Westerns Laundry, 34 Drayton Park, London N5 1PB (020 7700 3700). Meal for two without wine: £85; with wine £120
Recently, in support of a new US TV series, Gordon Ramsay gave an interview in which he listed his golden rules for eating in restaurants: avoid the specials, because they probably aren’t, and so on. More interesting was his suggestion that you book for three when there are just two of you, because they’ll give you a bigger table. Then you can turn up without your phantom friend, hungry for elbow room. This sounds like a brilliant way to infuriate grouchy chefs like, say, Gordon Ramsay.
He also tells people to pay no more than $30 for a bottle for wine. This recalls the time Ramsay furrowed his brow – at least I think he did – and declared that using ingredients out of season should be illegal. Off we all went to identify the myriad ingredients on his own menus which were out of season. Cuff him, officer!
Telling us we should pay no more than $30 a bottle – roughly £23.50 – is, of course, an invitation to excavate his own wine lists in search of something, anything, within the target price. Do I need tell you the pickings are slim? There’s a £20 and a £23 bottle at his Thames-side pub The Narrow, and a solitary £23 bottle at the Maze Grill. After that it’s all £25 and upwards with nothing in the US I could see below $40. It’s fair to say, I think, that Gordon Ramsay’s rules are for restaurants belonging to anybody other than Gordon Ramsay.
That said, they all do better on wine price than this week’s restaurant. It took me a minute or two of squinting at the blackboard-scribbled list at Westerns Laundry, the second place from the team behind Islington’s Primeur, to clock the problem. It’s a short list, with everything available by the glass but nothing below £30 a bottle. I called over the waiter. “How many of these are so-called naturals?” He smiled uneasily. “All of them.”
Yeah, I know; I keep banging on about this. One day I might look back at the summer of 2017 as the time when ideologically driven wine heads kept writing overpriced lists in the service of some bizarre ideology, and I might even feel nostalgic. But with Westerns Laundry the problem is particularly acute. The food – small sharing plates, a bit of British, a touch of Spanish – is bright and light, well-executed and well-priced. Small plates are £7 or so; the most expensive dish, a substantial piece of turbot, is £19. And then along comes the wine list, to make it just that bit more expensive both than it deserves to be and you want it to be. “That’s why we serve everything by the glass,” the waiter said, cheerfully. How generous of you. We might have priced you out of a whole bottle, but you can still have a glass. Cheers.
Gordon Ramsay’s restaurants may not service his $30 rule, but across the board from high to low even they offer significant choice around £25. Elystan Street, the new one from the multi-Michelin-star-gilded chef Phil Howard, has a bunch of bottles in the twenties. Likewise, Noble Rot, the wine bar which emerged out of the brilliant wine magazine of the same name and which arguably is nerdier about wine than this place, has terrific choice in the twenties.
Westerns Laundry goes from £30 to £36 and ever upwards. I am told these are low intervention wines – the winemakers use less sulphur and filter less – and because they do less, it costs more. OK? No, not really. Even when I come across one which is drinkable, it costs more than feels justified, and too many of them are, as I’ve said before, less a pleasant glass of wine than a slap in the face.
I’ll stop now. Westerns Laundry is named after the previous use of the reconditioned space it occupies, which is not yet completely reconditioned. The restaurant is currently one long snag list including a front door that is yet to arrive. But it’s a pleasingly echoey, semi-industrial space of high ceilings, artful lighting and communal tables marked off into two and threes by chalk lines. There is counter eating and the buzz of a wealthy neighbourhood of north London media professionals kicking back for the night. Outside is a small, gnarled olive tree.
The menu goes big on seafood, so there are oysters, both from Morecambe Bay and Jersey, and langoustine, served whole with a dollop of a well-made Marie Rose sauce. A Spanish ham croquette is flavoured with cuttlefish ink, so that the béchamel is black as a night that’s taken out the power lines, and just as intense. At the end, there’s a welcome hit of the fisherman’s slab before the clean down. There is a large piece of cod, salted inhouse, then cooked gently so the pearly leaves slip away from each other with a nudge, alongside the crunch of green peppers, like overgrown padrons, roasted in their skins.
Asparagus, charred to a pronounced smokiness, rests under a duvet of a dressing halfway towards a gribiche on account of the boiled egg blitzed into it, and given high, airy aniseed notes courtesy of tarragon. Thinly sliced tuna is served raw, under a puddle of peppery olive oil, lime juice and rings of finely chopped red chilli. It’s one of those brisk dishes that makes you think better of yourself for liking it.
Then comes the snowfield-white turbot, with a perfectly executed butter sauce that could be sipped as a restorative, half a seashore of “sea vegetables” from the water’s edge and a disc of nutty new potato to balance everything out. Against all this delicate fish cookery, a piece of slow-roasted lamb belly, big on sweet honey notes and the lubrication of its fat, feels like a bruiser. I can see why it’s there; some weirdos don’t want fish. But it feels like an escapee from another restaurant’s menu. Perhaps it is.
There are ice creams and chocolatey things to finish, but our eyes are drawn to a rum baba to share. It is a promise delivered: all blousy, syrup-soaked sponge, and sticky, macerated golden raisins. On the side is a pot of chilled Chantilly cream full of vanilla pod, a cool breeze at the end of a long night. Westerns Laundry is a class act: a smart, skilled kitchen with some tables attached. I won’t repeat the issues with the wine, save to say: if you want to drink, best open a bottle at home first.
Jay’s news bites
The tiny Hantverk and Found in Margate also scribbles its menu on a blackboard and also majors on seafood: go for oysters with ponzu and nori, for clams in dashi, Thai-spiced mussels and old stagers like crab thermidor. Pricing is keen and the wine list is not nerdy (hantverk-found.co.uk).
From tomorrow, 12 June, you can bid to be my companion on a forthcoming review in aid of The Food Chain, a brilliant charity providing nutritional support and advice for people with HIV. The auction will be via eBay and the result will be announced at a fundraising dinner on 22 June, being held as part of the Evening Standard’s London Food Month (foodchain.org.uk).
Meanwhile Frank Boxer, of Frank’s Café, on top of a multi-storey car park in Peckham, has gone all respectable and taken over the Camberwell Arms pub in south London. He’s also running the food and drink menu at the new Summer Pavilion at nearby Dulwich Picture Gallery. It’s bellinis all round (dulwichpicture gallery.org.uk).
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or follow him on Twitter @jayrayner1
