Les 2 Garçons, 143b Crouch Hill, London N8 9QH (0208 347 9834). Starters £8.95-£12.50, mains £16-£30, desserts £8, wine from £25 a bottle
All eating places appeal to tribes, and right here at Les 2 Garçons a really explicit tribe has come out to play. We will attain for obtuse euphemisms if we like, mangle the language seeking originality, however “the chattering center lessons” just about covers it. Maybe they've a subscription to the LRB that they fear they don’t learn sufficient of, or a membership to the Royal Academy that they worry they don’t use as usually as they need to.
They adore BBC Radio 4, aside from the 6.30pm comedy reveals, which they by no means snort at. They love good espresso and well-made sourdough. They despair of the federal government, hope Keir Starmer is the true factor and fantasise about happening vacation to France. Frankly, they’d go there extra usually if such behaviour didn’t make them worry that, with age, had come entrenched habits. They could properly be right down to solely certainly one of their very own hips. They're this newspaper’s readers. Oh, sod it. They're me.
This tiny French bistro, tucked in on the backside of north London’s Crouch Hill, has simply 22 seats. There are naked floorboards, internet curtains midway up the home windows and quite a lot of blackboards for the scribbling up of beguiling specials. It might have been designed with each them and me in thoughts. It's a excellent expression of our love for a sure form of basic, unfussy however luscious French cookery, lubricated by good butter, powered by chopped garlic and fistfuls of contemporary inexperienced herbs. Each menu description conjures up a picture of how comfortable you'll be consuming it. Not a single one enables you to down. The dishes right here might have been served at any time over the earlier 9 a long time. They simply won't all the time have been fairly so good.
It’s what you'll count on of those two explicit garçons. Chef Robert Reid has classical French chops cast within the best of French kitchens: he cooked at Roger Verge’s Moulins de Mougins on the Riviera, at au Crocodile in Strasbourg and Joel Robuchon’s Jamin in Paris, earlier than returning to London. There, he grew to become head chef at Marco Pierre White’s Oak Room when it held three Michelin stars. On the Oak Room he met Jean-Christophe Slowik, a front-of-house veteran who had labored at Le Manoir and at Harvey’s, Pierre-White’s unique launch pad, earlier than opening his personal neighbourhood restaurant, L’Absinthe, in Primrose Hill. These careers are akin to these of veteran guitarists and bassists who, between them, have performed with Sure and Delicate Machine, Pink Floyd, Jethro Tull, King Crimson and Genesis: much less monsters of rock than monsters of inventory.
This night the room is full, despite the fact that it's only slightly after six. The diners appear delighted to be the primary sitting, sure within the data they will do the complete restaurant factor and nonetheless be again residence by 8.30pm, digesting dinner whereas slumped in entrance of BBC4. Slowik, customary scarf tied at his neck, works the tables with nearly comedian Gallic allure, depositing glasses of kir with only a blush of cassis, and speaking up the blackboard specials. Reid can also be out right here, enjoying rush goalie, blue and white striped apron over his whites, Marco fashion. He takes orders and delivers dishes from the kitchen on the again, the place there are a few different cooks. It's a tight operation, because it must be with so few tables. It seems that different newspapers even have restaurant critics. Who knew? Considered one of them had simply stumbled upon the place. I ask Slowik if that’s why it’s so full so early. No, he says. It’s been like this since they opened within the autumn final 12 months. It simply fills up slightly faster now.
So what did we eat? Oh, you recognize. All the good things. Snails are served out of the shell, in a fearsomely scorching dimpled cast-iron tray, with garlic butter made with fields of contemporary herbs, extra torn than chopped. We're given a brown paper bag of sliced heat baguette that shortly turns into a car for all of the herby butter. From the specials board comes asparagus in its prime, with a salad of freshly podded peas in a dressing of lemon and truffle. Do I want let you know there are additionally duck rillettes and steak tartare and an onion soup gratinated with most intent? Nah, you'll have labored that out.
A correctly crisped leg of duck confit slumps right into a mattress of white beans and lardons, with slightly salad that can assist you absorb all of the lovingly saturated animal fat and make you are feeling that your food plan is balanced. A rooster breast of impeccable pedigree is introduced in a limpid broth of greens with, to assist all of it alongside, a ramekin of sauce gribiche, that good eggy sauce with mustard and cornichons and so forth, which improves most issues. We might have had steak frites with béarnaise sauce or roast seabass with new potatoes, or shared a roast leg of Pyrenean lamb with a gratin dauphinoise and wild mushrooms. We might have executed all of that, however we didn’t.
After the frustration of the clumsily made rum baba on the LaLee a number of weeks again, it's a pleasure to have the true factor, made by a person who has been making them for his complete working life. The tall muffin of a savarin has precisely the precise, mild texture. It has been soaked enthusiastically in syrup and cut up vertically down the center so it lies now on its again, surrendered. Rum has been added after which ignited in order that the dish sits earlier than me with guttering blue flames. The inside track of crème Chantilly melts gently within the warmth. A milk chocolate mousse, dotted sweetly with a hoop of buttons, is a reminder that a chocolate pot doesn't all the time must be a darkish, dense factor that sucks the very mild from the universe.
The wine checklist is a parade of bottles from Burgundy and Alsace, the Languedoc and the Rhone. It's a wholly unsurprising assortment. Which is the purpose of a restaurant like this; certainly, of all the custom of which it's a half. A real bistro isn't there to shock or dazzle. It isn't meant to position you exterior your consolation zone. It's designed particularly to be your consolation zone. Les 2 Garçons is about as full and pleasant an expression of that as I've come throughout in a really very long time.
Information bites
Jon Parry, who made his identify on the Mash Inn at Radnage, Buckinghamshire, along with his model of home-grown produce cooked over fireplace, has moved on. He has joined the White Hart at Wytham, simply exterior Oxford. His opening menu, whereas he finds his ft, contains roast mackerel with contemporary horseradish, turbot with a herb butter sauce, rhubarb Bakewell tart and pouring cream, and a lemon posset with a suet sable (whitehartwytham.com).
Dinner by Heston Blumenthal on the Mandarin Oriental Resort in London’s Knightsbridge, has launched a extremely illustrated card system to allow diners to handle how a lot interruption they get from the waiters. Prospects are invited to position the cardboard of their selection in a holder. They vary from the Adventurer – “I’d just like the meals to do the speaking” – by means of the Information, to the Maverick. The latter invitations you to take pleasure in ‘a visit down the rabbit gap of Heston’s creativeness’. The language could also be considerably grandiose, however the precept behind the thought might be welcome in lots of eating places (dinnerbyheston.co.uk).
South African born Hylton Espey, previously the top chef of Rastella in Falmouth, Cornwall, is to open his first unbiased restaurant within the city subsequent month. Tradition will highlight Cornish produce and can function an ever-changing multi-course “Journey Menu”. Dishes will embrace native lamb with hedgerow herbs and sea greens, and Cornish crab with a burnt onion and fermented garlic aioli (culturerestaurant.co.uk).
E-mail Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or observe him on Twitter @jayrayner1
Post a Comment