TABLE FOR TWO
Keith Miller finds bold flavours and beautiful presentation in a converted stable
y daughter was barely out of primary school when she started getting into The Only Way is Essex and, hot on its six-inch heels, Love Island, which invites contestants from all across the land but whose spiritual home is clearly the roped-off VIP zone at the Sugar Hut, Brentwood.
I worried it was a little early for her to have to worry about all that stuff but, in truth, such shows’ treatment of human courtship (not to mention their reliance on hearsay to keep the plot moving) is as ritualised and strange as a Renaissance masque.
Anyway, on the principle that the best way to discourage your children from doing something is to do it yourself, I’ve been dipping a toe into the “reality dating” genre, and to be honest, I’ve rather enjoyed it.
The thing was, when we actually made it to Essex together, it clearly came as something as a shock to her that everyone wasn’t fluffed and buffed, pillow-lipped and sixpacked, skin aglow like Corinthian bronze, eyebrows chiselled into place by some celestial calligrapher to suggest perpetual astonishment (the boys) or consternation (the girls).
Everyone, or everyone in Chelmsford at least, looked… normal – aside from a few primped-up gym bunnies, anyway. The aboriginal East Britons, with their fair hair and small, neat chins (“Not Angles, but angels” said Pope Gregory the Great) comprised just one plotline in the great multi-ethnic comédie humaine you’d expect to see in a sizeable British town nowadays. There were even – the horror! – quite a few old people, of indeterminate heritage and, in many cases, gender.
So I, at least, was managing my expectations of Haywards, a sixyear-old, Michelin Plate-holding, husband-and-wife operation in a pretty converted stables next to a rangy pub on the edge of Epping Forest. However much part of me wanted it to be packed to the rafters with the Apollos and Aphrodites de nos jours, all talking to the hand, mugging each other off and using the phrase “Shut up!” to signify even the very mildest surprise, I prepared myself for a more mundane outcome.
And so it proved, in a sense. It’s not for me to say whether my partner (my daughter’s on holiday with her aunt, fuming about having missed the Love Island final) and I were the prettiest people there – in fact I think the golden apple would have to go to the couple at the next table, stick-thin, tweed-clad and in, I’d guess, their late 70s (who, incidentally got through, we think, two bottles of wine). Still, north of 50 though we both are, I’m pretty sure we were among the youngest.
The dining room is suavely neutral, Essex-posh rather than posh-posh, with no sense of oldness about it. Big photo prints of the forest looking beautiful, albeit somehow too clean, are ranged around the walls. At our table were two empty stoneware plates, which were whisked away as soon as we’d ordered: I was quietly troubled by this throughout lunch.
The restaurant performs the same sort of deft balancing act I’ve seen in a lot of affluent rural or (as in this case) semi-rural areas. Significant levels of chefly firepower are brought to bear on a clientele that’s willing to experiment up to a point but no further. The strange is anchored in the familiar. In this case, that was chiefly manifest in ‘Clever retro sensibility’: food at Haywards London Fields
111 Bell Common, Epping, Essex CM16 4DZ: 01992 577350; haywardsrestaurant. co.uk Welcome to the Very Important Plate zone