The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - The Telegraph Magazine
‘My shepherd’s pie, billed as an Ivy classic, was stewy, soupy, gloopy, the potato limp and listless’
Much of the original Ivy style has been lost in its expansion
THE IVY IS APTLY NAMED. Just look at how it’s spreading. These days it’s everywhere. If there isn’t an Ivy near you, there soon will be. As well as the original site in London – which last year celebrated its 100th birthday – there are now Ivy Brasseries, Ivy Grills and Ivy Cafés in Covent Garden, Chelsea, Kensington, Soho, Marylebone, St John’s Wood, the City, Tower Bridge, Blackheath, Wimbledon, Richmond, Cobham in Surrey, Marlow Garden in Buckinghamshire, Tunbridge Wells, Bath, Bristol, Cheltenham, Harrogate, York and Edinburgh. Opening this year are yet more Ivy Brasseries, Ivy Grills and Ivy Cafés in Winchester, Brighton, Guildford, Cambridge, Birmingham and Leeds.
It’s extraordinary. At the current rate of expansion, by this time next year they’ll outnumber Starbucks. The year after that, they’ll outnumber Mcdonald’s. The year after that, Tesco. And then one morning, sometime in the summer of 2022, you’ll stumble downstairs to make breakfast – only to find that your kitchen has been converted overnight into an Ivy. Dazed, you’ll stagger into your dining room – only to find that that’s been converted into an Ivy, too. With a shriek, you’ll run outside, past your shed (now an Ivy), past your greenhouse (now an Ivy), and out into the road (now being dug up to make way for an Ivy). You desperately want to talk to your nextdoor neighbour, so you can ask him what on earth’s going on. But you can’t.
He’s not there. His house is now an Ivy.
This is a nightmare. You don’t know what to do. Panicked, you pull out your phone and dial 999.
‘Hello,’ says the voice at the other end. ‘Ivy Brasserie, how can I help?’
I wonder what the thinking is. Beyond making money, I mean. After all, the original Ivy is famed for its exclusivity. Anyone who’s ever picked up a tabloid newspaper or women’s magazine has heard of it. It’s that place where celebrities eat, and you can’t get a table inside the next three months unless you’ve at the very least costarred in a Bafta-nominated BBC Two serial about a crime-fighting divorcée.
Yet now there are tables all over the country. Tables, tables, endless tables. And there simply aren’t enough celebrities to go round. Which means the tables will have to be filled by ordinary people – ordinary people who will be able to get a table well within the next three months, in fact within the next three weeks, perhaps the day before, or even stroll in on the night, unannounced, and just sit down, no questions asked. There’s practically a table for every man, woman, child and dog in Britain. And, brand-wise, it’s not an easy balancing act to pull off: trying to be both exclusive, and ubiquitous.
We don’t (yet) have an Ivy in Gravesend. But the Tunbridge Wells branch, which sprang up last November, isn’t too far away. So my wife and I went along to try it.
On entry, we were immediately shown to the restaurant’s very worst table, directly beside the lavatory door, even though there were other tables free. Perhaps the staff could sense what I was going to write in my intro, and were getting their revenge in early.
The place was decorated in the Ivy’s familiar art-deco style. The chairs were plump. The walls were riotously busy with pictures, a chaotic clash of abstract and realist, barely a square inch spare. To start, we ordered the truffle arancini, the wasabi prawns with salt and pepper squid, and the wild mushrooms on toasted brioche. They arrived with almost startling speed. Wetherspoon’s could hardly have served us quicker.
The truffle arancini were very good: gorgeous little orbs of creamy nuttiness. I liked the wasabi prawns, too: big and satisfyingly crunchy, dipped in wasabi mayonnaise for a teasing tingle of heat. The toasted brioche with mushrooms, though, was soggy and wan.
My wife’s main was dukka-spiced sweet potato. An exotic name for a bowl of bland squidge. Not that she’d had
My wife’s main was dukkaspiced sweet potato. An exotic name for a bowl of bland squidge
much choice. Though the menu was packed to bursting with options, only one other main was vegetarian – there wasn’t even a vegetarian version of the Ivy burger. My shepherd’s pie, billed as an Ivy classic, wasn’t much better: stewy, soupy, gloopy, the potato limp and listless. My side of creamed spinach was wilted damp slop. (Bit of a theme here: the worst dishes were all weirdly wet. Maybe a pipe had burst in the kitchen.)
For pudding, the chocolate bombe was excellent. I even enjoyed watching the waitress pour on the hot salted caramel sauce. The chocolate collapsed as helplessly as a sandcastle engulfed by the tide. But I wasn’t so keen on the flourless cappuccino cake. So dense. So dark. So earthy. It was like trying to eat a square of freshly cut turf. Forget flourless. For all the pleasure it offered, it might as well have been eggless, butterless and sugarless, too.
Perhaps it isn’t fair to compare The Ivy Tunbridge Wells with the original restaurant. For one thing, it’s a lot cheaper. This wasn’t an expensive night out. Even so, I found the food very up and down. I doubt I’ll go back.
Then again, I won’t need to. I hear there’s an Ivy opening in our utility room any day now.