A cultured caff for the no-Pret set
It feels very much like the ‘old normal’ at this quirky, timeless venue, writes Kathryn Flett
hile I love Pret a Manger’s oeuvre as much as the next wage slave – I favour their “crunchy baguette with Wiltshire-cured ham and slices of Swedish Greve cheese on a layer of mustard mayo, finished with mixed salad leaves”, IYI – the Government’s campaign to get us back to work to save the said sarnie chain is clearly somewhat problematic.
In mid-February I left a job with a two-day-a-week commute from my south coast home, so even bursts of nostalgie-de-la-baguette will be insufficient to get me on the 7.34 from St Leonards Warrior Square to Charing Cross from whence it is (was?) a hop down the stairs to the bijou Pret in Villiers Street before a District line journey to my work in Hammersmith. Indeed, as a self-employed woman in her 50s, it’s conceivable I may never set foot in an office again.
Meanwhile, as pointed out succinctly in this newspaper’s Stella magazine a couple of weeks ago, working women with school-age children very often shouldered the bulk of lockdown’s cooking, cleaning and home schooling before shoehorning in whatever remained of their careers – realising with dismay that when the economic support system rug is pulled things swiftly revert to The Way They Were – if not Streisand and Redford in The Way We Were. Those women need our schools reopened consistently to be able to return to office working.
Which brings me – circuitously, granted – back to where I’m meant to be, both actually and metaphorically: restaurants. This week, specifically in leafy, picture-postcard-pretty Primrose Hill, London NW1, which has self-identified as a bohemian working-from-home enclave throughout my life, and even in 2020 (when bohemianism is presumably out of fashion even in Bohemia) retains its air of groovy insouciance, shored-up by a stellar roll-call of devil-may-care former residents such as W B Yeats, Sylvia Plath, Kate Moss and indeed the Johnson family, none of whom ever spent much time in offices.
I hadn’t visited in a while, however whether it’s the late 1970s/early 1980s lunches and suppers with my late father at Odette’s, 1990s Graecophile bingeathons with mates at Lemonia or long, happy nights at The Engineer during the 2000s, the Hill always stokes a millefeuille of mealtime memories. As I strolled along Regent’s Park Road it was recreational business as usual: squint and in PH it’s still Summer 2019.
A local with a suitably PH backstory, Sam’s Café (not to be confused with any other restaurants with Sam in their name that may have been recently reviewed by Telegraph critics; they come along like buses and we are powerless) is at the comparatively low-key residential crossroads of Chalcot Road and Fitzroy Road and is co-owned by the Booker-bothering author/journalist Andrew O’Hagan (whom, for the record, I know) and his mate Sam Frears (son of the writer/director Stephen and MaryKay Wilmers, the editor of the London Review of Books, to whom the epithet “extraordinary” is invariably and correctly attached. Sam’s rare genetic condition meant he wasn’t expected to live past the age of five; however, now in his late 40s, he hasn’t ever let disability get in the way of acting, abseiling, or indeed playing le patron at his eponymous caff). Though of
Play it again: the new incarnation of Andrew O’Hagan and Sam Frears’ café is a place for locals to linger course this is very much a PH-style caff. Sam’s closed 18 months ago in its nearby previous Regent’s Park Road incarnation, reopening three weeks ago a few hundred yards away. Helena Bonham Carter cut the ribbon.
Like its residents, Sam’s looks modern yet timeless – the corner site an airily stylish marriage (though this being PH, more probably an affair) of Farrowand-Ball-meets-melamine with an atmosphere somewhere betwixt an old Parisian bistro freighted with the metaphorical scent of madeleines and a True Brit greasy spoon, albeit one where the spoons are run through a Miele eco-wash. There’s a bookable private dining-room downstairs, too.
Sam’s is open for breakfast, lunch and dinner. The menu ranges confidently and comfortably between, say, vegan sausage with scrambled tofu and a steak ciabatta chased by a knickerbocker glory, making it as conducive to a food-tart like me as it is to PH’s kombucha-inhaling Pilates-mums. During my lunchtime visit, vegan fry-ups segued into (as chosen by lunch-date Georgina) a pair of dill-infused fishcakes with a robust hollandaise and (as chosen by me) a creamy mac-n-cheese and a side of salt beef which, in truth, was less the crumbly kosher slab of my beefy-dreams, more the slimline pastrami slices of a New Yorker’s, though none the worse for that. Sam’s was buzzing, its laid-back staff and shiny locals all behaving entirely “old-normally” befitting a place that understands its clientele.
And while I am keen to steer clear of making grandiose sweeping statements about “The Way We’ll Live From Now On”, more than simply being a cracking little local restaurant (definition: will you go wildly out of your way to visit? No. Will you make a beeline if you’re in the area? Absolutely), freshly-opened, happily optimistic places like Sam’s say something timely and important about our futures. While the retail/business/ financial office-based epicentres of cities may currently look bereft, the ecosystems of our urban “villages” are busy keeping it real. Albeit, at Sam’s in PH, inevitably a slightly rarefied “real”.
There is, for the record, no Pret (or any other chain) in Primrose Hill – but why would there be? Rather than incomers streaking past en route to a desk like so many of London’s villages this is a place for locals to linger. In which case there’s no reason why Sam’s shouldn’t pack them in for another 30 years.