing ingredients. British food is
always said to be based on superior stuff — it’s simple and plain, because
the raw materials will brook no fancy tampering. This isn’t actually true:
British food is quite as complicated as French or Italian or Chinese. But it
does tend to rely more on the intrinsic flavours of its ingredients, on
bland harmonies, table-tapping rhythms and bluff, rough tongue jigs. There’s
a world of difference between eating supermarket Danish bacon and the Dunmow
Flitch.
So, for one week, I get to live on salt-marsh lamb, cumberland sausages that
actually come from Cumberland, hams and black puddings from bespoke butchers
— food that hasn’t been made by nutrition morticians in doctor’s gloves and
hairnets. It’s a profound experience, as fundamental and
essence-effervescing as the landscape, simply to eat apples that don’t have
sticky name tags, to collect rowans for jelly and catch brown trout for
breakfast. You can, of course, dismiss all this as Sunday-supplement Petit
Trianonism, just another bit of faddy nostalgia tourism, and you could sneer
that the locals are probably eating frozen pizza like everyone else. And
you’d have half a point: the cynical, joyless half. But the pleasure and
profundity come from the fact that this is food that already speaks with our
tongue. It knows our stories and fits naturally and comfortably into the
shape of our lives.
I’ve been writing a lot about the metaphysics of eating recently, the emotion
and narrative of food. But it’s usually dipping into other people’s stories,
tasting a translation. Where do we go to dine on our own dialect?
Communities, countries, are like families: they need to sit down together
every so often. We see eating out as a couple of hours of exotic foreign
travel, and that’s fine. But to eat our own climate, landscape and
temperament, we’re forced to endure touristy hotels, or weird, boatered
compost obsessives.
And that’s what makes St John so special — it is so much more than the sum of
its ingredients. I have few regrets as a restaurant critic, but one is that
I didn’t give Fergus Henderson a better review when he opened in Clerkenwell
years ago. St John is a restaurant that holds the votive flame for us. The
food is quizzical, sometimes brilliant. It always looks you straight in the
eye, and it does it in an observantly British way. Nothing to do with funny
hats or morris men or beefeaters. It is properly who we are. And it has
attracted messianically protective customers. Even the editor of this column
didn’t want to tell me about the new offshoot, St John Bread &
Wine. In the end, we went to lunch together, to see fair play. And now
another editor, from Culture, has passed on a message to make sure I know
they bake their own bread. Okay, I get the point. Customers don’t behave
like this about Nobu.
St John’s Bread & Wine is a plain room: Jane Eyre sort of plain. The
menu is a list of convivial, hospitable combinations that you won’t have
seen out together before. Brown shrimp and white cabbage, lentils and goat
curd, duck leg and carrots and brawn with pickled red cabbage were all
exemplary, intelligent, exciting dishes that held your attention. There were
others, though, that suffered from that English belief that hardship itself
is a virtue. Such as duck neck, chicory and watercress. Eating duck’s necks
is like eating soggy dog breath. The pig-cheek ham on sourdough toast was an
exercise in competitive chewing for little reward except the satisfaction of
knowing you’d done it and that your stool would be a thing of rough beauty.
The horseradish with the smoked eel was too creamy; the aïoli with the
quail, too fierce — and it had split.
But none of this is really the point. What makes customers loyal to St John is
that this, at last, is food that speaks their language and says decent, kind
and quietly flattering things about them and their families. This is the
restaurant that we might have got if George Orwell had married Elizabeth
David. It’s that winning home-grown combination of casual austerity with
flashes of spectacular opulence, like an old tweed jacket with a paisley
silk lining. You can love this place as much for what it isn’t as for what
it is. And that, too, seems to be very, very us.
