A winter’s tale in Summertown

TABLE FOR TWO Keith Miller enjoys classic French dishes with a few flourishes of originality POMPETTE £ 90 8/ 10

The delicious French word pompette, meaning “tipsy” or “squiffy”, was first deployed in my earshot by Audrey, a friend of my exwife. We went to her minuscule, immaculate apartment near the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris for supper once; another time, she guided us around the semiotic wilderness that is the Fête de la Musique, an annual carnival of misrule when the coltish young neostructuralists of the École Normale Supérieure belt out Eighties heavy metal covers on the Rue d’ulm, rap crews from the banlieues bellow like stegosaurs from rackety stages in the Place du Panthéon, nimble-fingered plongeurs wreathe themselves in Le Hot Club-inspired jazz riffs in the Quartier Latin and sexy firefighters in vests graciously make themselves available for salsa assignations in front of the Collège des Quatre-nations. ( We lost Audrey at this point.)

I’m afraid that during both these evenings, pompette flowered into full-blown ivresse, as in those warning signs you see pinned to the walls of French bars. After dinner, I remember careening off into the night to look for Le Corbusier’s modernist Salvation Army hostel by the river, because that’s the sort of wild thrillseeking fool I was then, but I’m genuinely unsure whether I found it.

As for the F de la M, we eventually made it back to our apartment (minuscule but by no means immaculate – it belonged to my ex’s cousin Charlie, who’d done a fair bit of DIY, much of it involving a claw hammer). We paused in the nearby Place de la Republique to enjoy Wind of Change, the Scorpions’ adenoidal ode to peace, love and pan-european cooperation, complete with a squalling solo from on-off guitarist Michael Schenker, who’s wrestled with ivresse- related issues of his own over the years but who’s paint-strippingly good on a good day, and whose work with UFO, Spotify recently informed me in what felt uncannily like a disappointing school report, I’d particularly enjoyed listening to this year.

So Pompette is a good name for a restaurant, I’d say. But it brings with it, as its owners must surely realise, the risk of cuteness. Its location in the north Oxford suburb of Summertown, where a more cerebral Richard Curtis might choose to make a film about theorists in love ( Neo-structuralism, Actually?), is, likewise, far from untwee. But arriving for lunch on a cold, wet Saturday in December, what we found was a large room, brick-walled and picture-lined and, OK, inviting, but inviting in a grown-up, restrained and even faintly austere way – halfway between a continental European café des artistes and the sort of place (we felt) a stellar restaurateur of a certain age might open as a cautious comeback move after some cataclysmic disgrace, in the same way a bloated Seventies rocker might, in the wake of a tabloid monstering, g, lie low for a bit and then dip a toe into the market with a sober acoustic ustic ballad.

No such sordid circumstances attend on the team behind Pommpette, of course, e, namely Pascal l Wiedemann, who used to cook at Terroirs, one of a handful of London restaurants that specialised in re- gional French food – there are more now, w, happily – and his wife, Laura. What they’re e serv- ing up in Oxford is a little more expansive in scope, with wider European and more specifically modern British influences; but bistro classics such as fish soup with rouille and leeks with brown shrimps and vinaigrette will leap out of the menu at you, if you like that sort of thing.

On the basis that we do like that sort of thing, we ordered the following: olives for the table; fish soup followed by a pumpkin risotto with wild mushrooms and chestnuts for my partner; a complex but certifiably sauce-free assortment of sides for my daughter; leeks and then red mullet with sauerkraut for me. Some good but unshowy French bread arrived, along with an orange wine from Sicily (the wine list is a bit Shoreditch 2015 for my liking).

My daughter made a little moue as she munched an olive. “These fall off the stone nicely,” she said sagely. Spanish-style croquetas with Iberico ham and Manchego were “crispy on the outside” – particularly the first one they brought – and the ham was “well distributed”; but she wasn’t sure about the graininess of the cheesy mash within. “I’d prefer something…” “Silkier?” “Silkier.” A generous side of simply prepared kale was “the best I’ve ever had”.

All the grown-up stuff scored highly too, though I didn’t write down what we said about it. I guess another risk Pompette is running – if you aren’t blown away by the whole peasanty European thing, or feel we’ve somehow got beyond it – is that of looking like an Elizabeth David tribute act. Maybe that’s another sort of tweeness. (Some of the art on the walls had that slight neoretro-romantic Mintonesque vibe.)

I’d say, though, that even the bistro classics had touches of originality – the texture of crushed roasted nuts with the leeks, the kick of fresh herbs with the fish – like taking a Mississippi delta blues standard and juicing it up with a squalling guitar solo, maybe.

So: rooted in tradition but unafraid to experiment around the edges a little; friendly, if not what you’d call gushing; fantastic puddings (a single hyperprofiterole was enough for the three of us, but we saw various tartes being ferried to and fro, and very pretty they looked too) – Pompette is aiming at a sort of eternally contemporary, always-been-there vibe. It deserves to do well, and I trust it will. And my red mullet was positively – what’s the word? – intoxicating.