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An awesome and ridiculous film that leaves you thrilled beyond the point of your natural endurance
2012
Theatre
The show has suddenly become quite wonderful, and the galvanising factor is the terrific stage debut of Melanie C
Blood Brothers
Music
The British pop music industry may be eating itself but if Muse are the pick of what it can offer the world in 2010 then British music is in rude health indeed
Muse
I was smitten by both Gilberts enormous luxuriant moustache and the intelligence and nuance of this highly entertaining play
I totally recommend Babbo to anyone who is looking for really good and traditional Italian food
Always been a fan but never seen them live. I was ecstatic to be part of this epic event. WOW!
London,
David Sexton's rating
Reader rating
Description: "Inspiring" cooking -- that's "distinctively British", "confidently straightforward" and "offaly good" -- has made this "utilitarian" Smithfield "institution" a "place of pilgrimage for chefs worldwide"; its ratings slipped a bit this year, though, and staff risk becoming a bit "self-important".
Food: 
Service:
Ambience: 
Phone: 020 7251 0848
Website: http://www.stjohnrestaurant.com
Open: Lunch, Mon-Fri noon-3pm. Dinner Mon-Sat, 6-11pm
Dress code: City suits
Good for: Business, Good food, Ambience.
Payment options: All major cards
Rudimentary yet luxurious: Fergus Henderson with his signature dish of roast bone marrow and parsley salad
St John was the big winner in this year’s S Pellegrino World’s 50 Best Restaurants list, having been named the “must visit” restaurant of 2008 and promoted to number 16, a leap of 18 places. In London, only Gordon Ramsay is rated higher, at 13 — although a meal there costs three times as much.
So is it the best top-class bargain in town? Only for some, maybe — for St John is the epitome of the love it or hate it restaurant: uncompromising in everything it does, taking its aesthetic of simplicity and excellence right to the limit.
The decor is stark, the old smokehouse having been left pretty much as it was found when the restaurant opened back in 1994, just tidied up and whitewashed. The tableclothes are paper, the cutlery and chairs plain, the painted floorboards beginning to show tracks of wear — but all this just adds to its unpretentious appeal, its commitment to putting cooking first.
Fergus Henderson’s “nose-to-tail” approach, employing offal and other previously little-rated cuts, has been influential right across London. Many fine places — the Anchor & Hope, Great Queen Street, Hereford Road — are run by St John graduates, and just about every mediocre gastropub has picked up tips. Yet, though a diffused version of the St John style may now be widely available, the place itself retains a kind of brutal originality.
Partly, that’s to do with the confident curtness of the menu — snail, sausage and chickpea, say, or ox heart and chips. Just like that. Affected? But the food itself follows through in its clarity and simplicity.
St John’s signature dish is still roast bone marrow and parsley salad (£6.60), still terrific. Four chunks of veal legbone are briefly roasted and served with a slice of pain de campagne toast and a relish made of parsley, dressed with oil and lemon, enhanced with a few capers and finely sliced rings of shallot.
In A Cook’s Tour, Anthony Bourdain said he thought this rudimentary yet luxurious dish “the best thing I have ever put into my mouth ... It’s butter from God.”
It’s a much clearer hit than you ever get from the bits of marrow in osso bucco — just the perfection of flavoursome unctuosity. And unctuosity is what it’s all about here. What could possibly make it better? (Perhaps only being able to use a Georgian silver marrow spoon instead of steel crab picks.)
Pig’s head and radishes (£6.60) was disappointing by comparison — the chunks of meat were just too fatty to enjoy, too short on crispy bits for varied texture.
A special of roast middlewhite with white beans and chicory (£22.50) came as a roll of tender slowcooked pork topped with explosive crackling. The meat was a little dry but the glistening beans and melted chicory moistened it, putting all the fat back.
Pigeon and braised red cabbage (£15) was a whole bird, simply served halved, quite rare and bloody, tender and savoursome as a result, with again a vegetable that couldn’t be called anything less than unctuous.
Puddings feel daunting after this — certainly, a lot of sharing seems to go on. A tasty, quite sweet apple sorbet came with a refreshing snifter of chilled Polish vodka — a nice Clerkenwell equivalent of the trou normande, maybe, though the waitress recommended not actually mixing the two.
The wine list is determinedly all French, opening quite steeply at £17 but then full of regional treasures (though, on our visit, they’d oddly run out of such basics as Côtes du Rhône and St Veran). When asked what water they had, the waitress replied, with perfect St John crispness: “Sparkling, still, tap.”
My companion put the case against St John as being almost a theme restaurant — so devoted to pork, offal and game that it’s as much a macho exhibition as it is an eating house. Cards on the table: I’ve long loved it. And, for what this list is worth, it’s great to see St John standing high above the fancy follies some dafties seem to like.
Details are correct at the time of publication - please check with venue before booking.
