That there is an arbutus in my front garden is no coincidence. I planted it
there with my father when I moved into the house in the summer of 2003. It
was a housewarming present from my mother and him, which was bought for
purely sentimental reasons (the only kind parents have for doing anything)
because there was one outside the house where I grew up, in Cricklewood.
It was a huge old thing, the original, with a thick black bole and an
incredibly vivid crown of leaf (like a giant bay tree) that hung out over
the pavement. For most of the year it attracted little attention, and then,
towards the middle of September, it briefly became the single most exciting
thing in NW2 (which, if you know NW2, is not all that much of an accolade).
Passers-by would stop and gawp. The elderly would glance up at it and shake
their heads. Children would poke it and run away. Dogs would bark, cats
would hiss, lone policemen would keep their distance and call for back-up,
and men in anoraks and stout shoes with little notebooks would ring the
doorbell and inquire about tonnage.
And the reason for this was the fruit: scarlet-red, perfectly spherical
danglers about the size of ping-pong balls, their surface slightly knobbled,
which shone brightly in their hundreds amid the leaves, and fell to the
pavement whenever a slight breeze ruffled the branches, to pop with an
audible wheeze and reveal the steaming, pink-white flesh within. It was a
local spectacle, it really was. You don’t get much fat, ripe, utterly
unfamiliar-looking fruit fermenting on the streets of Cricklewood.
My mother hated them, because evening guests who parked across the road and
walked to the door in darkness tramped innocently through yards of arbutus
slush and then trod it into the hall carpet (it was the Seventies, halls had
carpets). And my father told my sister and me that the fruit was fatally
poisonous, like everything that grows on trees (it was the Seventies, food
came in tins), and like the pathetic little urban twerp I was, my horror of
mortality overruled the normal childish desire for empiric proof.
Even when a man from Kew came to the door saying he wanted to talk to my
parents about “the strawberry tree” I was not swayed from my conviction that
the little red fruits could kill. When, however, a little old Portuguese
lady rang the bell, asking if she might harvest some of the fruit, seeing as
we didn’t seem to be interested it, for the making of jam and a drink called
medronho, and my father said “of course” and gave her a bag to carry them
in, I became suspicious.
“She’ll be dead by morning,” said my dad, when I asked, and went back to his
newspaper, leaving me to wonder if it wasn’t a little irresponsible of him
to have handed over the bag.
Years passed, I moved out and my parents moved on. The tree, however, remained
in place. You can see it still outside number 26 Ranulf Road, the only house
in the street whose front garden has not been replaced by a tarmac’d drive
full of 4x4s, a chipboard portico and a row of Victorian-style street lamps,
in the hope that it will be mistaken for a third-rate country-house hotel in
Berkshire.
And now I have my own little arbutus tree, no more than four feet high at
present, its crown cut into a jolly little ball. I have had it for three
years and while it groans out a tiny handful of tiny, white, bulb-shaped
blossoms each summer, it has yet to fruit. For a while, I watched anxiously
from the front room, trug at the ready, for the first fruits, which I
planned to turn into one of the many jams and drinks that, I now know,
arbutus-fanciers love. And when nothing happened, I phoned my dad.
“Ah,” he said. “That one is a dwarf arbutus. It doesn’t fruit.”
“You’re kidding?” I said.
“No. We wanted you to have something to remember Ranulf Road by, but without
having all that poisonous crap being tramped into your hall carpet.”
I’m a lucky man. I’m 36, my hall floor is polished maple that wipes clean a
treat, and the fruit turns out to be harmless, but my folks are still there
to protect me from the evil arbutus.
And so, it transpires, are Anthony Demetre and Will Smith, the two brilliant
fellows formerly of Putney Bridge who have launched Arbutus in Frith Street.
It’s a lovely little spot, crisply designed and comfily accoutred, in the
space that was once, among other things, the excellent but short-lived Frith
Street Restaurant under Stephen Terry, and the legendary Bistro Bruno under
Bruno Loubet. But it has no arbuti.
“No, I know,” said the maître d’, a paragon of his profession in all but his
ability to point out fruiting trees of the genus arbutus (it didn’t have to
be an arbutus unedo, a menziesii or andrachne would have
done). “We were thinking of getting some. We probably should, shouldn’t we?”
“Should” is not the word, my friend. The fact that you are serving some of the
most accomplished upscale bistro food in London, offering a menu as exciting
as I can possibly imagine, full of beautifully executed dishes that delight
visually and stagger on the palate, is as nothing – nothing, do you hear! –
alongside the wanton arbutuslessness. Until it’s sorted, I won’t be coming
back.
Which is a shame. Because the chicken sot-l’y-laisse with macaroni and broad
beans is the cutest dish I’ve seen in yonks. Meaning in French “the fool
leaves it”, these are the oysters from under a chicken (eight of them, so
four chickens’ worth) tossed with lovely home-made pasta tubes, scented with
thyme under a puffy white foam and piqued with a crunch of hazelnut. Demetre
was Loubet’s sous-chef here in the old days, and then at Putney Bridge he
was a pioneer of the current new wave, leading the way with the old
meat-in-polythene- under-lights-at-58-degrees-overnight routine. And he’s
brilliant. Brilliant.
The menu looks classic bistro (you’ll want to have everything) but delivers
refined, modern platefuls, while maintaining the flavour punch of the old
school. He has reinvented pieds-et-paquets, for example, to give a gentle
offal hit in two tripe parcels (but clean, clean, unscary tripe, with no
turdiness at all) accompanied by two quasi-quenelles (add up the Scrabble
points yourself) of trotter. Braised pig’s head is a glistening slice of
packed brawn and other goodies with puréed potatoes and caramelised onions.
Hardcore troughers will be delighted by the presence of slow-cooked lamb
shoulder boulangère on the starter list (and it’s not a particularly
baby-size portion), especially if they love a scattering of soft, nutty
sweetbreads on the side. The spiced dates are a novel and utterly successful
addition.
I loved the saddle of rabbit with its little shoulder cottage pie, I loved the
piquant fattiness of the breast of veal (an underused cut) lacquered with
spices, and while smoked eel is a glory however you find it, it was magical
here, smoked and served with pressed beetroot and horseradish cream.
A lot is seasonal and indigenous (the asparagus were great but the Jersey
Royals, while good and waxy, lacked flavour) and there is both in-your-face
accountability (Elwy Valley lamb, Scottish beef, etc…) and heartening use of
sustainable fish, up to a point – I like to see pollack on a menu in place
of cod, but while sole is a fine fish, the use of slip soles (as here)
should not be encouraged. Throw them back!
The wine list is genius, too, with every bottle that is not available as a
glass available as a 250ml carafe. A wheeze of world-changing originality,
if you ask me. I wouldn’t pay £85 in a restaurant for a 2000
Puligny-Montrachet, but the carafe I had for £28.50 (along with the
Californian sangiovese for £12.75) was the making of my meal.
This is a radically spanking, thoroughly massive piece of restaurant-making.
The kind of place that New York or Paris would kill to have. You can’t eat
better than this. If they only had a couple of fruiting arbuti I think it
would be almost worth a detour.
Arbutus
63 Frith Street, W1 (020-7734 4545)
Meat/fish: 9
Cooking: 9
Trees: 7
Score: 8.33
Price: set lunch and early evening menu, £18 for three
courses.
The Horse & Trumpet
Old Green, Medbourne, Leicestershire (01858 565000)
Louise Jack writes: “If great chefs love food then the chef
at the Horse and Trumpet is the Casanova of culinary masters – he combines
foods like crab and chocolate and the last pud I had there had tobacco in it
– no kidding, he’d unrolled a cigar!”
Roger D. Fellows writes: “Please do not make snide, silly,
demeaning and snobbish references to Wolverhampton when you probably have
never been there and no [sic] nothing whatever about the city.”
Book a table at
Arbutus
