46 Golborne Road, London W10 (020 8969 3280). Meal for two, including wine and service: £90
Meet Bertha. I like her, even though she made me smell. Or to be more exact, even though she made me smell more than usual. Then again I’ve experienced what she can do, and what she can do is very pleasing indeed – so pleasing I’ll let a bit of whiff and stench pass. Without Bertha I’m not entirely sure my lunch at John Doe, just off London’s Portobello Road, would have been worth writing to anywhere about, let alone home. With her, a set of humble ingredients were allowed to present the best of themselves. She’s that most admirable of things: an enabler. I won’t lie. I want Bertha in my kitchen. After all, who wouldn’t want a serious chunk of bespoke wood-fired oven?
On paper this sort of thing is old hat now. Britain’s high streets are full of places promising wood-fired pizzas, though those hyphenated words are so rarely felt in the clammy finished product. Likewise, every half-arsed steak joint bangs on about owning a Josper grill, as though it were proof of skill rather than mere budget. The Josper uses only charcoal and, although in the right hands it can do good things to a good steak, cooking properly with wood is a different matter entirely. I saw inside Bertha, a tall narrow cabinet with a lovely retro duck-egg blue finish, and it really does burn chunks of tree, the smell of which float out of the open kitchen, scent the air and infiltrate your clothes and hair. At Restaurant John Doe every day is bonfire day.
I first experienced cooking of this sort at Asador Etxebarri in the Basque Hills above San Sebastián, where the chef fashioned his own implements to enable him to cook literally everything over different kinds of woods for different ingredients. It was a personal mission verging on obsession. Ingredients sang. He smoked the milk for his ice cream and let caviar catch the hot wisps until the oils began to run.
John Doe is not quite on that scale, but the wood is used with enough intent to make a difference. For once most of their marketing slogan – “Wild British produce, cooked over wood and charcoal” – is more than just a bunch of words clinging to each other for safety. (I say most of the slogan. A lot of the produce is British, but happily there is space here for flavours from elsewhere.) They say they came up with the restaurant’s name, the American legal term for an unknown male, partly out of a desire for a quiet opening. Sorry, chaps; I can’t stay quiet on this one. But it’s also a play on the word “doe”, as in a female deer, venison being a featured ingredient in their Scotch eggs, tartar, burgers and steaks. At John Doe the death of Bambi’s mum isn’t a childhood trauma. It’s a blessed menu option.
The result is a series of dishes with unapologetic heft; of platefuls which are unafraid of big flavours. Warm discs of octopus tentacle have a satisfying bite and a clean smokiness that I have not tasted since I was Greek island-hopping in the 1980s, when barbecue fish restaurants clustered along the harbour sides. The mess of chickpeas and the finely calibrated aioli do a good job of filling the gaps on the plate without contaminating your breath. Octopus is a diverting ingredient which does a lot of the work for you. It takes more skill to get something special out of a bunch of leeks, here roasted in ash until soft and served with a thick caper and tarragon vinaigrette, all aniseed and spark.
Given the nature of the place, can you now just insert the adjective “smoky” into each dish description? Typing it repetitively would get tedious for all of us. The point is that it doesn’t overwhelm. It’s there, sometimes as a back note, sometimes more stridently. A fillet of fallow deer has been given a trip through the pellet smoker in the kitchen and is then finely diced for a sweet-salty tartar, served with the lubricant of a raw quail egg yolk in the middle. That and a chunk of fire-toasted bread, and all is good.
What’s interesting is the unexpected impact it has on certain ingredients. I’m not surprised that pristine mackerel fillets take kindly to the double treatment – a trip through the pellet smoker, a finish in Bertha – on top of leeks and mussels. These are foods that like to play rough and dirty. I am surprised, however, at the impact it has on a big piece of duck confit, served in a soupy mix of lentils, with a hint of mint. There is an extra crispness to the skin, a deepness to the flavour, a… oh, damn it… smokiness. For once, duck-fat-roasted potatoes are as crisp and golden and downright rude as you always hope they will be and so rarely are.
Victoria plums, with a scoop of thick mascarpone and an amaretti biscuit crumb, seem almost grateful for their time spent with Bertha, the flavour concentrated, the flesh soft. The only clumsy dish is a banana and rum tarte tatin, which is quite simply burnt, in both caramel and pastry. With that much flame knocking around, it was always a possibility. Starters are around £7, mains double that.
Decor is a rather grand word for the pleasingly functional combination of wipe-down white wall tiles, brushed copper tubing and raw wood for tables, floors and everything else in between. Unfortunately all this rawness carries over to some of the wine list. I order a couple of glasses of prosecco and I know from the moment it splashes cloudily into the glass that it’s a “natural” wine. “It has a lovely farmyard back taste,” our waiter says, and he’s not wrong. I love the stench of the farmyard, of decay and the duodenum, in an andouillette or a stinky, bolting cheese. In a glass of prosecco? Not so much.
The truth is that none of the labels – organic, biodynamic, natural, Blue Nun – really matter. What matters is whether the wine contained in the bottle slapped with that label tastes nice or not. I have yet to taste a nice natural wine. My exposure to them is merely turning me in to a really big fan of traditional preservatives. Natural wine silliness aside, John Doe does not deserve to stay anonymous. It’s a simple idea executed with determination and, most importantly, good taste. And, of course, a little help from a gal called Bertha.
Jay’s news bites
■ If it’s flames you want, head to London’s Covent Garden. There in the bowels of the new outpost of the Big Easy group is a wall of fire. Much of this kitchen has been designed with the visual in mind: there are glass-walled ovens with coals stacked inside, a wood-fired oven burning bright. What matters is the flame-singed food that comes as a result; not just cracking ribs and wings but smoky, wood-roasted seafood platters of rare beauty (bigeasy.co.uk).
■ I have seen the future and it smells of… bacon. American company J&D’s Foods Inc of Seattle, the makers of Bacon Salt, has introduced a bacon-scented pillowcase using ‘advances in printing technology we stole from Nasa to allow the scent of bacon to permeate your dreams and expand your mind’. Yours for $12.99 each online (jdfoods.net).
■ Opening I’m most looking forward to in 2015: Duck & Rice from Alan Yau, the founder of Wagamama and Yauatcha, among others. It will be located in Soho, and he’s describing it as a Chinese gastropub. No idea what that means, but it’s bound to be intriguing.
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk. Follow Jay on Twitter@jayrayner1
