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To be tired of London’s restaurants is to be tired of life but this truism may have something to do with the way new restaurants are constantly opening in the metropolis, forever offering something novel for jaded taste buds. This is evident from two new eateries that have opened in the heart of the West End, another with a rather exclusive address in Park Lane, a fourth in Stratford in east London and, to top the bill, a restaurant in the historic railway hotel at Kings Cross station. Taken together, the locations cover a remarkable cross-section of contemporary London life and their new culinary offerings bear testimony to the capital’s remarkable cosmopolitanism.
Soho is a neighbourhood that is now synonymous with entertainment but when Karl Marx chose to live here it was a slum area and affordable rents rather than the nightlife was what attracted his attention. Amadeus Mozart also lived here for a while, unwittingly establishing a music tradition for the area. In Old Compton Street, still home to the best-known jazz club in the UK, around the corner, Ronnie Scott’s, a coffee bar opened in 1956 and its cellar became a venue for upstart bands influenced by the musical revolution that was taking place across the Atlantic. As the plaque on the wall outside records, the 2i’s club became the birthplace of British rock & roll. When the building was being renovated for The House of Hố restaurant, a mural was uncovered on an interior wall advertising the club; looking like a fresco excavated at Pompeii, its faded words and pictorial images hark back to an era that we know about but cannot ever inhabit.
The cellar of the 2i’s club is now the basement kitchen for The House of Hố, with the sounds of drums and guitars replaced by the sizzle of stir-frying woks and the smoke of cigarettes giving way to the aromas of apple-smoked pork belly, lemongrass monkfish and crispy shallots. The master chef, Bobby Chinn, is not well known in Britain but in his native Vietnam, he is a household name, the country’s first celebrity chef, and in Hanoi a few years back I was fortunate over a weekend to bag a table at his famed restaurant. The place was packed to bursting, a party atmosphere prevailed and multi-coloured balloons hung from the rafters.
The House of Hố is sedate by comparison, feeling cosy despite there being room for some hundred hungry diners. Subdued lighting and bamboo-coloured walls adorned with large ethnic paintings help create a calm atmosphere even though the menu is all about sociable eating and the sharing of the small portions: crab pomelo salad, spicy chicken wings, tofu-stuffed mushrooms, quality fillets of beef, sea bream with coriander sauce …
The House of Hố opened its doors in late December 2013 and may well prove as successful as Bobby Chinn’s first venture in Hanoi. I was there on a wet Wednesday evening in late January and few empty seats were visible. Top marks for the wines, chosen to suit the mildly oriental food, with about a dozen available by the glass, but don’t expect traditional Vietnamese cuisine; I would defy anyone, led blind to eat here, to pinpoint Vietnamese flavours.
Just around the corner in Wardour Street, the country that was being defeated by Vietnam during the heyday of the 2i’s club provides the cue for a very different food experience. The exterior of Jackson & Rye gives little away but step inside and you enter an East Coast American diner, circa late 1950s. It feels smokey, although it can’t be, and the slowly whirling fans overhead seem necessary. Long wall mirrors, showing their age at the edges, hang on the walls and so too does a large clock that looks like a prop from High Noon. To fully experience the period recreation, though, a visit to the washrooms is essential; time travel in a loo, unlikely as it sounds, is what you get.
I was in Jackson & Rye for Sunday brunch and arriving early, when the surrounding Soho pavements were eerily bereft of revellers, was surprised to find standing room only at the bar where glasses of Breakfast Sour and Aperol Spritz were being prepared with professional aplomb. Two-pint jugs of Bloody Mary sat half full on tables between the to-ings and fro-ings of conversations. The menu is an expansive one and with no minimum price one could pop in for just buttermilk pancakes or apple fritters with a coffee. Appetizers like shrimp and grits (husked grain but ground very coarsely) catch the British eye while another one, chopped raw tuna, came according to the menu with smoked paprika; I should have asked how and why paprika is smoked. Being an American diner, eggs are treated with culinary respect and more than half a dozen variations are listed. Main meals cover the gamut from cheeseburgers to lobster.
Brunch at Jackson & Rye lasts until 4.30 pm and by the time I stepped back onto the streets of Soho they were alive with the familiar international mix of pedestrians, a fusion of races and cultures. Referring to a restaurant’s menu as “fusion”, of course, is no longer a neutral description – the word has tended to acquire pejorative connotations when it comes to food – and it’s an especially misleading term nowadays given the way any chef worth his or her tabasco cannot help but be responsive to world influences when juggling culinary tricks in the kitchen. Aware of this, Lanes of London has come up with an imaginative and witty way to structure its menu and present a global diversity of food tastes. Given London’s pre-eminence as a world city, its approach is entirely appropriate to the capital.
The concept is a simple one but yields myriad results. Take the names of four London locations – Brick Lane, Edgware Road, Kingsland Road and Portobello Road – and use these as shorthand for cuisines associated with the street names and/or the neighbourhoods’ ethnic identities. Thus, Brick Lane evokes the Indian subcontinent and provides spicy tasters like samosa chat paneer pakoras; Edgware Road gives us the Middle East by way of fattoush salad, kafta meshwi and falafel; Vietnamese eateries have established a presence in Kingsland Road, the “Pho Mile”, hence pho bo, barbecued pork skewers and green papaya salad; the café culture of Notting Hill’s Portobello Road is the occasion for old favourites like hot dog, scotch eggs and beef burger.
If this sounds eclectic enough, save some of your taste buds for additional sections on the menu featuring meat, fish and vegetarian dishes. Hard core carnivores get their fix from 10oz and 12oz steaks sourced from the UK and Ireland, served with a walnut and chilli pesto.
There is no need to think that because this restaurant is in Park Lane diners are unduly poshed up. No one near my table was wearing an Armani suit or showing off their bling and, anyway, the restaurant is at the top end of Park Lane, just around the corner from Oxford St. There is nothing terribly exclusive about traffic snarled in queues around Marble Arch. Lanes of London does not do hoity-toityness but it does go in for interesting food in a civilised and comfortable setting.
Away to the east, on the other side of London, Stratford has had a facelift since the Olympic Games were held there and the Westfield Centre attracts local shoppers who once might have journeyed to Oxford St for quality stores. For soccer aficionados, the lure is newly opened Café Football, not the John Lewis store or the large Marks & Spencers. The Irish author Elizabeth Bowen, in her novel The Little Girls, has a character say that it’s only someone’s “raging peculiarity” that makes them a person; if something similar could be said about restaurants then Café Football fully qualifies because of its obsession with soccer.
Multiple screens show nothing but soccer-related programmes, the menu headings read The Kick Off/Terrace Food/Ball Food/Fans Favourites, and dishes like Starting Eleven Platter pop up. The food is presumably what appeals to football fanatics — steaks, burgers, pizzas – but it is not stodgy. The drinks list is admirably catholic, with imported beers and some decent wines as well as family-friendly Tizer, sarsaparilla and “dummytails” (mocktails). Café Football is invitingly informal and friendly, not overly masculine in tone though the loud music never ceases and whoever chose it should be shown a red card.
The area around Kings Cross station has undergone a far more radical transformation that Stratford and the idea of going there not to catch a train but for a dining experience based on food of English provenance was unthinkable until very recently. Plum and Spilt Milk, in the refurbished Great Northern Hotel, is the name of the restaurant that makes such a journey worthwhile. It takes its name from the livery of the staff that served passengers on The Flying Scotsman but the railway theme is not pursued to excess – getting away with one of the house cocktails being called Lady Violet, after the name of the ladies smoking room (the world’s first) in the Great Northern Hotel, if only because it is a suitably feminine mix of elderberry, vodka and raspberry liquor.
The décor of oblong-shaped Plum and Spilt Milk would not create the stylish impression it immediately makes on diners were it not for the clusters of low-hung, decorous bulbs with exposed filaments. They are impressive without being ostentatious and left me with the idea that one or two of them could only enhance my living room. Distraction from thoughts of interior design came with the arrival of a cocktail and a bowl of cockles, a delightful twosome that will be tried at home under my new lighting system. The cockles came with their own tiny shakers of white vinegar and white pepper, an aesthetically pleasing arrangement, and perhaps the Folkstone whelks on the menu also arrive like this. Meanwhile, my pal went for the Maldon oysters and they came so splendidly displayed on a large glass bowl filled with ice that I tried one and then attempted to fork a second.
This was the cause of a minor ruction between us that was only soothed by the arrival of my perfectly cooked Dover sole with seaweed butter and a small Caesar salad (with anchovies, not chicken, as the waiter took the precaution of explaining before it was ordered). The night ended amiably on the stroke of 10pm, indicated by the clock tower of St Pancras which was always visible from my companion’s seat but never from mine. But as I explained walking home, it would be silly to think such a trivial difference could have bothered me.
by Sean Sheenan