It is two years to the week since this column went zero tolerance on organic
meat and sustainable fish — introducing the unique “meat/fish” category into
its elaborate points-scoring system — and in that time menus have improved
remarkably, at least at the middle and top ends of the market. So now I’m
going after mineral water.
I touched on this the other week, in my review of Acorn, the eco-friendly
restaurant in King’s Cross, but now I am going to do more than touch it. I
am going to grasp it, embrace it, hold it like I’ll never let it go.
Mineral water is a preposterous vanity. It is flown and shipped around the
world, from France and Norway at best, from Japan and Fiji at worst. It is
bottled in glass that is mostly thrown away and is stupidly heavy to
freight, or in plastic which never, ever, decomposes and just goes to
landfill or ends up in one of the “plastic patches” the size of Texas
currently gyring in our oceans.
Food snobs and restaurant critics make a big song and dance about mineral
waters they like and don’t like. New York’s Ritz-Carlton even caters to the
whim of abstemious punters with a dedicated water list and sommelier.
The vanity of it! While half the world dies of thirst or puts up with water
you wouldn’t piss in, or already have, we have invested years and years, and
vast amounts of money, into an ingenious system which cleanses water of all
the nasties that most other humans and animals have always had to put up
with, and delivers it, dirt-cheap, to our homes and workplaces in pipes,
which we can access at a tap.
And yet last year we bought three billion litres of bottled water.
3,000,000,000 litres! I have no idea how much that is. But it seems a lot.
Especially when we were fooled into buying it because of labels that said
“pure as an alpine stream”, “bottled at the foot of a Mexican volcano” or
“cleansed for three million years beneath a Siberian glacier”. What morons
we are.
We spent £2 billion on the stuff. And then we grumble about water metering
and annual domestic bills of a couple of hundred quid for water that is just
as good, and whose consumption by us is unlimited. Those two billion pounds
could go some way to mending the odd leak, don’t you think? Towards digging
the odd reservoir?
From the restaurants’ point of view it is just a clipping system. It’s more
free money. The mark-ups are bigger even than they are on wine. You’ll pay
four to five pounds in most posh London restaurants for stuff no different,
no different at all, from what you brushed your teeth in that morning (not
leaving the tap on while doing so, I hope). The result is billions of
unnecessary food miles, non-biodegradable waste, millions of tonnes of
greenhouse gases, more urban pollution, hell in a handcart.
From now on, if a restaurant does not offer me tap water, politely,
unsarcastically, and before they offer mineral water, then they will be
penalised. The only bottled water I will tolerate will henceforth be Belu –
sourced and bottled in Shropshire, sold in glass or fully degradable plastic
made from a corn derivative which can be composted back to soil in 12 weeks,
and all of whose profits go to fund drinking-water projects in India and
Africa and river-cleaning projects in Britain.
I will introduce a new category to my scoring system, a fourth, since I can’t
very well get rid of “meat/fish”, “cooking” or “other” without ballsing
everything up, and I will call it “water”. And restaurants which serve only
tap, or tap and Belu, will score ten out of ten.
But if you serve Evian or Perrier, Volvic, Vittel, Vichy, Voss, Chateldon,
Aqua Panna, Ferrarelle, San Pellegrino, San Gimignano, Badoit, Voss,
Minaqua, Poland Springs, or any other foreign water, then you’re going down.
You will score zero in that category. Your maximum possible score, if you
get top marks in everything else, will be 7.5. (I will allow British waters
such as Highland Spring, Hildon, Buxton and Powwow for the moment, and knock
off only five “water” points for that.)
This means that, with the “meat/fish” category, fully half of each restaurant
score will now be awarded on an environmental basis. So hurrah for bloody me.
Right. The Fat Badger. New gastropub in Notting Hill Gate. They serve Belu.
It’s what gave me the idea. Apart from the water and the name, the other
thing I really like about the Fat Badger is the upstairs wall-paper.
Upstairs is where the eating mostly goes on, above the thrum and bustle of
the very large downstairs corner pub, full of light and beer and smoke and
jolly old pubbery.
There are lots of big windows here, too, full of winter light and views
across the street of the familiar local Victorian grey brick. Lots of wood,
dark-brown paint, all that. But the paper is something else. It is dark-pink
etchings on a white background, a Dalmatian spotting of small fuchsia
landscapes, which from a distance looks like ersatz Thirties twee. Almost as
if they’d found this old paper underneath the layers they’d stripped off in
the refurb, and left it.
But then you look closer. There, looming above a sylvan scene, is not just St
Paul’s and Tower Bridge, but the Gherkin, the Millennium Eye, the NatWest
Tower. The park scene has homeless people asleep on benches, a commuter
talking into his mobile phone, a Sikh in a turban, teenagers drinking from
bottles and cans. There’s a guy holding someone up with a gun.
It’s by an Edinburgh company called Timorous Beasties and comes in, I see
from their website, at £100 a roll. Which doesn’t sound cheap, although I
have never bought wallpaper. It looked lovely, particularly in corners where
it was lit by old-fashioned lamps and young women ate at wooden tables in
the rosy glow.
This reassimilation of traditional values in a modern context does not stop
at the wallpaper (it would be silly if it did). The food is all seasonal and
British and hearty in a way that is very much the in-thing once again:
crubeens, salt mallard, potted shrimps, boiled lamb’s tongues, slow-cooked
kid’s shoulder, all that jazz.
Having been told that the chef here, William Leigh, takes care with the farms
he uses and buys his animals and birds whole, I asked after the provenance
of the bavette and was told “it’s from Hereford”.
“You’re sure?” I asked. “It’s not just a Hereford, from somewhere else.”
“No, no,” said the very nice chap (as these chaps so often are). “It’s a
Hereford from Hereford.”
So I guess it must have been. The bavette was grilled dark and crunchy on the
outside, nice and pink on the inside, and was full of flavour and texture.
Top beef. Good chips it came with, too. The horseradish dressing was too
sweet for me, but the watercress was a good, timely, peppery accompanying
salad.
Squash and carrot soup was rich and full-bodied with crispy little croutons,
and a dish of chicken liver pâté was really, really excellent. Fricassee of
wild mushrooms, squash, beans and vermouth was OK with me but unpopular with
the rest of the table. It was a bit busy, a bit too much going on. One, or
even two, ingredients might have been shed to give it focus. The crème
brûlée was only middling – too warm and loose in the crème, too grainy in
the glaze.
But this is a damn fine gastropub. Among the best. Breakfast looked tempting
(particularly porridge and bananas), and the bar snack menu had smoked
sprats, gubbeen rarebit, pork crackling with apple sauce, quail’s eggs with
celery salt... poetic, tear-jerkingly British platefuls.
And all washed down with a lovely glass of water.
The Fat Badger
310 Portobello Road, W10
(020-8969 4500)
Meat/fish: 8
Water: 10
Cooking: 7
Atmosphere: 8
Score: 8.25
Price: £20 a head will see you right.
Nobu
The Metropolitan Hotel,
Park Lane, W1
(020-7447 4747)
An odd choice for me to put here, since I have been known to be a bit snooty
about it. But I went the other night, ate very well, and was flabbergasted
and delighted to be served Belu. In a place like this! Things are looking up.
Glade
9 Conduit Street, W1
(0870 7774488)
An accessibly priced lunch place within the very expensive Sketch restaurant
emporium. I haven’t been here, but they serve Belu, which is all I care
about today.
E-mail feedme2@thetimes.co.uk
