Telephone: 020-7482 4855
Address: 135 Fortess Road, London NW5
Rating: 16.5/20
It was like entering a less conventional Garrick Club. Everybody seemed to know everybody else, and there was more air kissing than at London Fashion Week, followed by whispered, searching social observation along the lines of "Is he her latest bit of stuff?" and "I can't quite see what she sees in him" and "Or he in her, come to that" and "Quick, get me a drink, for God's sake".
Enthusiasm is contagious. That doesn't always mean that it is justified, but it can be difficult to resist. Tod, Alice and Wendy were enthusiastic in the extreme about Samphire, a new restaurant in Tufnell Park. Tufnell Park, so they said, has about it something of Tombstone, Arizona, at the time of the Earp brothers. In other words, it's not the first place you'd expect to find a smart, modern restaurant, done up in minimalist finery, with a talented chef in the kitchen. The chef is Dirceu Pozzebon, a young Brazilian who I last encountered at Mesclun in Stoke Newington Church Street, where I had been very taken with his style of grub.
And it is grub, rather than a work of art on the plate. Pozzebon may be Brazilian, and therefore open to influences from all over the place - carpaccio from Italy, foie gras from France, skordalia (of celeriac!) from Greece, coriander salsa from central America - but he is a chap who likes to put flavour, in its bonniest, most forthright, most no-nonsense form, to the fore. I am not saying that the food from his kitchen lacks subtlety or nuance, but, by golly, when you've eaten a mouthful, you know what it tastes of.
Alice and Wendy passed on first courses, which left them free to plunder Ted's wild mushroom and shallot tart and my stew of prawns, mussels, clams, cockles and squid. Mine was a terrific dish, and delicious; delicious because the mussels were fat and sweet and just cooked through, as were the cockles (I can't think why this wonder of the mollusc family is so neglected by chefs; they're so much plumper, juicier and tastier than any clam), the squid was tense but not dense, and the prawns were caramelised along the shell. The broth that filled that part of the bowl that the shellfish did not was based on a severe reduction of tomato thickened with finely diced shallot, warmed with a tincture of chilli, and then thinned with the juices from the shellfish. The flavours of the fish were amplified rather than smothered.
Tod's mushroom and shallot tart was an altogether simpler dish (he is a simple man of simple tastes), but, once again, the groundwork was very well done - buttery, flaky pastry, nice stew of mushrooms, sweetly fruity shallot, plus a little salad by way of contrast - so that there was scarcely a crumb of pastry left when the able waitress came to clear the plates. In keeping with the simplicity of the man, Tod went on to grilled calf's liver with polenta, a more difficult dish to pull off than you might imagine if you want to keep the liver juicy and delicate. It was pulled off with aplomb.
It is some time since I have been confronted by a lamb shank. Its popularity has waned a little since Antony Worrall Thompson first put shank on the culinary map. At Samphire it came as a substantial gobbet of meat, cooked for so long that it slid gracefully down the bone. Succulent scrap by succulent scrap, it glided on to my fork, before being dipped in a gentle - and possibly too retiring - gravy and lifted to my mouth. Hefty colcannon added ballast to a dish that hardly needed it.
Having tasted their way through our first courses, Alice and Wendy went at their main courses with vigour: Alice at rump of venison, which was the dish of the day, a scrolled fan of thin slices of refined meat with a bouncy red wine sauce and root vegetables; Wendy at the vegetarian sautéed Provençal vegetables with toasted pinenuts and long grain and wild rice, which could best be described as a gob-smacking goo. Maybe the word "goo" doesn't quite do justice to some very neat vegetable cooking.
We ended up with a semi-liquid bittersweet chocolate tart and a definitive, unsweet crème brûlée in which the custard had been brilliantly cooked so that it just held, hanging on the point of flowing, providing that exquisite sensation of ultra-rich cream slowly gliding down the throat. Down it went, with the inevitable concomitant sensation of arteries furring up.
Take away the wine and water elements from the bill of £143.60, and we were left with £80.15 - or £20 and a few pence a head. That's pretty fair pricing by anyone's standards. Indeed, it makes you wonder how some other restaurants manage to get away with charging what they do, especially when they don't provide food half as accomplished or half as tasty as that at Samphire.
· Open Mon-Sat, dinner only, 6.30-10.30pm; Sun, 12 noon-9pm. All major credit cards. Wheelchair access (no WC).
