Some people travel to London for neckties, and some to take a peek at the Turner watercolors in the Tate. Virgin jumbos bulge with Americans eager to transform themselves into finely tuned machines dedicated to the consumption of theater, catching a bit of the Ye Olde, or dancing until dawn. Then there are those poor deluded fools like me. I went to London looking for an epiphany of cuisine.
More specifically, I was hoping to be thrown out of Gordon Ramsay's restaurant on Royal Hospital Road, which, with three Michelin stars, is officially the best restaurant in Britain. Getting thrown out of Ramsay's is what one does in London, apparently, as one might attempt a bit of heli-skiing in British Columbia or an audience with the king when in Tonga. Some of Britain's finest restaurant critics have been tossed out of Ramsay's for disparaging the soup or slighting the chef's term as a teenage footballer with Glasgow Rangers, and the sweep of his famous temper was prominently displayed on Boiling Point, a six-part kitchen documentary that aired on Channel 4. Any twit with a functioning American Express card can arrange to be fawned over-I wanted the full treatment, the sort of personal service that London chefs such as Ramsay, Marco Pierre White, and Nico Ladenis are uniquely situated to provide.
I had done my homework, of course. For years, Americans have been hearing about the London restaurant scene, reputed at one point to be the most robust in the world, and though I had never tasted a speck of food prepared by Marco, Nico, or Gordo, I seemed to know everything about them from British journals like The Times, The Observer, and a short-lived foodie lad mag called Eat Soup: their cars, their kids, their politics, their favorite football teams, their sexual proclivities, and in whose restaurant's back room Posh and Becks held their engagement party.
When artists were hip, Marco did a brasserie with Damien Hirst, then re-replaced all the art with his own glittering masterpieces when the two had their inevitable row. When the '90s financial boom made mere kitchen work seem like a mug's game, Marco and Nico gave back their hard-won Michelin stars and concentrated on building their respective empires rather than cooking for the Man. Gordo, in the meantime, muscled in on the ultraluxury hotel-restaurant game with the vigor of an East Jersey don.
White, the most famous French chef in the country, bragged at one point that he had never been to France. In the introduction to his first cookbook, Ladenis asserted that the customer is not always right. My shelves groaned under the weight of volumes from Ramsay, White, Rogers and Gray, David Thompson, Pierre Koffmann, Gary Rhodes, the Roux brothers, and a place called The Ivy, where reservations were said to be fantastically difficult although the recipes seemed to be of the sort common on first-class airline menus.
Half the movies coming out of London seemed to feature mad chefs, from the cannibalistic cuisinière in Peter Greenaway's The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover to the lunatic creations (Clams and Ham, Liver in Lager) in Mike Leigh's Life Is Sweet, where restaurant excess stood in neatly as a metaphor for pure, unchecked Thatcherism.
It must be said, the news trickling from London didn't exactly make me want to catch the next flight out-when the food press finally got around to describing the actual dishes, they sounded incredibly overwrought, the three-ingredients-too-many school of British cooking that Calvin Trillin once characterized as "Stuff-Stuff with Heavy," only laced with black pudding instead of sauce mousseline.
On my last trip to London, in 1988, during the Acid House season that the music magazines were calling the Summer of Love, I managed to hit some of the high points of London cuisine without really trying. My wife and I went to Sally Clarke's, where I remember being knocked silly by a piece of farmhouse Cheddar, and we had a bollito misto at the River Cafe that was almost as good as the ones you get in Modena. We had the haddock and chips at the renowned Sea Shell, near the Marylebone tube station, oysters and Champagne at Bibendum, and a nouvelle pheasant banger at Alastair Little, on Frith Street-it made us laugh out loud to see the tiny sausage, no bigger than a child's curled pinky, marooned on an acre of naked crockery. We had a vaguely Asian-influenced meal in a restaurant in Hampstead that had been extravagantly praised by the Evening Standard, although it would barely have passed muster back in California. I would like to say that we made a pilgrimage to Harvey's restaurant, in suburban Wandsworth, where Marco Pierre White was already beginning to make an impression as a gastro-terrorist, but the night we planned to visit, we somehow ended up eating doner kebabs on the street outside an all-night rave in Brixton. Once, I arranged for a meal to be delivered to our room from Bombay Brasserie, which happened both to be close to the hotel and London's swankest Indian restaurant at the time, and my wife, still convinced that I had chosen it randomly from the telephone directory, continues to think of it as the best Indian meal she's ever eaten.
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."
Precisely so.
To understand the new London restaurant, it may be necessary to begin with the classic English breakfast, known as a fry-up, at a classic London caff-perhaps the well-known Borough Cafe, a couple of steps from the Borough Market, near London Bridge. A proper fry-up is an intimidating sight to a novice, a big plate sluiced with tinned baked beans, surmounted by a couple of fried eggs, a fried tomato, a fried slab of black pudding (which is to say blood sausage), a slice of fried bread, fried mushrooms, two or three rashers of streaky bacon, and a terrifying hillock of bubble and squeak-potatoes fried hard with cabbage-which all leaks a sort of pale, orange grease that puddles across the plate in rude abundance. You may be tempted to flee to the nearest Starbucks, but it's gruesomely fascinating to see small-boned Englishwomen tearing through these absolutely enormous plates of food.
Modern British cooking can be defined thusly: anything but that.
So the morning after England eked its way into the second round of the World Cup by tying Nigeria-an event celebrated by lager louts across the land-I was not wholly surprised to walk into Gordon Ramsay's restaurant on Royal Hospital Road, a long, flag-draped walk from Sloane Square past an immense veterans' hospital, and find & a restaurant that might have been 12 paces from the Arc de Triomphe, with a French sommelier, a French maître d', and a cheese cart, bereft of even a single English specimen, that ranged from Époisses to Cabécou.
I was seated at first in a sort of foyer, where I was furnished with salted nuts, a copy of The Daily Telegraph, and a flute of Dom Pérignon for which I was destined to pay about $35. A waiter brought out some breadsticks and a little dish of cream cheese heavily scented with truffle oil. I rattled the sports page-if nuclear war had broken out that week, it would have been pushed to page 14 behind news of David Beckham's injured toe. A headwaiter looked alarmed, and substituted a menu for the newspaper before I could get to the summary of the England-Nigeria game. If I guess correctly, he whisked the paper off to be ironed.
Then Ramsay walked by (he has other restaurants, but this is the place where he seems to be) and I leapt at the chance to chat him up. He gently changed the subject from the inadequacies of the England eleven to the succulence of the new season's lamb before I had so much as a chance to blurt out a single "Oi! Gordo!" I gestured toward the crystal panels and the blond wood and smirked. "Very Arpège," I said, referring to the Paris restaurant that Ramsay's interior is probably meant to recall.
Ramsay just smiled.
I waved toward the canapé, telling him that I had always considered truffle oil to be the Heinz ketchup of the overbred, and a corner of his mouth twitched at my rudeness, but the headwaiter came by just then to lead me to a proper table. Ramsay shrugged and wandered back into the kitchen.
I would evidently not be thrown out of Gordon Ramsay's restaurant today. (Nor would I be when I visited his gorgeous new restaurant at Claridge's a few days later, where the menu was strikingly similar.) I would, on the other hand, consume a thoroughly conventional luxury-French meal, starting with a consommé spiked with tiny favas, chervil, and more truffle oil, continuing with a foie gras terrine overpowered by its larding of smoked goose, a single ravioli stuffed with a rubbery, overemulsified bolus of lobster, and a pretty, if overcooked, bit of John Dory moistened with browned butter and garnished with delicious little cubes of spiced celery root. A lamb loin, very rare, with a salt-marsh funkiness, was served on a bed of melted cabbage. Ramsay was right: The new season's lamb was pretty spectacular.
Still, with all the brashness, all the hype, I had been expecting at least a cuisine of big flavors from London, something with a punch, but what I had been experiencing was as mild as lemonade. When I finally took a trip to Marcoland, or to one outpost of his kingdom anyway, a wonderworld in Mayfair called Mirabelle, I found a fantasy of '50s posh, with neither wild attitude nor blood sausage in sight. The menus are as tall as The Sunday Times, and the wine list-actually, I just saw the training-wheels version, magnificent in itself-is one of the deepest in London. The truffled stuffed pig's trotter, a borrowing from La Tante Claire's chef Pierre Koffmann that was always part of the Marco legend, was almost refined, at least as refined as it is possible for a huge, naked pig's foot to be.
These days, when you go to a restaurant run by Marco Pierre White, you're buying a branded product. You can't be accused of lacking class for going to an MPW restaurant, where you can be pretty sure you'll go the route of sole meunière, haddock-stuffed "omelets Arnold Bennett," and reliably good steak frites. The old MPW delighted in sea-pirate prices and cowering customers; the new one just wants to sell you dinner. Mirabelle was all right in its way, but I felt like a rock 'n' roller who never got around to seeing the Beatles on stage and is now making do with Wings.