There are those who look on the world and see an intricate filigree of
delicately interlocking elements, each apparently random, but necessary for
a complex symmetry. And then there are those who look at the world in the
same way a Dundonian cleaning lady looks at a teenager’s bedroom. They don’t
think nature is miraculous to behold; they think it is a very naughty boy,
and that mud is a severe design fault.
I have a friend like this. Let’s call her Rita, because that is her name. She
has whatever the decorative version of perfect pitch is. I’ve only known one
chap who had truly perfect pitch. It’s a rare gift — actually a curse. The
world for him was a cacophony of things that were sharp or flat. From sirens
to doorbells, it all grated like fingernails on a blackboard. Which,
incidentally, are F sharp. Rita feels the same about the aesthetic
landscape. For her, life is a bucket of damp laundry and a nasty shade of
pink. She is an alluring cross between Esther Rantzen and Grace Kelly, a
sort of Debbie Tidies Dallas. I belong to the other school: all’s well that
doesn’t stink of putrefaction.
We were having dinner last week and she ordered asparagus. When it came, she
stared at her plate with a furrowed concern. Her little nose ruckled, the
gimlet entered her eye. The asparagus appeared to be perfect: uniformly
green, arranged in a neat row, all the same length, veritable vegetable
grenadiers. After a moment, she took the plate and turned it 90 degrees,
then straightened it a touch, a look of satisfaction suffusing her face. She
smiled at me. “The wrong way round, ” she explained. “They served the
asparagus the wrong way round.”
You’re having a giggle. Asparagus don’t have a wrong way round, I replied. “Of
course they do,” she said with the quiet authority of a special-needs
teacher. “There are left-hand asparagus and right-hand asparagus. They got
it wrong.” You are stark, staring Rain Man, I said. And I called over the
owner, who we will refer to as Jeremy, because that’s what his mother calls
him. My friend says you’ve served her asparagus the wrong way round. Instead
of laughing until we could see his uvula pole-dance, he runkled, pursed and
said yes. “We’ve had a lot of discussion about that.” A lot? “A lot. Some
people,” he continued, “are of the opinion that you should grasp asparagus
with the right finger and thumb and drag it from the left-hand side, thereby
anointing it with unctions.”
“No, they’re quite wrong,” said Rita crisply. “You shouldn’t reach across a
plate ... ” And they were off. Where do you put the spoon on a coffee cup?
Is eating a flatfish with two forks pretentious? They opened up a little
window into a world of tiny concerns and minute satisfactions that I’ve
never travelled to. For a moment, watching them frolic in the herbaceous
border of inconsequence, I considered joining them. But would the pygmy
satisfaction of hospital corners outweigh the dwarf irritation of an
untucked shirt-tail? The answer is, plainly, no.
All this has precious little to do with this week’s restaurant, The Ledbury in
Notting Hill. Many have said that this smart, new, soigné dining room
doesn’t belong in louche Notting Hill, but this is because Notting Hill is
an area where its character is decided by people who don’t actually live
there. The crowds who stuff the confused polyglot restaurants that dot the
place are mostly young aspirationals who travel there on the bus to be
part-time hillbillies. The Hill’s white cliffs of family houses and garden
flats are far too expensive for the people who are thought to make this
place so chic and infuriating. The Ledbury is precisely the sort of
restaurant that belongs in Notting Hill. The evening I went, it was full of
old polished natives relieved not to have to travel to Mayfair.
It’s a spacious room, with good-sized tables and big windows that have not
been overdesigned, and is carefully lit with soft, ambient light and small
overhead spots on each table. Lighting is far more important than art or
furnishing for the spectacle-wearing, wealthy over-forties. The menu is
wearying; it starts with a tasting menu of numerous courses, a thing
redolent of the 1980s, of chef vanity and star envy. The choose-yourself
list is full of stuff you might like, but it invariably has one ingredient
too many. So you might fancy ambidextrous asparagus with a hen’s egg, but do
you really want morel foam? I started with a lobster, sea trout, leeks and
jersey royals terrine with frog’s leg beignets and watercress mayonnaise,
which is a much bigger mouthful to say than it was to eat. Despite the cast
list, it managed to say very little, though it did look like the Christmas
cover of an Australian gourmet magazine. Even Rita would have drawn the line
at boning a frog’s leg, dipping it in breadcrumbs and frying it into a
pike’s canapé.
For the main I had assiette of veal, with gratin of macaroni, wild
mushrooms, white asparagus and toasted almonds. It was the almonds that did
it for me. The dish was laid out in little piles as if waiting to be wrapped
in tissue and packed. Bits of it tasted nice, but all in all it wasn’t
remotely satisfying. The dessert menu came from planet pudding, a parallel
world where everything lives in harmony with everything else and anyone can
be afters. I had a chocolate soufflé with honeycomb and banana ice cream
that was far and away the best dish of the meal.
You probably gather this is not the sort of food I seek out with pleasure. It
all looked like it was prepared for a cookbook and it was punctuated with
little things I didn’t order and didn’t want. Every dish came with an
inaudible explanation given in some pidgin waiter tongue. The smaller the
plop on the plate, the longer the description. But I can tell when this sort
of retro, fussy, tepid, taupe grub has been done well. This stuff was six
out of ten. Just too imprecise, the flavours not intense or distinct enough.
Small and anal shouldn’t also mean timid, but in this case it did. The
service, when I could understand it, was good, and the Scandinavian maître
d’ — a longtime London favourite — is excellent. Three courses are £40. On
the way out, I picked up a lunch menu that looked much more the thing. For
£19.50 you could have potato, crab and bean soup followed by bream with
scallop, cockle and artichoke risotto.
The Ledbury is exactly what Notting Hill wants. The dining-room version of
being entertained by a troop of flat-chested, shy, whispering strippers. And
my one neat life observation is that if you have overhead spots and
oversized plates, then every wipe mark on the rim shines like tubercular
snot.
020 7792 9090
Lunch, Mon-Fri, noon-2pm; Sat-Sun, noon-2.30pm. Dinner, Mon-Sat,
6.30pm-11pm; Sun, 6.30pm-10pm
