I chose not to do so, however, because if I had, then I would have had to think of something else to write about here to stave off the inevitable point, about 500 words from now, when I start writing about this week’s restaurant. Thus I am using a review of a book about restaurant reviewing to delay reviewing a restaurant… it’s the meta-critical paradox of post-structuralist nightmare.
Reichl’s book details her time as “the world’s most important restaurant critic”, and tells how she visited every restaurant in disguise, with full make-up, so as to avoid special treatment (adopting a number of false identities, including, ghoulishly, that of her own dead mother, although she took the coward’s way out and chose to imitate the way the old dear had looked when alive), attending each place at least three times so as to get a proper impression, and debating for weeks whether to give a place three, say, or four of the paper’s precious stars.
Such smug, worthy, self-aggrandising horseshit I have never seen. One woman’s quest to eradicate her very humanity, the better to haunt the dining rooms of a big city and decide who poaches the best egg. What a gaping waste of time. What a monstrous, what a vain, what a Promethean misconception of the role of Man on earth.
You might imagine that this approach only shows how hidebound, backward and snobby wealthy New York society is (or was in the mid-Nineties when Reichl was doing the job – full marks for up-to-the-minute observational relevance, Ruth, by the way), and certainly her descriptions of such theoretically hot destinations as Le Cirque and Lespinasse make them sound like the stuffiest bastions of classist priggery since the aristocratic salles à manger of pre-Revolutionary France.
But the thing is that there are critics here in Britain who make a bit of a song and dance about anonymity, too. Going beyond what the rest of us happily do (which in my case is to book with a fake name and phone number, to dress like crap, make my guest announce our arrival, and to sit facing the wall), these few go by-lineless in their reviews (no doubt enjoying the same frisson the Lone Ranger enjoyed each time he donned his mask), and even when contributing to dull features in trade mags insist on appearing as blacked-out silhouettes, as if they were embedded in an FBI witness-protection scheme, rather than just being dumpy hacks who differ from every other flabby ink-pisser on the Street only in that when they claim lunch on expenses they don’t have to pretend they got a “story” from a “contact”.
But how grim to skulk in the shadows all one’s life like some hooded urban phone-grabber? How can it be worth it? One’s job has to fit into one’s life. Take the other night: I had a meeting in town at six o’clock, followed by a friend’s party in Soho which I felt I had to drop in on for an hour, and I wanted to have dinner with my girlfriend somewhere on the way to where she lives in Southeast London. So I look through my lists and see that Belgravia, which is ten minutes from the party by cab, and another 15 to her place, has got a new gastropub called the Thomas Cubitt, which first reports say is very good.
So what do I do? Do I book a table in her name, meet her at the party, then cab it down to Belgravia for a scoff and a bottle, and back to hers for Ovaltine and Book at Bedtime, planning to dash something off in the morning if she can remember what I ate?
Or do I spend nine hours in make-up, book as Rgthi the Klingon, feel damn silly at the party in my rubber mask with gills on the forehead, put a bag on my bird’s head when I get to the restaurant because there’s a chance they might recognise her, too, remain silent throughout the meal (they might recognise the world-famous voice), order nothing I actually like (because if I have the caramelised sweetbreads followed by the pork belly with a bottle of cheap pinot noir, no pudding, two espressos and a bottle of still, then there’s frankly nobody it could be but me), pay with one of my walletful of fake ID credit cards (as Reichl does) and then come back twice more even if it’s rubbish?
I think we know.
And anyway, the Thomas Cubitt is not rubbish, it’s fantastic, and I don’t think they clocked me, at least not till the end, and I’ll be going back lots more for fun, if that’s OK with everybody.
The Thomas Cubitt, named, one assumes, after the 19th-century builder responsible for most of the nice stuff in Belgravia, was apparently once a proper pub, but is one today in very much a Belgravia sort of way: no fights, no fruities, no drug deals in the bog (you do them before you come), but big windows, plenty of light, and lots of nicely dressed young chaps with their ties off and shirts open to relax after work in the estate agent’s (or perhaps just to look like David Cameron, the area’s natural-born Messiah).
The upstairs dining room is chic and restrained and flatteringly lit, not over- decorated and nicely nooky (and thus, I assume, nice for nookie), and enough not like a pub, with its high prices and smartly dressed staff, for the preponderance of fiftysomethings to feel comfy here in their jewels and hairdos, but with that added edge of a pub downstairs that makes them feel they’re slumming it like when they were younger (although they were kidding themselves then, too).
As for food, I have not many times eaten a better steak than the fat, grilled fillet of grass-reared, rare-breed organic Norfolk beef (the county in which, as it happens, Thomas Cubitt’s family had a farm, which was also organic, of course, as everything was in that deliriously happy and far-off time). It was thick as my wrist and, ordered rare, came with a gorgeous black crust no more than half a millimetre thick on red, red flesh that had aged long after death and, judging by its perfect, almost human, temperature, had stood away from refrigeration plenty before cooking.
I asked for it to be served with the smoked bacon risotto and poached duck egg that would have come with the organic salmon had the fish not run out (as good fish will), and thought it made a marvellous pairing, or tripling. I shall call it “Tournedos Giley” and let Rossini keep his nasty foie gras. Oh, and the £30 Vega Real tempranillo my waiter suggested was dazzlingly good in its own right, and a perfect match.
It also went well with the avalanche of devilled kidneys and wild mushrooms on hot buttered toast with which I started, and with the plump breast of guinea fowl under a veal and thyme jus that my girlfriend chomped across the table. She had champagne with her scallops, apples and broad beans, and seemed happy enough. But who cares what she thought? She wasn’t pretending not to be herself, so her opinion is irrelevant.
We might also have had marinated sardines with potato salad, cured Barbary duck with merlot vinaigrette, seared tuna with a pistachio lime crust, roast loin of lamb with a vine tomato tart… it’s a good, tight, imaginative menu, throbbing with things you’ll want to eat, served by nice people in a calm, relaxed atmosphere. Go. Enjoy. Wear a wig if you want.
The Thomas Cubitt
44 Elizabeth Street, SW1 (020-7730 6060)
Meat/fish: 7
Cooking: 8
Other: 7
Score: 7.33
Price: steep. £75 a couple before booze.
The London Restaurant Guide by Charles Campion, Profile Books, £8.99
Now, this is a food book. Campion’s Rough Guide to London Restaurants was always one of the few restaurant books, certainly the only London guide, without which I absolutely could not do. He has now dropped the celebrated grunge publishers, and his solo guide is more grown-up and a solider read, the foodie bog book par excellence. Charles is a critic of the old school, convinced that what readers of restaurant reviews want to read about most is restaurants. If that’s you, then this book cannot be bettered. If it’s not, I’m here again next week.
E-mail feedme@thetimes.co.uk and maybe we’ll go out for lunch
