Salt-baked sea bass on the menu at Sheekey’s lodged like a bone in my head — because of Cargoes, the school rote poem. “Dirty British coaster with a salt-caked smoke stack/Butting through the Channel in the mad March days.” Now it’s always going to be: “Dirty British coaster with a salt-baked sea bass.” I didn’t order it.
Here’s a funny thing. When you write down an e-mail address, however big the piece of paper, it never fits on one line. It happens too regularly to be random, and it fits in with a semi-formed theory I’ve been mulling — animist determinism. I’ve been piecing it together with the help of a chair and a defunct television remote called Barry. I/we suspect that manhandled objects take on a shade of their use or user; the tool remembers the hand of the craftsman. Maybe it’s no more than a frisson, a resonance. But I reckon the paper and pen know that the e-mail address is anti-hard copy. They know that e-mail is set to make them obsolete.
Nothing is as replete with animist determinism as kitchen equipment. I don’t know a cook who isn’t superstitious about bowls and wooden spoons. They all have favourite rings on the stove, good and naughty pans, friendly aprons and arrogant pastry brushes. I once knew a girl who swore that a knife was out to get her. All her other knives treated her with respect, fondness even, but this one cut her with a salacious dexterity. I looked at it. She’d got it in a junk shop. It lay supine and acquiescent in my hand. “It’s obvious,” I said. “This knife has been rubbed up the right way with a lot of Carborundum, turning it into an elegant stiletto curve. It’s a boning knife — and you’re a vegetarian. Of course it wants to eviscerate you.” Spooky, but true.
I ate in the restaurant at Tate Britain a couple of weeks ago. I’ve reviewed this place before, but it has a new chef and the food has taken a distinct turn for the better. I had an excellent lunch with Ian Warrell, the Turner expert. They gave us the corner table usually reserved for the gallery’s director, Nick Serota (it will be an awful mouthful if he’s knighted), with its buttoned leather banquette that looks as if it’s made out of stuffed Gestapo greatcoats. I sat down gingerly and the imperceptible frisson of culture’s supremo insinuated itself up my bottom. For an instant, I saw the world through Serota-coloured spectacles. Everything was hung crooked.
The Tate restaurant is one of the great secret dining rooms of London. First, because they always have a splendid pair of Radclyffe Hall-style lesbians, with horny fingers and tongues like bald moles, eating oysters without using their hands. And second, because there’s a marvellous mural by Rex Whistler, a charming country-house guest and artist who was probably the model for Charles Ryder in Brideshead Revisited. The picture is called The Expedition in Pursuit of Rare Meats, and includes a small tableau of a black boy being led off on a lead. You could never get away with that at the inclusive Sharon Tate Modern up the river.
At the bottom of the menu, it said a 12.5% gratuity charge would be added to the bill, “for the benefit of serving and other staff”. I asked the waiter. He said that was right, but that it might also buy new napkins and make up wages. If it does, that’s just plain wrong and immoral. I felt Mr Serota’s banquette squirm. I’m not going to give up going on about the iniquity of the service charge being used to make up a minimum wage.
The other week, Antony Worrall Thompson — the flat-faced little munchkin, of whom I’m rather fond — said that to get good service in this country, we should pay waiting staff less and make them rely on tips. Brilliant. Why not apply the same criterion to teachers or doctors? Or daytime television personalities? In fact, what other areas do you think Antony imagines will be improved by paying the workers less? Waiters are already among the lowest-paid, most exploited of the urban workforce.
At the bottom of the menu at this week’s restaurant, Amici, in Wandsworth, it say they don’t use GM crops, but they do add a 12.5% service charge. The waiter said it went to him, via his wage packet. So I said: “Take it off the bill.” The manager hurried over with the new bill and asked if everything was all right, and why had I taken off the service charge — was the waiter awful, did he need punishing? I said he was charming and professional, but I wouldn’t be adding my money to the management’s meanness, and I gave the waiter a tip in cash. He was inordinately grateful and beamed like an extra from a Charlie Chaplin film. The manager added that he completely understood and that, strictly between the two of us, he’d have done the same thing himself.
All this is a bore for you to read and for me to do. The Blonde, who is generally impervious to public embarrassment, stared at her fingernails, muttering: “Oh God, oh God.” But it’s worth it. It’s important. If you want to eat with pleasure, don’t leave a sour taste in someone else’s mouth.
Amici sits at the bottom of Wandsworth Common in a parade of restaurants, some of which look as if they would have to hand out free money to get a full house. The common lurks darkly; shadowy figures lurch and stagger in the gloaming, some of them dragging leaky sacks. Tendrils of fog slide between the twisted trunks of blasted trees. Out of the blackness, a scream rises into a wild, keening laugh.
The reason I’ve come out here is because the menu is said to have been overseen by Valentina Harris, who writes nice books about nice Italian food. What she has overseen here is pedestrian: a series of starters that are merely constructions, made with mozzarella, carpaccio, prosciutto and pecorino. Main courses are the usual suspects: chicken, steak, sea bass, swordfish, all with unremarkable accompaniments that can be made by semi-trained or inexperienced cooks. At about £12 for a main course, it’s no bargain, but it doesn’t hurt.
The decoration is safe contemporary. It could be a restaurant, a hotel lobby or a secretaries’ boutique. It was virtually empty, except for a couple of tables of local women vacuuming wine, who were probably so bored at home, staring at the stripped pine and oatmeal Habitat sofa, that they had risked the common for an hour or two to moan. Or perhaps they were au pairs on an evening off, reminiscing about how much nicer Gdansk is than Wandsworth.
Amici looks rather like a prototype for a chain, as if someone has said: “Would you look at the success of that Carluccio’s? Let’s do the same, but a bit more upmarket. Get another Italian food writer on board, and we’ll start in Wandsworth.” It’s the right place to test this sort of low-expectation concept; there are hundreds of Wandsworths hanging off the bottoms of our fatter cities. But Amici is underpowered, underflavoured, uninviting and no friend of mine — or its staff.
AMICI
2 stars
35 Bellevue Road, SW17; 020 8672 5888
Lunch, Mon-Fri, noon-3pm, Sat-Sun, 11am-4pm. Dinner, Mon-Sat, 6pm-11pm Sun, 6pm-10pm
5 stars Italian stallion
4 stars Italians do it better
3 stars Ciao bella
2 stars Italian for beginners
1 star Arrivederci
