A Bohemian rhapsody on a summer’s night
Three months cooped up indoors have left Keith Miller pining for Old Vienna
Itrust we’re all agreed that this peculiar moment of fragile optimism, as we scramble down the scree on what we hope and pray might be the far side of the Bad Thing, is no time for the jaded boulevardier shtick of the traditional broadsheet restaurant review. These guys need our support. Anyone opening or reopening at the moment, facing the prospect of reduced footfall while also having to shell out on all sorts of additional measures to keep staff and diners feeling, and ideally being, reasonably safe, needs a medal, not a hilarious riff on their calamari.
From mid-March until about the beginning of June, I wasn’t in any fit state to reflect on much beyond my groundhog-daily round. But gradually and, it seemed, involuntarily, an image formed of where I’d like to go out if I could. And it was Fischer’s, Chris Corbin and Jeremy King’s Austro-Hungarian fantasia in Marylebone High Street.
I suppose it was an unadventurous choice for my first outing, though I shall try to make up for that as the summer progresses. But it’s where my partner Susanna usually takes my daughter Lydia and me for a joint birthday bash at the end of May, which – incoming understatement alert! – didn’t happen this year. A rematch felt like a good idea, not least because we haven’t had much time en famille since March.
Fischer’s is a happy place for all three of us: Susanna and I spent a lot of time in Vienna, its notional departure point, a few years back, while Lydia has long extolled its chicken schnitzel, which she diligently slices up into “posh fillet strips” (she is, quite rightly, an admirer of Elijah Quashie, aka the Chicken Connoisseur) and consumes with cucumber salad, runner beans dressed in paprika and chips that she likes but – again, following the CC – finds too crispy to retain sauces well.
Our heart-warming domestic traditions didn’t quite explain the allure of this particular restaurant at this moment, though. The whole Corbin & King thing is, I think, based on an almost-unconscious archetype: their restaurants resemble a sort of quintessence of cultivated bourgeois urban leisure in the way some flowers look like a child’s drawing of a flower.
In 2015 I went round the Fondazione Prada on the outskirts of Milan for a newspaper feature. The café there had been designed by the film-maker Wes Anderson as a hyperreal pastiche of a 1950s espresso bar. It was kinda cool but kinda weird: like being inside a doll’s house, hand-painted by some obsessive perfectionist. You expected to see Wes’s giant eyes peering at you through the window.
Similarly, the suave cosmopolitan brasseries of continental Europe towards which the C&K stable nods in various ways don’t quite exist in reality. Somewhere like Bofinger in Paris, say, founded in 1864, looks somehow perpetually new, yet Colbert in Sloane Square, which opened all of eight years ago, is almost neurotically insistent on having always been there. Conversely, an echt mid-market Viennese bar-restaurant tucked just off the Naschmarkt, say, would be older and dowdier than Fischer’s, though none the worse for that. The bourgeoisie there has moved on to modernist interiors and molecular gastronomy – or it had pre-Covid; now, presumably, everyone
Our happy place: like other C&K restaurants, the food at Fischer’s is better than it needs to be for the theatre to work is schnitzelling and tafelspitzing their socks off.
Fischer’s is somehow both cluttered and orderly; there is something of the psychiatrist’s waiting room about it, I always think. It’s panelled in dark wood, thickly decorated with Secessionist tiles and prints and some frankly pretty terrible paintings of mountains, watermills, woodcutters (a nod, I’d hope, to a 181-page rant by Thomas Bernhard, the best Austrian writer of the 20th century by a wide margin, who hated more or less everything about the country) and a sleek couple one takes to be the Fischers themselves, whoever they were.
Apart from ampoules of sanitiser and reassuringly vigorous air-conditioning, Covid precautions are discreet, once you’ve done the initial temperature check (which is highly theatrical, in true C&K style). The tables are roughly as they were, all set but only half occupied. This lends a not unpleasant weekday feeling.
We had what we always have, I’m afraid: Bismarck herring, chopped liver, schnitzels of various kinds, sides as described above and, from the prix fixe, a plump supreme of cod, beautifully presented as a sort of Hungarian tricolor with a jade-green rocket pesto beneath, ruby-red roasted aubergine on top and a heraldic little rösti hat. Puddings were two between three: a fantastically rich chocolate and salted caramel pot and a bracingly unsweet lemon sorbet.
It was all unimpeachably good, needless to say: a perfect way to celebrate being together again, even if we felt we’d missed the boat on the candlestudded Sachertorte we’ve sometimes ordered to round matters off in the past.
One of the things I like about Corbin & King’s restaurants is that the food is generally better than it needs to be for the theatre to work. Sometimes it even works better than the theatre – the one time we went to the Wolseley, arguably C&K’s flagship, the food was fantastic but the service was all over the place. Though maybe they were discombobulated by the then-recent death of famed regular Lucian Freud, whose early bohemian exploits were funded by a bequest of royalties from his grandfather Sigmund’s writings. He was sometimes rumoured to be mean to the staff: you won’t catch us doing that for a bit.
50 Marylebone High Street, London W1U 5HN; 020 7466 5501; fischers.co.uk