TED Restaurant, 47–51 Caledonian Road, London N1 (020 3763 2080). Meal for two, including drinks and service: £110
Let’s get the important bit out of the way first. This is a positive review. TED Restaurant – it stands for “Think, Eat, Drink” – in London’s King’s Cross, serves smart platefuls of modishly ingredient-led food in pleasant surroundings. With starters at between £6 and £8 and mains in the mid-teens, pricing is as you would expect for this part of the town, and the staff appear to know what they are doing. Bravo and so on. We’ll come back to the nitty gritty later.
As the name says, this place wants you to think before you eat. It’s the brainchild of Jamie Grainger-Smith, who has experience front of house at the River Café and, more importantly, was involved with Jamie Oliver’s social enterprise restaurant Fifteen and later with the award-winning “sustainable” restaurants Acorn House and Waterhouse. At the latter two, Grainger-Smith and his chef partner Arthur Potts-Dawson pioneered the use of low-carbon paints, fixtures and fittings, composters for waste, filtered tap water and even a wormery. Most strikingly, while they wore their ethical hearts on their sleeves, it didn’t interfere with the food on the plate. The cooking at Acorn House in particular was great.
TED restaurant has grown out of the TED consultancy (not to be confused with the inspirational-talks outfit from America), which apparently runs projects and events built around ideas of sustainability for corporate bodies big and small. This is where it gets tricky. Back when Acorn House opened in 2006, the idea of a luxury such as a restaurant bothering to think about its carbon footprint was a genuine novelty. Others had nibbled at the agenda, but no one had taken it as seriously. Now every damn restaurant from one end of the market to the other bangs on about their sourcing polices and how gloriously ethical they are. No planets were harmed in the making of this meal and so on. The presence of filtered tap water, for example, is becoming more common than not. You expect to walk through the doors of these places and smell not reducing stock but the glorious stench of an arch self-righteousness recently discovered.
The fact is that the literature for TED now doesn’t read any differently from dozens of other places. It’s also just as thin on detail as to what the word sustainability means. Indeed the best I could find was a reference to the TED events company which said: “We help you go greener by championing the best local suppliers, growers and small organic producers without compromising on quality.” Really? Is that it? If it said something like: “We have performed a whole lifecycle analysis on all our suppliers and can prove they have a lower CO2 yield per kilo of food produced than mainstream suppliers”, that would be interesting.
But they don’t. Instead they cleave to a whole bunch of emotive labels which are of no value whatsoever when it comes to establishing sustainability. There is no guarantee that local and/or organic production means a smaller carbon footprint. Yes, I know I bang on about it, but these things need to be said: what matters is how your food is produced, not where, and how it is measured. Transport is on average only 2-4% of the overall carbon cost. Far more important is how the food is made. You cannot make assumptions.
To be fair, Grainger-Smith is not alone in this. The Sustainable Restaurant Association, which charges people to be ratified sustainable, continues to keep localism, seasonality and organics at the heart of its criteria despite having been told repeatedly that none of those things guarantees a smaller carbon footprint. When I challenged the SRA on the basis for the assertion, the director Mark Linehan sent me a set of academic papers; not one of them proved that a local, seasonal agenda meant a smaller carbon footprint. It does make me wonder what members are paying for. To be blunt, if you are going to attempt to make money out of the sustainability agenda, as both the SRA and TED Restaurant do, you need more than a few limp words.
That’s the bitching done. Make of it what you will. The restaurant that has emerged out of this, on a less than sexy stretch of the Caledonian Road, is a nice place to go for dinner. It boasts some smart, eclectic design, using raw-wood panelling inlaid with mirrors, Portuguese tiles below the bar and tight circular leather booths around the side – go with a thin friend. Eco-friendly lights dangle.
The food is equally eclectic: a little Italian, a touch of French, a pinch of Asian and a whole load of hefty British rustic. There are, as there have been a lot recently, pig head croquettes. Maybe there’s a glut of pig’s heads. These, spiced and heavily filled, are the best of the three I’ve tried in recent weeks. A pile of carefully picked white Cornish crabmeat is laid on toast spread with the pungency of the brown meat, the whole mixed through with the citrus whack of grapefruit and the crunch of sliced radish. Another starter brings chargrilled squid, both ring and tentacle, and Asian spiced roasted cauliflower florets with a soft cauliflower purée underneath and a sprinkling of deep-fried curry leaves on top. It’s a clever idea, smartly executed.
Lamb breast comes long-braised, with caramelised sweetbreads and finely shredded kale flavoured with lamb jus. Kale put in the service of meatiness strikes me as the way to go. A slab of sea trout is the light to the lamb breast’s dark: all summery artichokes, mussels, parsley, broth. At the end they recommend their treacle tart, and rightly so. The pastry has crunch. The filling has just enough citrus to offset the sweet. Against that, their burnt Alaska – a big fluffy pillow of lightly carbonised Italian meringue over the ice cream centre – is a playful comedy item, but in a good way.
Champagne at £7.50 a glass is well priced; other bottles a little less so, but doubtless they have an expensive conscience. Most importantly there is a be-anything-you-want-me-to-be vibe. It can be a place for a special event dinner; it can be elbows on the table; it can be one course and a glass of wine. Whether it can also be a part of the solution to that which ails the planet is impossible to know.
Jay’s news bites
As much as it pains this committed carnivore to say it, a restaurant meal with a smaller carbon footprint means removing the meat. Zest, the kosher restaurant of the newly opened Jewish Community Centre in north London, has fish but no red or white meat, and killer vegetarian options: try the marinated beetroot with buttermilk and dukkha mixed nuts, the stuffed micro peppers with pearl barley and the sweet potato gnocchi with burnt aubergines (zestatjw3.co.uk).
The Royal London Society for Blind People has encouraged restaurants to stage fundraiser ‘blindfolded’ dinners to give guests an idea of sensory deprivation. A few, like Vinoteca, are great places; others, for example the execrable Novikov London, are less so. Blindfolded may be the best way to experience that particular restaurant (londonwithoutlimits.com).
A snapshot of our tastes: half the top 20 items on Amazon UK’s groceries wishlist – stuff people want their friends to buy them – are collections of retro sweets (amazon.co.uk).
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or follow him on Twitter @jayrayner1
