London,

Swan & Edgar

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Cuisine: British
A meal for two with wine, about £56 excluding service.

43 Linhope Street, NW1 6HL

Nearest Tube: Marylebone

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Phone: 020 7724 6268

Open: Mon-Fri 4-10.30pm. Sat & Sun 11am-10.30pm.

 

 

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Swan & Edgar trifles with the written word

 

No marks for spelling: chef Andy Evans’s short, homely menu offers “sheppards” pie and “Ceasar” salad

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Bourne & Hollingsworth is a basement bar in Rathbone Place, Fitzrovia quite near where I live. Last week I went for supper at Swan & Edgar in Marylebone. What is the world ­coming to when bars and pubs take on the names of defunct department stores? I have been puzzling over this peculiar development and the only answer I can come up with is school uniforms.

When I was at school the hideous ­uniforms we were made to wear were always supplied by stores named after two male founders such as Bourne & Hollingsworth or Swan & Edgar — in my case it was Kinch & Lack in Guildford — and now that schools are less prescriptive about where uniforms are bought, the store names have become somewhere to go for a drink. I’ll have to check out Guildford to see if this almost completely threadbare theory stands up.

The floral wallpapered bijou Bourne & Hollingsworth seemingly took design inspiration from a granny’s front ­parlour. Its sister establishment Swan & Edgar uses second-hand books, old newspapers and tailor’s offcuts of ­material (some possibly from school uniforms) as a starting point for themes. The bar in the diminutive ground floor is made from books stuck together into a curved wall and varnished. A plank of wood seals the top.

If you love books, or even like them, it is rather a distressing sight, the sort of pointless act that moves people to ask rhetorical questions like what is the world coming to? Some comfort can be drawn from the promise of poetry readings, book signings and the like when the upstairs dining room opens, an event scheduled for this coming weekend. The pieces of spare fabric have been turned into patchwork upholstery for chairs and banquettes, old copies of the Financial Times make a pale pink papier mâché layer over shelves, cornices and the ceiling rose. And the loos are tiled with Scrabble letters. That a bunch of people seems to have been having fun was a feeling perpetuated by the pub staff who were unusually warm and friendly, you might say almost amateurish in their niceness.

When I ate dinner last week, a day or two after Swan & Edgar opened, the pub was functioning only from 4pm onwards but those hours are due to be extended. The 20-seater dining space was full and overspill customers were taking drinks and food to the tables on the pavement of what is a quiet residential street. The menu is short, priced for recessionary times and homely, with some dishes available to share reinforcing the notion that it is a short step between your kitchen and theirs.

Two of us shared the English Deli Board as a first course. A particularly drab specimen representing Melton Mowbray pork pie did our national ­culinary reputation no service.

Indigenous liking for vinegary tastes was endorsed in pickled quails’ eggs, huge pickled onions and a tomato and chilli chutney. Ham, baked goat’s cheese and homemade bread made it into an urban Ploughman’s. Filling is perhaps the appropriate judgment.

Ceasar (sic) salad featured those ­silvery-white anchovies, which are not an improvement on the salted, tinned variety in this dish. The promised soft-boiled egg was indeed soft-boiled but a classic Caesar would have used runny yolk to dress and caress the leaves. Home-made sheppards (sic) pie served in a big soup plate did look and also taste home-made and arrived accompanied by green beans, carrots and cauliflower, almost enough veg — taking into account the pieces in the pie — to constitute that five a day.

Hand-made chicken and asparagus pie served with mash and honey and cardamom-glazed carrots introduced the game of hunt-the-asparagus. The texture of the chicken was so woolly as to make the generosity of the serving slightly punitive. The Chantenay carrots were good.

Farmhouse vegetable risotto “in a nest of balsamic rocket” with shaved Parmesan was risotto from the 1950s, before the import of Arborio or Carnaroli rice and before the realisation that risotto is not supposed to be savoury rice pudding, champion for leftovers, glazed with melted cheese. It tasted like someone in the kitchen had a vendetta against ­vegetarians. Or risotto lovers.

Desserts offered a choice of apple and rhubarb crumble with custard or bread and butter pudding with custard. We shared the former, which was sensible as there was lots of it. The custard was poured from exactly the right sort of stripy china jug.

Early days meant that there was no printed wine list, just a recitation of the possibilities from a waiter. He recommended a bottle of red burgundy that turned out to cost £16. It was not a wine I would choose again.

Apparently one of the plans for Swan & Edgar, according to its publicity, is to introduce the notion of “serves”, drinks that mix just two or three ingredients. Examples given are Bloody Mary, Pimm’s and Kir Royale. I’ve never heard of “serves” before and it seems like one of those ideas reflecting too much time spent at the drawing board and not enough in the real world. After all, you might ask for a Bloody Mary anywhere.

Our bill was presented inside an old book, Life and Labour or Characteristics of Men of Industry, Culture and Genius by the 19th-century self-help protagonist Samuel Smiles. It was good to hold a book that could be opened even if there was an albeit modest bill inside.

Details are correct at the time of publication - please check with venue before booking.

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