Rating: 8/10
Telephone: 020 7221 9225.
Address: 124 Kensington Church Street, London W8.
Open: Lunch, Mon-Fri, 12.30-2pm; dinner, Tues-Sat, 7-10pm.
Price: Around £45 a head with wine.
Limited wheelchair access; no disabled WC.
Very occasionally, the eye is caught by a headline so pleasing that the professional pessimist's assumption is that it must have been printed by a sadist to raise the hopes in order to crush them. The two that provoked the usual disbelieving reflex recently were Charles Clarke Sacked and Death Of The Dinner Party.
The first speaks for itself. As for the second, whoever genuinely enjoyed the custom of strangers being gathered to bore and irritate each other for four hours while fantasising about being at home watching telly? The only one I look back on with real pleasure was held at our house seven or eight years ago, when the facade collapsed, two female friends having taken such a visceral hatred for each other on being introduced that halfway through the soup we stood on the very precipice of a genuine cat fight, before one literally called for her coat and flounced off in tears.
One unforgettable classic out of however many dozen isn't an impressive rate of return, and the prospect of the curtain falling on this mirthless comedy of middle-class manners seemed infinitely too good to be true. And yet a trip to one of London's more venerable restaurants suggests it may well be.
For aeons, Clarke's in Kensington operated a system that drew the routine critical description that it was "more like going to a dinner party than a restaurant". Sally Clarke just served up whatever she fancied cooking on the day, with no choice whatever, and that was that. Admittedly, there was little danger of being trapped by the East India club bore desperate to explain why he regards Eugene Terreblanche as the most important political thinker of the age, but having no say in what you ate seemed as close to the nightmare as anyone normal would wish to go.
The day after Death Of The Dinner Party made its appearance, however, a sign appeared in Clarke's window: "After 21 years of offering no choice," it read, "Sally has decided it's time for a change." Whether she was reacting to the headline or came to the same conclusion through some osmotic process I don't know, but the restaurant is much improved as a result. Feeling obliged to affect enjoyment of dishes you actively loathe in someone's home is one thing, but having to do so when paying for them is another.
The room itself is both attractive (clean white walls, loads of fresh flowers, inoffensive dauby abstracts and crisp, expensive napery) and mildly irritating (enough chintz to suggest a National Trust tearoom and tables crammed close enough together to give a fleeting insight into the life of a conjoined twin). The real charm, meanwhile, lies as much in the ostentatious absence of liberty-taking. To ask for water and be brought a jug of iced tap without so much as a "still or sparkling?" is a rare and delightful thing; as is a wine list that seems barely to double the wholesale price, rather than the usual trebling or quadrupling.
The cuisine is simple, unfussy British, imaginatively presented and relying on the famously elusive old formula of buying excellent ingredients on the day and cooking them accurately. There wasn't much organic salmon in one starter, in truth, but it was superb fish enlivened by a wonderfully light, zingy dressing, while a main course of guinea fowl was elegantly arranged around a colourful medley of carrot and al dente asparagus, and immaculately cooked to retain all the juice.
The highlight, however, was one of those dishes you want so badly when you see it on a menu that it's a genuine struggle, first to remain polite when beaten to the choice by a friend, and later not to spear it with the fork and run out into the street, like Alan Partridge with the cheese during his catastrophic lunch with Tony Hares. Served with a potato cake, this chump chop of Welsh lamb looked great, with a layer of crispy fat ringing a thick cut of perfectly pink lamb, and tasted "absolutely incredible... that fantastic, char-grilled flavour". An accompanying onion "is wonderful, too... all scrunchy and caramelised".
By now, the rather professorial manager and a woman in an apron (presumably the owner) were chatting with punters with a warmth suggesting they were old friends. And when a ponderous, Conrad Blackian voice at a nearby table started to outline his admiration for Dick Cheney, the aura of Kensington dinner party became too oppressive. Distressed by the prospect of its death having been exaggerated, we paid up and rushed across the road for coffee in the nearest pub.
