The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - The Telegraph Magazine
‘The vol-au-vent was a chubby, puffy little turret of pastry crammed with girolle mushrooms and baby leeks. Delicious’
Our critic enjoys Tom Oldroyd’s gastropub – apart from its lack of veggie options
GEORGE ORWELL WOULD have hated them. All these fancy modern gastropubs, getting ideas above their station. When he wrote an essay in 1946 imagining his ideal pub, ‘the Moon Under Water’, he insisted that the food be minimal, and plain. The pub should serve a simple, filling lunch (‘a cut off the joint, two vegetables and boiled jam roll’) – but not dinner. No dinner at all. All you’d be able to get in the evening would be the following snacks: liver-sausage sandwiches, mussels, cheese, pickles, ‘and those large biscuits with caraway seeds in them’.
Good luck finding a pub like that now. Today, the Moon Under Water would serve a deconstructed liver-sausage sandwich with mussel velouté, a curated selection of artisanal cheeses, pickle coulis, and caraway-seed dukkah – all presented on a washboard, or a bathroom tile, or a vinyl copy of Loveless by My Bloody Valentine. In fact, pub food has become so ambitious that the Good Pub Guide is leading a protest against it.
‘Many chefs appear to have gone Masterchef-mad,’ complains the preface to the latest edition. ‘We really aren’t interested in eating kabsa, katsuobushi, matbucha, succotash, tataki or verjus in a pub. We don’t want our dishes adorned with carrot fluff, edible sand or fish “foam”. Leave that to the swanky restaurants. We want good, honest pub grub.’
I see what they mean. But I’m not sure I can really blame the pubs for trying. These days, it’s very hard to keep a pub in business if all it sells is booze. You need to do food as well. And there’s not much point doing basic, traditional pub food, because Wetherspoons will always undercut you. Hence the explosion of carrot fluff and fish foam. The idea is to offer swanky-restaurant food, at lower-than-swanky-restaurant prices.
This week’s restaurant is pretty much the anti-orwell. The Duke of Richmond is a gastropub opened in east London this summer by Tom Oldroyd (whose terrific Islington restaurant Oldroyd was the first place I ever reviewed in this column, two-and-a-half years ago). Quick run-through of some of the items listed on the menu. Loch Duart salmon rillettes. Celeriac remoulade. Brown-shrimp buerre noisette. Hamhock and pig’s-trotter terrine. Confit garlic mash. Persillade. If Orwell had found all this foreign-sounding muck in the Moon Under Water, he’d have stormed straight home to his typewriter and hammered out a furious 9,000word essay announcing the death of England. Assuming, of course, that he hadn’t already fainted after discovering the IPA was £6 a pint. Or been arrested for punching the man on the next table for asking the waitress, ‘Can I just check that everything here is dairy-free?’
Not that the Duke of Richmond is pretentious. It isn’t. Certainly not to look at. It’s stark and bare, the walls part white but mostly a forbidding green. No pictures or bric-a-brac. Jaunty music, though, and friendly service.
I went with my wife and son. It’s a good place to go in a group, because as an offer you can get all five of the starters for £30. Salmon rillettes: cool, squishily soft, with toast and squirmingly sour slices of pickled cucumber. Ham-hock terrine: light, wobbly, goes well with the cute little cornichons and celeriac. Herb fine green salad, topped with an ectoplasmic splat of baked cheese (Tunworth, good and strong).
Wasn’t too sure about the cold roast English squash with onions, hazelnuts and goat’s curd. Might have felt refreshing on a hot summer’s day, but in autumn it seemed a bit glum and cheerless. Healthy, but not much fun or flavour. Best starter by far, though, was the vol-au-vent: a chubby, puffy little turret of pastry crammed with girolle mushrooms and baby leeks. Delicious.
My main was Yorkshire grouse, with creamed corn, Bayonne ham and pickled blackberries. Lovely fluffy mash, but very watery gravy. I was surprised to see that only one of the six mains was vegetarian. I mean, this is Hackney. The place is crawling with vegetarians. And it’s not as if the one vegetarian main was anything very special: ratatouille
Herb fine green salad was topped with an ectoplasmic splat of baked cheese
Provençal, yet more goat’s curd, and baked garlic bread. Basically: a heap of roasted vegetables, with some bread and cheese. My wife, who is vegetarian – and had loved the vol-au-vent starter – wasn’t keen.
Good puddings, though. Warm almond and burnt-butter gateau: crispy on top, thick and spongy underneath, with black figs and milk ice cream. Even better, the mirabelle-plum and pistachio mess. It may have looked like a heap of smashed polystyrene – they don’t call it mess for nothing – but it tasted great: the gooey sticky-sweetness of the meringue, and the bursting juicy freshness of the mirabelle plums.
I’m in two minds here. I definitely preferred the food at Tom Oldroyd’s Islington restaurant. But it’s not bad, and the beer’s nice. And, when it comes down to it, it’s more fun eating in a pub like this, one with a bit of ambition, than one where your choice is between scampi in a basket and a bag of pork scratchings. Or, for that matter, Orwell’s miserable seedy biscuits, two vegetables and boiled jam roll.