>Hereford Road
★★★☆☆
Now, don’t get me wrong. I love rediscovered, born-again, new-fangled British food as much as the next man. I respect the compromise of old and new, the feel for memory and season, the roots in history and soil. I like mutton, jugged hare and Sussex pond pudding. I think an honorific for Fergus Henderson is long overdue. (Though to name St. John the 14th best restaurant in the world, 29 places above the Louis XV, is frankly barking.)
But here’s the rub. There’s a reason British food became an international joke – one that plenty of countries still find funny. At its Victorian worst, our food was as bland as clingfilm, as tame as Lassie. And at least one modern restaurant, serving resurgent English grub to metropolitan foodies, is crippled by a comparable timidity. Hereford Road is less a development of St. John than a faint, approximate copy of it. Tom Pemberton is the head chef, a former protégé of Henderson and, funnily enough, once a schoolmate of Giles Coren. The site is an old butcher’s shop (St. John, of course, was once a smokehouse) on a street twisted with Notting Hill affluenza. The room is as welcoming as a headmaster’s study. Like St. John, fabric is deemed a Neronian extravagance, so it’s all bare floors, unlinened tables, empty walls. I do wonder at the point of all this austerity. What’s wrong with a bit of cloth?
‘Tap or mineral water?’
What a nice question! Tap of course, and it comes in a pretty decanter. The menu, which changes daily, lists ingredients rather than dishes. ‘Rabbit, mustard, spinach and mash.’ ‘Roast Blackface lamb, courgettes and mint.’ ‘Apple and elderflower trifle.’ We all know that British food (especially savoury) is often little more than a shopping list of seasonal ingredients, simply prepared. Tonight, although asparagus and wild garlic nod towards spring, most of the food is still in chilly hibernation. Who wants to eat roast Jerusalem artichokes with the daffodils blooming? Or, for that matter, kale, the wintriest veg of all? ‘Seasonal’ means this season, not any old season, and a daily menu is a luxury that should emphasise this.
20 minutes pass, an aeon at a foodless table. A fennel and wild garlic soup tingles with aniseed. It’s flecked with green strips of wild garlic leaves, but not, oddly, with their flavour. This is essentially a cream of fennel soup, with a dim chivey whiff. I rarely add salt to a dish, but I do here, and plenty of pepper. Crab on toast is better – a rich smear of brown, flushed with lemon, on crumby toast. The meat has a decent pastiness, but again, needs lifting with salt. It’s strange: the ingredients are obviously excellent, but something is missing.
Hours seem to pass before the main courses show up. Little is as fraught and anxiously depressing, as thumb-twiddlingly, wine-sippingly painful, as a long wait for restaurant food. C is excellent company, but we’ve come here to eat, and the excitement and pleasure of the evening begin to ebb like a dying Catherine wheel. When the food finally appears, and I’ve shaved off my white beard, it’s a mixed bag. Onglet is an insole, with cold and mealy chips. Calf’s liver is milky and perfectly cooked, budding with lentils and those wintry flaps of kale. Ox cheeks are the dish of the evening, collapsing like they’ve run a marathon, richly sauced in flavoursome, slow-cooked murk. There’s proud and fluffy mash too, unlike the puddle popularised by Joël Robuchon. It’s an excellent dish, exactly the sort of thing you hope for in a restaurant like this. Sad, then, that it should be the only plate to stand out.
I finish with a rhubarb meringe, apparently assembled by a dyspraxic three year-old. I know that Hereford Road is about unadorned food, none-of-your-poncy-frou-frou-stuff-here-matey, but well, you know… look at it. It tastes a bit better: the fruit is zingily tart, which compensates for the overcooked meringue. And hang on… oh God. I reach to my lips and pull out a short, black, curly hair. The waitress apologises and politely sweeps away the plate, bringing another helping in its place. She knew I’d still want it.
We emerge rather dispirited. The menu at Hereford Road promises like a sugar daddy but delivers like the postal service of Zimbabwe. It sources terrific produce only to treat it with a kind of baffling indifference. Food is consistently underseasoned, and I find the studied inelegance of the presentation distracting, rather than comforting or homely. These aren’t teething problems, either: the restaurant’s been open since October 2007. Pricing is fair and service is friendly. The ethos, you see, is faultless: I just can’t say that for the execution.
3 Hereford Road, London W2
Tel. +44 (0)20 7727 1144
See on the TFYS Map
Dinner for two, excluding drinks and service, costs £53.
www.herefordroad.org
Sambrook’s began brewing last August, in a desolate strip of Battersea. It’s a joint venture between David Welsh, who has 30 years’ experience in the trade, and Duncan Sambrook, twentysomething accountant-turned-brewer. Like many ideas – and people, come to that – it was spawned from a booze-up. But less commonly, this drunken brainwave has proved a success.
Duncan was hugely informative on the arcane craft of brewing – kettle and mash tun, liquor and gypsum. The brewery uses fresh hops, unlike the pellets more typical nowadays: three strains, with the gloriously English names of Fuggles, Goldings and Boadicea. It’s the last of these that gives Wandle its distinctive, proud astringency, and like the old battleaxe herself, it takes no prisoners. Fresh hops, with their weedy green aroma, are a lot more work, and in the past, Duncan has had to clamber into the tanks to fish out buckets of sodden strobiles. It’s too much to say that his labour seasons the beer, but it’s testament to his commitment for the project.
The Westbridge is simply a gem of a gastropub, serving simple but well-executed food in a setting of undistilled nostalgia. The stairway down to the loos is decorated in vintage He-Man wallpaper, the sight of which gave me a Proustian jolt back to my childhood, the tinny theme and evocative nomenclature of that brilliant series: Grayskull, Orko, Eternia. Nick Drake plucks and twangs on the stereo. We ate meaty Irish rock oysters, splashing with osmazome, and then a good fish and chips with crispy, auburn batter and pearly flakes of pollock. A lamb steak looked excellent; and when I peeked at the prices, they were very reasonable. In total, we tasted six beers by the third-pint (which, it 
Writing about evenings like this, in which you eat and drink for free, it’s perhaps harder to show that you approached the experience in as balanced a fashion as normal. There are two things I’d say to this. The first is the obvious point that in a restaurant, good service can enhance your enjoyment of the food. So, in reality, I write about these places just as I would anywhere that treated me well, or which I felt had gone the extra mile. The second is more complex. Dishing out freebies can be counterproductive for restaurateurs. As customers, we all want to avoid seeming like we’ve been hoodwinked, or sensing we were gulled into being nice. As a result, when writing about the perks they’ve been given, bloggers can be harsher than normal, accentuating faults they might otherwise have let pass, so as to display their uncorruptibility. That, I hope, isn’t the case here. Duncan and Charlie have objectively excellent products, which they’re keen to share and profit from. I certainly don’t blame them for it – in fact, I salute them.
