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London,
Evening Standard rating
Reader rating
Description:
Phone: 020 8444 4224
Open: Open Mon-Sat 12noon-11pm, Sun 12noon-10.30pm
Same old recipe: apart from the service, everything at the Clissold Arms appeared to be done by numbers
The internet is warm with anger about the Clissold Arms. This blameless-looking pub has the honour and the burden of being the place where the Kinks first played in 1960, and has now been made into a gastropub, with ubiquitous scrubbed oak and ex-school chairs, and biscuit-coloured paint. They have taken a shrine and made it into anywhere, goes the rage against the beige. There are, to be sure, some framed pictures of Ray and Dave Davies and co outside the toilets, but there’s not much more for the rock pilgrim.
The Clissold Arms stands somewhere in the no man’s land between Muswell Hill and East Finchley and before making the journey there I was inclined to defend it against the moaners. What exactly could its owners do? Make it into a Kinks theme park where Dedicated Followers of Fashion and Well Respected Men could spend Sunny Afternoons?
The Sunday lunch crowd looked happy enough. The pub is in a place where metropolitan bonds unravel, and you can begin to sense the green belt. It feels half in Hertfordshire and, but for a bit of grit outside — wine warehouse, take-away, funeral director — has the placid atmosphere of the home counties.
We lunchers were 100 per cent white, tending to well-pressed open-necked shirts in the tones of pistachio and mauve once favoured by New Labour, the men managing their thinning hair in sensible ways. Only one man, with loud shirt and long black rocker’s ringlets, evoked the Kinksian past.
I ate with my wife Lizzie, daughter Stella and Carolyn Steel, author of the forthcoming Hungry City, in which she describes how food shapes the way we live. We toasted her book in prosecco — champagne by the glass was off — and Stella with Fentiman’s burdock and dandelion cordial. This last gave pleasure, though for me it combines the flavours of bubblegum and Duckham’s oil.
The staff being nice enough, we were still inclined to like the place but the food challenged, then routed, our benignity. A brown onion soup was fine, if sweet. Smoked duck salad also fine, if mean with the duck and the accompanying eggs were overcooked. Asparagus and artichoke salad took two of the world’s greatest vegetables and made them boring. Crevettes with aioli suffered, as did other dishes, from a fear of garlic.
At this point we thought they might do best to drop the “gastro” prefix and just call themselves a pub, offering what for 30 years or more has been called a carvery: Sunday roasts, hopefully of good quality, honestly served.
The arrival of the meat seemed to confirm this, large of portion where the duck had been stingy, with ballooning Yorkshire pudding and fists of roast potato. The former cow and pig were indeed well-sourced and reasonably cooked but the potatoes, apart from a few moments of crispiness, were boarding-school awful. Red cabbage and mashed root vegetables, stowed inelegantly under the meat, became mush. The vegetarian option, without the benefit of meat, was just sludge.
We hoped for redemption from dessert, but the rhubarb fool (actually a trifle) was ill-assorted in taste and texture, and whiskey crème, which started with an aromatic sweetness, ended with a back-draft of Jeyes fluid. It came with prunes of the military hardness celebrated by Nigel Molesworth in Down with Skool.
In Hungry City, Carolyn describes the terrifying factories where ready-meals are made by the million. This, at smaller scale, offered the same systematised approach to pleasure. The décor, the concept, the menu are all by numbers, starting from the moment they take your booking and demand that you fit into one of two time slots.
Yet the other punters seemed to like it, so what should they change? Get the potatoes right and simplify, for a start. Either that or hand the keys of the kitchen to Ray Davies and his band, and see what they can do. It would be more fun, at least.
Details are correct at the time of publication - please check with venue before booking.
