London,

Green's Restaurant and Oyster Bar

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Cuisine: Other

14 Cornhill, EC3


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Phone: 02072206300

 

 

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Green’s Restaurant and Oyster Bar is posh and pukka

 

Oysterman: Green’s head chef Michael Beugnet

Green’s Restaurant and Oyster Bar in St James’s, as more learned authorities than me have observed, is about comfort food for toffs.

It is as if nanny is still hovering sweetly in the air, and the long chain of nurturing in oak-panelled rooms, from nursery to school hall to university college to gentleman’s club, is unbroken. It also has comfort décor: although the first Green’s opened in 1982, the year that emoticons were invented and Michael Jackson released Thriller, it has the air of having been there for ever. It was rewarded with the patronage of Baroness Thatcher, among others.

The new Green’s in Cornhill repeats the winning formula but at a larger scale and with its own atmosphere. It is set in the pillared halls of an old Lloyds Bank building, with a bar downstairs and the restaurant above, whose black horse mosaic and bronze-lined lifts speak of reassurance and stability. Amid the Ionic columns of the old bank you can look across the sturdy Corinthian columns of the Royal Exchange to the Composite columns of the proverbially safe Bank of England.

All’s well with the world, says the architecture, and banks never ever go bust. There will always be an England, it also says, with Scotland handily attached for the purposes of supplying Aberdeenshire steak and Loch Ryan oysters. This corner of London was celebrated by a sweeping 1904 painting called Heart of Empire by one NM Lund, and from the comfortable bubble of Green’s it’s possible to imagine that little has changed since.

None of which is any guarantee that the food would be any good. Indeed, if all the management’s effort were to go into creating a nostalgic haze, you might not expect them to bother much with cuisine, and diners might be seduced enough to have their critical facilities disarmed. This, after all, is the way of themed restaurants everywhere, which, in its way, Green’s is. And often the woozy longing for things imperial and Edwardian is a cover for charlatanry and shabbiness and rip-offery.

But Green’s is good. It is good like a Jermyn Street shirt or a Savile Row suit is supposed to be, with everything done impeccably and as it should be, without too much fanciness. It is officer class stuff, pukka and proper, but updated. It also has to satisfy its City lunchers, who have eaten plenty of oysters in New York and have high standards.

Four kinds of oyster are offered, two native and two rock, and you can buy a platter with three of each kind for £27.25. They are everything you could want from oysters: sweet, fresh, succulent parcels of ocean that slip easily into the mouth, some hidden nanny having first done the necessary with a knife to disconnect them from their shell. They come with green and red Tabasco and the usual shallot vinegar but these are unnecessary, as the flavours need no embellishment.

Broccoli soup, if tending fractionally to the bland, would placate even the notoriously broccoli-hating George Bush Snr. Flavours pinged nicely around a starter of black pudding, bacon-rolled sausages, apple compote and bread sauce, a sort of bonsai version of a Smithfield breakfast. Meat dishes like braised rump of lamb were highly competent and not fancy. The wine list was varied and quite long but thoughtful, and there is an imposing array of whiskies.

The fish and chips were outstanding. I’m wary of posh restaurants doing prole food, as it often means you pay four times the price for nothing but an overdose of anxiety and tidiness. Here, however, the batter was of magical lightness and the fish (politically correct plaice rather than over-fished cod) was moist and tasty. The only disappointment was halibut, which didn’t seem to have the hyper-freshness you would expect in a top-class fish restaurant.

I didn’t try Green’s signature dish, the Haddock Parker Bowles, because I have never been remotely attracted to smoked haddock. It is named after Green’s founder, Simon Parker Bowles, the brother of the ex-husband of the current wife of our future king, who was dining (as apparently he does most nights) a couple of tables away. His haddock, for those who like the fish, comes resting on a creamy, chive-y mash with a poached egg on top.

The best bit, as you would expect of a comfort food specialist, was the puddings, which reflect the centuries of effort that have gone into consoling small British boys for the horrors of sending them off, first, to forbidding public schools, then to colonial wars in unspeakable parts of the world. There is sticky toffee pudding, damson Cambridge burnt cream, strawberry Eton mess, and chilled rice pudding mousse with caramelised apple, all sweet and full of nursery-love but with enough sharpness or darkness (the damsons, the burnt bits) to stop them becoming pure gunk.

And it is not as stuffy as you might expect of a place owned by a nearly-royal and two Lords, Daresbury and Vestey, whose ancestors created empires of beer and meat. The décor is on the trad side and men are probably meant to wear jackets, but the restaurant coped well with the fact that our party included two boisterous girls, 12 and 15, who weren’t really core Green’s clientele. Our sparky waitress did not behave, as staff sometimes do in this kind of place, like an extra from Upstairs, Downstairs. You get well fed for £50-£60 a head: not cheap, but not ridiculous.

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

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