Throgmortons, 27a Throgmorton Street, London EC2 (020 7588 5165).
Meal for two, including wine and service, £75
As a British restaurant critic, slaving away at the beginning of the 21st century, I am expected to be a tub-thumper for British food. Down with the Franco-Italianate hegemony. These islands have their own noble culinary traditions, remarkable raw materials and a repertoire of dishes which can stand their own against blah, blah, blah. It's true that there are a few chefs - Fergus Henderson at St John, for example, or Gary Rhodes - who genuinely do know how to craft small wonders from 5lbs of mutton and a bucket of suet.
But, if I'm being honest, and I do try to be, when I'm presented with a menu that claims to make a virtue of British cooking, my heart sinks. The fact is that most of these dishes - the pies and roasts - were kept alive by the British upper classes who, tutored by grimy boarding-school kitchens and lousy high-table feast, have no taste whatsoever and hate food. Never let someone with a title buy you dinner. The wine will be expensive and the food unremittingly shite.
And so to the reborn Throgmortons in the City of London, a grand downstairs dining hall of wood panelling, banquettes and booths, and some of the poorest meat cookery you could hope to find this side of a Black Country pub. They have one thing right, of course: if you wanted to set up a restaurant for the type of clientele who will become aroused by a dreadful plate of lunch, Throgmorton Street is the place to do it.
Why, in God's name, can a kitchen like this not roast a potato? It's not rocket science. Come round to my house and I'll show them how to do it. Here, they are huge, floury creatures of tough skin and no flavour. Ditto the dry, roast chicken, the undercooked root vegetables and the pallid excuse for gravy. It's a repeat performance with the roast beef. Grand, it's served pink, but it's tasteless and sinewy: the same dismal potatoes, over-boiled vegetables and gravy - and a Yorkshire pudding that tastes as if it were made in advance and reheated. Expect to pay more than £30 for these two dishes. Better still, don't. 'I had images of small boys wearing shorts in my head as I ate this and that isn't a good thing,' said my companion. No, indeed, it isn't.
Yet they managed to do a good job with whitebait, served crisp with a lively sauce tartar, and were equally on top of things with the smoked salmon and fluffy scrambled eggs. I rather liked the bread and butter pudding, studded with citrus peel. But that poor cow! That unfortunate chicken! Sacrificed on the altar of shabby British cooking. Can any fate be worse? I doubt it. OM
