The Barley Mow, 82 Duke Street, London W1K 6JG (020 4553 1414). Bar snacks and starters £8-£18, mains £19-£36, desserts £10-£12, wines from £29
A lot of money, and most of the world’s fairy lights, have gone into making London’s Mayfair look pretty at this time of year. Even so, the place just can’t help being ugly. Outside Berkeley Street’s Novikov – owned by a man who once boasted to me about being Vladimir Putin’s favourite caterer – the crowds are still clamouring to get through the twinkly light-crusted doors for £18 bowls of mediocre minestrone. Up on the other side of Berkeley Square is Bacchanalia, Richard Caring’s latest attempt to make Vegas look classy. It’s seemingly styled after a faux Greco-Roman knocking shop, complete with a Damien Hirst sculpture of “winged lovers embracing on a unicorn”. They have just posted their opening menu outside: a dozen oysters for £64? Or how about 125g of Beluga for £935? Sod it, have both.
Meanwhile, inside the door of the newly renovated Barley Mow pub just north of Grosvenor Square, they’re screening the Belgium v Canada World Cup match. I have no interest in football. I do not understand how anyone attaches their emotional wellbeing to the activities of 11 people they’ve never met (a minority opinion on the day of the World Cup final, I grant you). Even so, I find the TVs deeply reassuring. We may be in Mayfair, where it’s hard to find a lip that has not been filled or a colon that has not been irrigated. But there are still vestiges of normality: Guinness and London Brewing Co’s Upright on draught, and the match to stare at while drinking them.
But do take a look around: at the gorgeous etched glass windows and the deep dark varnish sheen of the bar. Now come up the narrow stairs to the dining room, where the tablecloths are thick and there’s a honeyed amber glow from the art deco ceiling lights and sconces. Here they have a glass-fronted cabinet for their collection of Neal’s Yard cheeses. The Barley Mow was purchased earlier this year by Cubitt House, a company that has for a while now been giving glossy, robust makeovers to a group of central London pubs, including the Alfred Tennyson in Knightsbridge and the Princess Royal in Notting Hill. These are pubs for people with very clean boots.
The Barley Mow is now being managed with a steady hand by Lara Rogers, who is as close to pub royalty as it gets these days. She learned her trade working alongside her father, Oisin Rogers, famed landlord most recently of the nearby Guinea Grill. But for our purposes what really matters is the food, which is overseen by Ben Tish, formerly of the Game Bird. He has come up with an offering as butch and beguiling as the fit-out. Start with a bar menu of sausage rolls with their own brown sauce or a haggis scotch egg. Better still, try the hot meat bun, a tottering construction of brioche roll toasted to a smoky char, stacked with slices of slow-cooked beef and pickles, with a jug of extra gravy on the side for a bit of a French dip. Like all the best foods, it’s shirt-destroying messy. In a town infested by over-engineered burgers, it’s more than just a pleasing novelty.
Or drop your elbows on to those thick tablecloths upstairs and order the fresh cockles in the shell. Cockles are more than an equal to palourde clams. These come in a hot liquid swamp of garlicky parsley butter and offer huge shell-suckage opportunities. If that’s just too much mess, have a slab of the gamey terrine en croûte, in a glazed picture frame of hot-water pastry, the jewel green of the pistachios shining through. It’s served at exactly the right temperature, so the jelly is just starting to melt.
For mains there is, of course, a beef pie with mash and parsley sauce (deep-fried oyster optional). There’s Dover sole various ways and a daily changing roast. Today there are two, although I don’t quite get to hear them mention the sirloin, because I say yes before our waiter gets to the “y” in pork belly. It is a slow-cooked, tender brick with both big puffs of crackling and a herb-stuffed round of the loin, sliced and crisped. With it comes their bronzed gratin dauphinoise. They warn me it’s made with anchovies, which I regard as a recommendation. It is closing on Jansson’s temptation territory. That’s never a bad thing. Alongside half a chicken, hot-roasted so the skin is dark and slightly chewy, comes a jug of sage and truffle butter.
There are many places in London for a light supper, full of subtlety and grace. This is not one of them. You can order some seasonal greens if you like. But over there under “sides” it mentions house fries with roasted garlic aioli and a Westcombe curd aligot. Choices have to be made. Who am I to judge, what with gravy dripping down my forearms and a beard full of parsley butter? If that image isn’t helping you, give thanks you weren’t on the other side of the table.
How much is it all, you ask? Well, you know. It is still bloody Mayfair, where the asset managers roll up their sleeves, order big bottles of Bordeaux’s finest and bemoan the state of China’s economy. Tolerate the other clientele, as they do me. Look, it’s not as bad as at the newly opened restaurant above the nearby Audley, where the lobster pie for two is £96 and the rib-eye is £48. Which is me attempting to dodge the question. OK. It’s still pretty pokey here: £13 for that hot meat bun, £15 for the cockles, £36 for the pork, sides included. But unlike that place a couple of weeks ago where I complained about £100-a-head dinners for something that was just fine, this is so much more. That’s the problem with really expensive things. Yes, many are stupid and infuriating, but some are really nice. The Barley Mow is really nice.
The dessert menu is a real one, with a baked Alaska for two and crêpes Suzette, and a sticky toffee pudding with clotted cream that is the only weak moment. The sponge should be saturated with sauce. Here it’s only been poured on at the end. Have the poire belle Hélène instead. It’s a perfectly poached pear crusted in biscuit crumb, with vanilla ice-cream and a chocolate sauce which, like me, has obvious depths. Then stumble downstairs, past the now dark TV screens, and out into the fairy-lit night, belly full and wallet empty.
News bites
The chef Mark Hix is in a planning battle with Dorset council over a decking structure he built at a cost of £20,000 for his Oyster and Fish House in Lyme Regis during the pandemic. The outdoor deck is in Lister Gardens, next to the restaurant, on space leased from the council. He has recently applied to extend the lease, but has been told the application will be turned down. In a letter to the council, he has argued that post-Covid trading conditions are still tough and that ‘the removal of the deck would undoubtably seriously impact upon our business and put the future of the restaurant in jeopardy.’ Hix is to launch a petition (theoysterandfishhouse.co.uk).
Sad news from Edinburgh. Paul Kitching, the brilliant chef-proprietor of restaurant and boutique hotel 21212, has died suddenly aged 61. Before moving to the Scottish capital in 2010, he held a Michelin star at Juniper in Altrincham for over a decade, for many years the only restaurant in Greater Manchester to be so recognised. His food could be both bonkers and inspired. A hilarious meal at Juniper might include a salmon pink “spaghetti purée”, spelling out the word spaghetti to be spooned off the plate or mopped with bread, or tiny fried eggs, the whites made of sharp natural yoghurt, the yolks made of mango purée. It all sounds ludicrous and it often was, but it was always delicious. Kitching was that rare thing: a genuinely creative chef who knew how to manage his own creativity. He will be much missed.
Tipjar, the cashless gratuity platform, has calculated that average restaurant takings were down 17% on rail strike days in October and November. Given the number of strike days in December, staff could lose around £15m in tips this month. Ben Thomas of Tipjar believes that this could amount to a loss of around £40 for employees. ‘While we align with workers speaking to improve pay and conditions,’ he has said. ‘Our job is to represent some of the lowest-paid workers whose income is directly related to footfall in their pubs and restaurants.’
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or follow him on Twitter @jayrayner1
