TABLE FOR TWO
A new, grown-up Euro-brasserie at the centre of things could do well, says Keith Miller
There’s a peculiar loneliness, a desolation, almost, about finding yourself at the very centre of things. Dante was right, surely, when he swathed the innermost circle of Hell not in fire and brimstone, but ice.
This hasn’t stopped estate agents, who might do well to read up a little on the torments awaiting them in the afterlife, from breezily spouting off about “Midtown”, an amorphous tract of London between the Borough of Westminster and the City. It’s meant to evoke Manhattan, I suppose, where “downtown” denotes the bottom rather than the middle, “uptown” is Harlem and the Bronx and “midtown” sleek and spendy – and, especially since the purging of Times Square, ever so slightly stuffy.
It’s true that something seems to be afoot in the windblown badlands where the east end of Covent Garden meets the scrag end of Bloomsbury. Sicilian Avenue, one of the prettiest pedestrian streets in town, has had a blandly elegant makeover, all craft beer and succulents, its shops and bars sans-seriffed into submission. At the Rosewood Hotel, chef Calum Franklin dispenses what are widely held to be the capital’s finest pies. And now, in what was once the library alongside Holborn Town Hall, we have a shiny new Euro-brasserie, Gezellig.
It’s a lofty, airy space, accessed by a narrow corridor, where a front-ofhouse person currently lurks, Cerberus-like, at a lectern – which leads you to expect a more formal experience than you may end up having. There’s a slightly cramped bar area along one side at the front, which serves as a holding pen for new arrivals, who can either climb to a mezzanine – the crime section in days of yore, one hopes – and carry on drinking and snacking, or proceed into a squarish dining area. This is densely hung with a knowingly random assortment of posters and artworks,
among them – we couldn’t help noticing – a photograph of the infamous 1895 train wreck at the Gare Montparnasse: something of a hostage to fortune in a new restaurant, we thought. Happily, nothing happened to – kerching! – derail our enjoyment of the ensuing evening.
We had already been here for half an hour, perched at the bar knocking back beers and nibbling crispy-crunchy snacks. I’d almost been looking forward to this part more than dinner, ever since a sweet gig earlier this year when I went to review an exhibition in Amersfoort in the Netherlands.
We went to a tiny brew pub tucked inside the almost unbearably pretty Koppelpoort, where we munched bitterballen (crispy-crunchy snacks) and necked fluitjes (little glasses) of stadsbier (a zippy Kölsch-style lager) to the sound of, if memory serves, Madonna.
There was late snow on the pavements and the gables, and the obsidian depths of the canal glittered; but inside all was Gezelligheid – a word I didn’t know then but do now, thanks to the present restaurant’s press pack, and which translates as a sort of social “cosiness”, a Dutch hygge if you will.
Anyway, this time around the bitterballen were a shade cheffier than you’d get in a Dutch bar, with sweet mustard and a gently spiced pork filling. We also had cheddar gougères, sharpened with a rusty tang of pickled walnut.
The beer, sadly, wasn’t Dutch, but Greenwichese: Meantime lager or pale ale on draught. I’d have preferred a fatter, maltier flavour with my bitterballen – I also thought they might have gone a little further down the Dutch route and maybe proffered some sort of herring.
But then, as our researches into the dinner menu made clear, they’re clearly not so much about Dutchness in any specific sense as a glossy, grown-up cosmopolitan vibe: a bit French, a bit Viennese, a bit (whisper it) German. The food is, I suppose, a sort of “modern European”: deceptively simple, made with understated skill, on the hearty side, generously (pro)portioned and served with warmth and pride. Gezellig serves deceptively simple modern European food in an airy space