Still, for one reason or another, we never got back to London.
Now that I'm back, it is less the bizarreness than the Frenchness of London restaurants that is most puzzling: In dining rooms of a certain class, it is French commands you hear barked by headwaiters; French that you hear muttered in appreciation when a particularly lovely woman walks across the room. English farmhouse cheeses may be among the most exciting in the world at the moment, but you are far more likely to find a St.-Marcellin than a cheese from Wensleydale. There is something deeply ironic about stopping into a restaurant around the corner from Trafalgar Square, where you can't see the pavement for the pigeons, and dining on squab imported from Bresse.
Where the chef happens to be British, the trappings are still likely to be French. At the Lindsay House, where Richard Corrigan is revered as one of the new stars of British cooking, you may recognize the maître d', Walter Lecocq, from his years with Alain Ducasse in Monte Carlo and New York. At The Square, where Philip Howard runs the kitchen, your wine will be chosen by a young man who, like many of his wines, hails from France.
The menu basically shared by Ladenis's restaurants Deca and Incognico reads and tastes as if it were lifted from an ambitious train-station bistro in the Loire. At Le Gavroche, where the Roux family has been serving Mayfair for 35 years, English is spoken with less enthusiasm than it is in most of the great restaurants of Paris.
Even at the extremely English fish and game restaurant Wiltons, where the St. James's set has been drowsing off over the trifle since gout stools were all the rage and the smartly aproned waitresses seem to have been chosen for their resemblance to somebody's beloved nanny, the kitchen has been taken over by refugees from the long, Escoffier-style regime of Michel Bourdin at The Connaught (which has been transformed into, of all things, an Italian restaurant by the inevitable Ramsay), and although the primary effect of this so far seems to have been a slight improvement in the potted shrimp and sole meunière, it may be, perhaps, further evidence of the gallification of English taste. What the French couldn't win at Waterloo, they may be gradually conquering through their mastery of the English palate.
The phenomenon could plausibly be stretched to include the meal I had at Nahm, a dreary hotel restaurant in Belgravia where Australia's David Thompson just happens to spin phantasmagorical riffs on 19th-century Thai cuisine at stunning expense-fantastically complicated spicy crab relishes and lobster salads and southern-Thai venison curries all meant to be enjoyed with fine French wines. Even Charles Fontaine's deft menu at The Quality Chop House, a worn, crumbling restaurant in the ancient printing district, a roster of East End standards like jellied eels and steak and kidney pie-no doubt served a century ago, when the dining room was new-is leavened with things like lobster salad and lemon sole with olives.
It also probably encompasses Mju-where the much-esteemed Japanese-Australian chef Tetsuya Wakuda apparently consulted just long enough to institute a stale brand of French-fried Japanese fusion cooking that wouldn't pass the smell test at a Holiday Inn restaurant in Toledo, Ohio-and the lived-in cheer of J. Sheekey, a venerable West End fish restaurant whose timeless menu of prawn cocktails and salmon fish cakes extends these days to roasted bream with olive oil and herbs, a delicious cassolette of monkfish and sweetbreads, as well as happy nursery sweets. If you have ever had the urge to sample spotted dick, a steamed suet pudding dotted with currants, this might be the best possible place to do so.
I suppose Wapping Food came closest to reproducing what I thought the new London restaurant thing might be, a looming former hydroelectric plant with a few dozen tables tucked in among bits of the old machinery, and an utterly simple menu-I had a few grilled sardines, half a roasted guinea fowl with green beans, and a bowl of poached cherries garnished with a scoop of clotted cream the size of a cricket ball. The chairs were midcentury modern, and were for sale. The wine list was all-Australian. (Is this where to mention that an alarming percentage of the creative culinary minds in London-including David Thompson, Will Ricker of the pan-Asian bistro e&o, and Peter Gordon of the wonderful Asian fusion restaurant Providores, among others-come from the antipodes?) Though the food clearly exists in support of the Wapping Project's art performances and lecture series, the beautiful exhibition space, and the clanking electronic music on the loudspeakers, this is the London I used to dream of as a teenager: the rotting Victorian ruins, the bleakly gorgeous industrial landscape commemorated by Throbbing Gristle and Cabaret Voltaire, which has mostly been replaced by glistening office parks. I loved Wapping Food; I don't expect you to.
We can all agree, though, on St. John, Fergus Henderson's unapologetically British palace of meat: heaps of sizzling marrowbones, great slabs of pork from the rare Middlewhite breed roasted with potatoes, skewered eel broiled with Old Spots bacon, gooseberry fool-plain, deeply flavored food that may now be the most thrilling in London. "I have been to St. John," confessed a young French waiter at a Soho bistro, "and I had a beautiful piece of beef that had been ... only put in the oven. The food is tasty, yes, but it is the farthest thing from French."
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