The original gastro pub is ready to soar again
Kathryn Flett opts for car-boot crockery over Spoons as she eats out for the first time since lockdown began
When it was announced by Boris Johnson at the end of June that pubs and restaurants would be reopening, I toyed with a Full English, Whoohoo/Wey-hey, SaturdayNight’s-All-Right-For-Drinking chugathon at my nearest Spoons, before remembering I wasn’t an 18-year-old lad freshly sprung from the emotional borstal of lockdown – it just felt that way.
Having heroically fed a household of five (including three teenagers) two restaurant-quality meals a day over the past few months, during which time friends on Instagram asked if I did click-and-collect and several sweetly suggested I write a comfort-food cookbook (to which the answers remain “No!” and “Make me an offer”), it was food cooked by almost anybody in the world other than me that I craved.
As I inched slowly back towards whoever it was I used to be before all of this (ie a woman without the couple of inches of salt-and-pepper roots and a mysterious half-a-stone of cheese attached to my midriff) it was obvious where I’d be going to eat, drink and make my muted “merry”: I’d be going home.
“I don’t like pubs, but I love The Eagle,” I wrote in my foreword to the gastro-pioneers’ cookbook, Big Flavours & Rough Edges, published way back in 2001 to coincide with their first decade in business.
In 1991, London EC1 was almost unrecognisable, which is precisely why the pub’s then co-owners, Mike Belben and David Eyre, took a punt on the cheap end of a lease at a big airy corner site in the teeth of a recession. The Quality Chop House had recently opened just across the Farringdon Road and there was a cracking Italian deli, Gazzano’s, all but next door. This vibey-ness, plus the possibility of sufficient passing trade from The Guardian just down the road, allowed Belben and Eyre to believe that the idea of a pub with (and I quote myself here – apologies) “a bull---- free rough-edged urban charm” might just succeed.
As keen students of urban pub-ology will be aware The Eagle didn’t merely succeed, it thrived, single-handedly redefining the parameters of what a contemporary urban pub could – should – be. It was the first “gastropub” – a term coined by the owners – with the blueprint we recognise: mismatched chairs, car-boot crockery, blackboard menu, real-life cooking right there in front of you.
I was in my late twenties when I first went there, and my early thirties when David Eyre cooked a giant paella for my wedding reception (delivering it to Kensington). I have far fonder memories of the paella than I do of the ex-husband. Having loved, lost (partners and jobs) and fallen over within its walls (mostly en route to/from the basement lavatories) more times than I care to mention, I was amazed to learn that The Eagle is still on only its third head chef, Ed Mottershaw: 16 years and counting.
This is a tight, occasionally starstudded, family with a spectacular tentacular reach. Famously, Graham Norton – a man with his own-label wine – did occasional shifts behind the bar in the early-1990s.
Other alumni include the founders of the Hackney Brewery and Moro, (the late) Great Queen Street and The Canton Arms, Eyre Bros, The Anchor & Hope, and many more, while last year an ex-Great Queen Street staffer opened a pub with strongly aquiline DNA,
The Royal, just a spit away from my home in St Leonards-on-Sea. Happy Days.
Unlike these.
I phoned Belben to check if they were open. “Oh god, are you going to review us?” Well, no, not really.
Monday lunchtime and Farringdon Road looked like I imagine it did in the 1970s; I’d driven up to town, effortlessly, and parked right by the pub. Inside, with just nine other diners I hadn’t seen the space as empty since Tue Sept 11, 2001, just after a lunch during which the twin towers collapsed.
Other than bottles of hand sanitiser, some widely-spaced tables – the former gallery space upstairs has been opened so they can accommodate the same amount of covers as before – and a request to leave my name and number in the Little Black Covid-Book on the bar just in case, it was business as usual.
We shared, at one metre apart, a fabulously summery plate of watermelon chunks with feta and toasted pumpkin seeds. I sank a half of chilly Estrella, chased by grilled lamb chops, cracked wheat, green tomatoes, dried mint, yogurt and dill. My date Tom Norrington-Davies – The Eagle’s second head chef, a former Telegraph columnist, the co-founder of Great Queen Street with Belben and now a yoga guru – had the sabih-flavoured flatbread, fried aubergines, chopped salad, tahini egg and mango pickle. “Love this!” said Norrington-Davies, insisting I dig in.
Belben joined us. “How are you feeling about your 30th anniversary in January?” I wondered, even while guessing the answer. “Well, in an ideal world I’d be sitting at the bar with a cold beer, a full pub and a big smile on my face. I was 39 when we opened. We had the energy and the vision then…” Belben shrugged, “but now – who knows?”
It was a very lovely long lunch – about which for everything that had changed even as many things had stayed exactly the same – among lovely old friends.
These days, of course, I love pubs precisely because so many of them are fledgling Eagles. Why then, back in the car and about to embark on the long journey home, was I so surprised when
I started to cry?
159 Farringdon Rd, London EC1R 3AL; 020 7837 1353; theeaglefarringdon. co.uk