Morning:
10°c
Looking onto Wandsworth Common lies what I am told is the best restaurant in south-west London. This, in capital letters and perhaps in Latin, should be cut in stone over its door, for it is held in awe not only by restaurant critics but by those who pompose (a new word for the lexicographer) on the even weightier matters of education, architecture, albino felines and Ferdinand Porsche's early motor cars. As it is inconceivable that in the far reaches of Foots Cray there can be a restaurant quite as exquisite, it should perhaps claim to be the best in south London as a whole.
I write of it only because, taken there by a friend far better acquainted with the finer things, I chose, perhaps perversely, to eat a peasant dish pot-au-feu. Its very name speaks of its primitive antiquity - imagine the Palaeolithic caves of Lascaux, the Tate Modern of their day, with the wafting aromas of flesh in bubbling stewpots over fires, exciting pleasures of the belly to match the pleasures of the eye. As an impoverished student I made pot-au-feu from the odd ends of animals, from shin, shank and neck, tongue and cheek, fat belly and thin flank. As a young man with a splendid Daimler my pot-au-feu was made of more expensive cuts, of lean beef and osso bucco, but still with pork belly and even the odd trotter to remind me that it is essentially a dish for those with the habits of economy.
As an old man I never make it and so, choosing it in the BR in SWL was a journey into my past.
It was unrecognisably decorous a bowl of clear broth in which the halved lamb's tongue may have stewed, but the freshly grilled lamb chop had not. It came with slivers of carrot and teeny-weeny boiled potatoes, but neither parsnips nor turnips, sans the essential twine-bound bundles of celery and leek, and not a hint of the whole onion studded with cloves that was a medieval disguise for meat on the turn. There was no evidence of a bouquet garni (dried herbs contained in a muslin bag), and the dish was presented with neither the Parisian refinements of croutons and the bone marrow on fingers of toast with sea salt and coarse-ground black pepper, nor the gherkins, pickled onions, baby beetroot (hot or cold), redcurrant jelly and horseradish sauce that are the refinements of Lorraine and Alsace. Without beef in the pot, the traditional selection of mustards, had it been offered, would have been superfluous.
What I ate was delicious, but it was not from a pot-au-feu as any Frenchman understands the term. Above all, it had not been cooked the day before. Like cassoulet (Lord knows how the BR in SWL would emasculate that dish), it is better cooked on one day and eaten on another but perhaps some silly health and safety regulation prevents that now.
The best restaurant in south-west London? Not on the showing of its pot-au-feu but then Wandsworth is not exactly Montparnasse.
