The Anchor and Hope is the most exciting new restaurant I have been to since I
started writing this column. No question. It opened last autumn and I heard
almost immediately that it was good, but a
gastropub in Waterloo is a gastropub in Waterloo. I have good gastropubs in
North London, where I live, dozens of them. Some of them better than good.
The thing about good gastropubs is that they are very handy to have on your
doorstep, but you do not cross the metropolis specially. Waterloo is a long
way away. Waterloo is where the Old Vic is. Al Pacino and Robert De Niro
could be doing Waiting for Godot there, one night only, with Le
Gavroche doing the catering and Uma Thurman giving cigarettes away, naked,
and I could have tickets for the best seats in the house, and I would still,
when it came to it, almost certainly think, “Oh balls, I’ll get Police
Academy 4 out on video again and order pizza.” Definitely, if it was
raining.
And then I heard that The Anchor and Hope was “really good”. And I said,
“What, really, really good?” And they said, “Yes, really, really, properly
good.”
Now, all talk of greatness in restaurants or chefs is a nonsense, a pose, a
sham, a lot of girly French toss. Restaurants are either good, really good,
really really good, or properly good. And of properly good restaurants in
London, we have but a handful. Barely a clutch.
So down I went. I always forget about the wonder of Waterloo Bridge. From dusk
until dawn there is no city view like it in the world. None. Sweeping round
to St Paul’s on your left, and to Parliament on your right, with the South
Bank, the Wheel, the bridges and the Embankment, the turbid Thames, really,
you could not travel across it in a car and not feel your heart race. Unless
the car was a hearse. And you were in the boot. “Dull would he be of soul…”
or dead.
The Anchor and Hope is on the site of one of those pubs known as a “shite pub”
- the kind that are built into the ground floor of council blocks. But once
inside, things look up: red painted walls, good-looking staff, a bar with a
knock-through to a dining room and open kitchen, and a tall blackboard with
a long poem about food on it, free verse, not rhyming, rhythmically tedious,
but with a lexicon to beat all hell out of Wordsworth: “Salt cod brandade,
potato soup and foie gras, whole crab and mayonnaise, rabbit rillettes,
leeks gribiche, octopus, baby gem and aïoli, kedgeree, tripe and chips,
mutton ham, peas and caper sauce, braised beef and celeriac, fried guinea
fowl…”
You can’t book, so my mate Mark and I announced ourselves to the dining room
and repaired to the bar to wait. On the bar blackboard were fino,
manzanilla, oloroso… excellent. Nothing Spanish about this gaff, nothing
remotely tapas-y, they simply grasp that to drink anything other than good
dry sherry before a meal is to poke yourself in the palate with a hot stick.
The guy put down two ice-frosted little tumblers and filled them. Yes, mate,
yes. That is how you do it. None of your poxy little schooners. This is how
you do it. I knew then how good my supper was going to be.
On the bar, a plate of croutons covered with dark, straggly, gamey-looking
meat was ignored by the public. I took them to be the rillettes. “These for
anybody in particular?” I asked the barman after a while. They weren’t. They
were for general consumption at 80p a pop. English people need a bit of a
help with this sort of thing. Like a big flag on the plate with the words
“Nobody will fight you if you take one of these” on it. Marky and I ate the
lot, then asked if the same could be done with the brandade. It could. They
were lovely fishy potato toasts with sticky boiled egg, and we snarfed them
all. And then some genius sweet pickled herring, firm and squeaky. The
manzanilla loved us for it and - with the wait being nearly an hour - we did
a bottle of it in the end.
Two guys worked the kitchen - a dark, lowering, Heathcliffy fellow and a
chirpy-looking, more English chap in glasses. They were sending out
cassoulets for four at £48 and Lancashire hot pots for three at £40, that
looked golden and weighty and hot as the devil, blasted in Vulcan’s furnace
or forged in the smithy of some poor poet’s soul. But Marky and I had
business to attend to and could not be diverted by party pieces.
We had tripe and chips as a stonking intermezzo: a bowl of tomatoey, tangy
soup in which lurked tongues of sweet stomach so charmingly textured as to
be positively gloopulous, perfectly matched with the brown and crackling
chips. Next came some mutton dressed as ham: the old sheep salted to an
embarrassed pinky blush - astoundingly well-flavoured, and enjoying the
company of heaps of peas and a caper sauce. A stuffed duck (for three or
four) waddled past, and we drooled. And then we tore into fried guinea fowl.
The next evening, I went back, alone. I have never done that before. Ever. Not
returned alone within less than 24 hours just for the food. The beetroot and
horseradish salad I had then was cool, pink flames of root, and the warm
bacon and snail salad had the greasy sweetness of teenage sex. And then I
had the sea bass for two, a beautiful beast, with a lentil and anchovy
vinaigrette of dreamy greenness.
On this second night the service was a little scatty - non-appearance of some
drinks, trouble getting hold of a fork, an age to wait for the bill - but
that happens. The blonde girl that night was every bit as gorgeous as the
brunette the night before, and that’s all that matters. This place is not
about napkins folded like swans, and petits fours on a tiered platter.
The non-booking policy is an indicator of priorities - and it is a shame that
so many food-lovers will be denied the Anchor’s pleasures because of a
reluctance to drive all that way without being guaranteed a meal. But the
guys who opened this place had their ideas about the kind of joint they
wanted to run, a place where people drop in for a beer and a plate of
something at the bar and maybe saunter through to the dining room for
something more substantial. It is a beautifully relaxed and un-English idea,
and it is not their fault that they are serving some of the best food in
London.
So go at silly times, go at 6.30 for supper, finish breakfast and hurry down
there for lunch. The Anchor and Hope is a place to enjoy waiting, to feel
the sweet uncertainty of eating at all, to drink good sherry, to eat like a
lord - if you eat at all - and to enjoy the view from the bridge on your way
home. The Anchor and Hope is all that English hospitality once was, and all
that it may, one day, be again. It is anchored in the past and is our hope
for the future. It is Alpha and Omega. Hell, is it quarter past four
already? Got to go, I’m hoping to get down there in time for supper.
Food: 9
Menu: 10
Attitude: 10
Score: 9.67
Price: 20-odd quid will see you right for food and the wine list is
wondrously cheap.
Le Gavroche
43 Upper Brook Street, London, W1 (020-7408 0881)
Another properly good restaurant. The well-dressed uncle of rowdy, noisy,
scruffy Anchor and Hope. If Michel Roux ran a pub, it would be the A&H.
Sardo
45 Grafton Way, London, W1 (020-7387 2521)
Another properly good restaurant. Tough to get in, you won’t want to get out.
Lively, original, and devoted to food. If the A&H were a Sardinian
brasserie, and you could book, it would be Sardo.
E-mail feedme@thetimes.co.uk if you know somewhere good and maybe
we’ll go there together.
